What is an SEO audit, and how often should you do one?

The Trakis audit runs 65 checks on every page it reads, in eight parts:

• Crawlability (12 checks): whether every page answers, redirects that take more than one hop, the sitemap, robots.txt, http and https.
• Indexation (6 checks): a noindex in the page or in a header, and canonicals missing or pointing elsewhere.
• On-page (14 checks): titles, descriptions and headings, and, with Search Console connected, the searches a page shows up for.
• Content (8 checks): pages with too little text, titles and descriptions repeated across pages, pages that repeat each other, images without alt text.
• Structured data (7 checks): whether the JSON-LD is there, valid, and complete for what the page sells or says.
• Links (7 checks): internal links to dead pages, pages no link reaches, pages one link away from being lost.
• Performance (7 checks): Core Web Vitals, and what slows a page down: heavy images, blocking scripts, a heavy document.
• AI readiness (4 checks): whether AI search may read the site, and whether it can see the content without running JavaScript.

Each check has its own page, with what it looks at and how to fix it: every check. To go through them yourself, in the order a search engine meets a site: how to do an SEO audit, step by step.

• Not a promise of rankings. Google’s advice to anyone hiring an SEO is plain: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” What it says an audit should give you instead is a realistic estimate of the improvement and of the work involved (Do you need an SEO?).
• Not keyword research or a content plan. Google lists those as services of their own, next to a review of a site’s content or structure. An audit says what keeps the pages you have from being found; what to write next is another job.
• Not a check of the links from other sites. An SEO audit as meant here reads your own site. Who links to it is a backlink audit.

Most people use the three for the same thing. “Website audit” is sometimes wider: it can also cover accessibility, security or how well the pages sell. When someone offers you one, ask what it covers. An SEO audit covers what decides whether search engines, and now AI search, can find the pages and show them.

The problems an audit finds don’t show in a browser. A page told not to be indexed by a header looks the same to a visitor as any other; so does a canonical pointing to another page, or a robots.txt line that shuts out a crawler. On the demo shop, a header rule meant for PDFs took the guide pages out of search, and a robots.txt meant to stop AI training also shut out ChatGPT search. Neither was visible on the site itself.

Search Console tells you about such problems too, once Google has met them: it sends alerts when Google encounters indexing or other issues on your site (About Search Console). An audit finds them as soon as it runs, before Googlebot meets them.

Search engines don’t set a schedule. What decides it is how often your site changes, and the answer has two parts.

Every time something changes. A new template or theme, a CMS or plugin update, a redesign, a move to a new domain or a new platform, a change at the host or the CDN, new redirects, a new robots.txt. Before a redesign or a migration, audit the old site too: the second audit is read against the first, and that is how you see what the move broke.

On a schedule in between, because sites change without anyone deciding to. Pages go up without a title, pages get deleted and the links to them stay, a setting changes somewhere you don’t look. Since 15 September 2026, Cloudflare’s old “Block AI bots” switch also stops crawlers used for both search and training: a site that turned it on long ago now blocks more than it did, with nobody touching it (Cloudflare’s AI bot settings).

Our advice, by how much the site changes:

• A site that rarely changes, a few pages that stay as they are: every two weeks, or at least once a month, catches what changes on its own.
• A site that publishes every week, a blog or a small shop: every week.
• A site that changes every day, a large catalogue, a publisher, a site that releases daily: every day, and after every release.
• Before and after a redesign, a migration or a template change: always, whatever the schedule says.

A Trakis account can audit a site on its own, every day, every week or every two weeks, as you set. Each audit is read against the one before: what was fixed, what is new, and what changed on the pages themselves, such as a title, a canonical, or a page that started answering an error (help).

A list of problems, each with the pages it covers, in the order worth fixing: what keeps pages out of search first, then what weakens them, weighed against the work. Most pages are made from a few templates, so most problems repeat: on the demo shop, 42 pages, a list with a row for every page came to 248 rows, and the audit to 22 problems, each counted once. The whole report: an SEO audit report sample. To write one by hand, the SEO audit template is free in Word and Excel.

You can run one yourself: a crawler does the reading, and the eight steps say what to look at. If you hire someone, Google suggests asking, among other things, whether they follow Google Search Essentials, and what results they expect and in what timeframe (Do you need an SEO?). An agency that audits its clients’ sites can send the report under its own name: white-label SEO audits.

Is an SEO audit worth it? It is worth what it finds. The problems that keep pages out of search are the ones nobody sees from the browser, and one of them on a template can cover hundreds of pages.

How long does an SEO audit take? The reading is the quick part, when a crawler does it: a Trakis audit runs in a queue and comes back within the hour. The time goes into deciding what to fix first, which is why the order of the list matters more than its length.

How much does an SEO audit cost? Trakis has no paid plan today: an audit is free, reads up to 200 pages, and asks for no card. An agency’s audit also pays for someone to read it with you and write the fixes.

What is the difference between an SEO audit and a technical SEO audit? A technical audit is the part about how the site is built: crawling, indexing, redirects, speed, structured data. An SEO audit adds what the pages say: titles, descriptions, headings and text. How to do the technical part: what is a technical SEO audit, and how to do one.

Will an SEO audit improve my rankings? Not by itself. It says what to fix; the fixes do the work, and nobody can promise a position.

Free, up to 200 pages, no card: create an account and add your site, or read what the free audit includes.

Google’s pages, read on 4 November 2026.

• Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO?: the services an SEO offers, what an audit should give you, that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and the questions to ask.
• Search Console Help, About Search Console: alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam or other issues.
• The Cloudflare change is told, with Cloudflare’s documentation, in Cloudflare’s AI bot settings.