SEO Auditing
Check and fix technical SEO issues in a web project.
Audit Checklist
1. Meta Tags
Every page must have:
<head>
<title>Page Title — Site Name</title>
<meta name="description" content="155 chars max, compelling summary" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
</head>Check for:
- Unique
<title>per page (50-60 chars) - Unique
<meta description>per page (120-155 chars) - Canonical URL set (avoids duplicate content)
- No
noindexon pages that should be indexed
2. Open Graph & Social
<meta property="og:title" content="Page Title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description for social sharing" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og-image.png" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />- OG image should be 1200x630px
- Test with https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ and https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
3. Structured Data (JSON-LD)
Add schema markup for rich search results:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Article",
"headline": "Article Title",
"author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Author Name" },
"datePublished": "2026-04-10",
"image": "https://example.com/image.jpg"
}
</script>Common types: Article, Product, FAQPage, Organization, BreadcrumbList
Test with: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
4. Sitemap
/sitemap.xml should:
- List all indexable pages
- Include
<lastmod>dates - Exclude pages with
noindex - Be under 50MB / 50,000 URLs per file
- Be referenced in
robots.txt
5. Robots.txt
/robots.txt should:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /admin/
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml- Not block CSS/JS files (search engines need them to render)
- Not block pages you want indexed
6. Performance (Core Web Vitals)
| Metric | Good | Needs Work |
|---|---|---|
| LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) | < 2.5s | > 4.0s |
| INP (Interaction to Next Paint) | < 200ms | > 500ms |
| CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) | < 0.1 | > 0.25 |
Key fixes:
- Compress and lazy-load images
- Preload critical fonts and CSS
- Avoid layout shifts from dynamic content
- Use
next/imageor equivalent for automatic optimization
7. Crawlability
- All important pages are reachable from internal links
- No orphan pages (pages with zero internal links)
- No redirect chains (A→B→C should be A→C)
- 404 pages return proper HTTP 404 status
- No broken internal links
8. Accessibility (SEO Signals)
- All images have
alttext - Heading hierarchy is correct (one
h1, thenh2,h3etc.) - Links have descriptive text (not "click here")
- Language attribute set:
<html lang="en">
Quick Automated Check
# Check robots.txt
curl -s https://example.com/robots.txt
# Check sitemap
curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | head -20
# Check meta tags
curl -s https://example.com | grep -E '<title>|<meta name="description"|<link rel="canonical"'
# Check HTTP status codes
curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" https://example.com/pageTips
- Run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools → check SEO score
- Google Search Console is the source of truth for indexing issues
- Mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor — test on mobile viewports
- Page speed directly affects rankings — optimize Core Web Vitals