Every engagement starts with an audit. Not because audits are impressive deliverables, but because you cannot prioritise what you haven't measured. The checklist below is the exact process I run — across 8 categories, 40 checks — before making a single recommendation.
Tools generate reports. This process generates a diagnosis. The difference is that a report tells you what's there; a diagnosis tells you what matters and what to do first.
An SEO audit is only as useful as its prioritisation. A list of 200 issues is not a strategy — it's noise.
Before you open any tool
The first step isn't crawling the site. It's understanding the business context: What are the primary conversion actions? Which pages drive revenue? Where does current organic traffic come from, and where does it drop off?
Get access to: Google Search Console, Google Analytics (or equivalent), the CMS, and a Cloudflare/CDN dashboard if available. An audit without GSC data is a blind audit.
The 40-point checklist
How to prioritise
After running all 40 checks, I categorise findings into three buckets:
Critical (fix first): Anything preventing crawl, indexation, or rendering of important pages. Zero upside until resolved.
High leverage (fix second): LCP, entity schema, internal link structure, and content depth on high-priority pages.
Optimisation (fix third): Everything else — meta descriptions, CLS, pagination, third-party scripts.
What most tools miss
1. Rendered vs. source content discrepancy. Tools that don't render JavaScript report what's in the HTML source, not what Googlebot actually sees. On Next.js sites with heavy client-side rendering, these can be completely different documents.
2. The AI visibility layer. No mainstream SEO tool yet measures entity disambiguation, LLM citation likelihood, or co-occurrence signals. This is a manual check — ask the AI systems directly.
3. Crawl budget reality. Tools report crawl depth as a graph. What matters is the ratio of meaningful URLs to noise URLs being crawled. A site with 10,000 real pages and 500,000 parameter URLs is burning 98% of its crawl budget on nothing.
4. Business context alignment. A tool reports that you have 847 pages with thin content. That's data. The audit question is: which 12 of those pages are on paths that affect revenue? That requires understanding the business, not just the site.
Deliverable format
The output of this audit is a prioritised action plan — not a 200-item issue list. Each finding is assigned a priority tier (Critical / High / Optimisation), an estimated effort level, and a rationale explaining why it matters in the context of this specific site's goals.
The goal isn't to fix everything. It's to fix the right things first — and create a clear roadmap for the rest.