Most website audits are theater. You run a tool, it generates a report with 200 items sorted by priority, and you spend three days fixing meta descriptions while the actual problems — the ones costing you traffic and conversions — go untouched.
A real website audit is a diagnostic, not a checklist. The difference shows up in what gets fixed.
Technical SEO
This is usually where audits start, and it’s the area most tools handle reasonably well. The goal is to identify anything preventing search engines from crawling, indexing, and ranking your pages correctly.
Crawl errors and indexability. Are the right pages indexed? Are the wrong ones? A surprising number of sites have staging URLs, duplicate content, or filtered versions accidentally indexed. Others have important pages accidentally blocked by robots.txt or noindex tags.
Site architecture and internal linking. How link equity flows through your site determines which pages have the authority to rank. Flat architectures (every page one click from the homepage) tend to outperform deep ones. Orphan pages — pages with no internal links pointing to them — effectively don’t exist to search engines.
Core Web Vitals and page speed. Google’s performance metrics (LCP, CLS, INP) are a ranking factor, but more importantly, slow pages lose visitors before they convert. A good audit identifies the specific bottlenecks — usually unoptimized images, render-blocking scripts, or poorly configured hosting — not just the score.
Structured data. Schema markup helps search engines understand what’s on your page and enables rich results (star ratings, FAQs, breadcrumbs). Most sites use it badly or not at all.
On-Page SEO
Technical SEO gets your pages crawled. On-page SEO gets them ranked for the right things.
Keyword targeting. Are your pages targeting real searches with meaningful volume? Are you covering the full funnel — informational searches, comparison searches, and high-intent commercial searches? Most sites over-invest in broad awareness content and under-invest in the bottom-of-funnel pages that actually drive conversions.
Title tags and meta descriptions. These are the first thing searchers see in results. Most sites have them wrong — either missing, duplicated, auto-generated, or keyword-stuffed without being written for humans.
Heading structure. H1 through H3 should tell a logical story about page content, not just look good visually. A good audit checks whether heading structure reflects how users and search engines actually process the page.
Content quality signals. Thin content, duplicate content, and low-engagement pages pull down the perceived quality of your entire domain. An audit identifies which pages are dragging your site down versus which ones are pulling it up.
Conversion and UX
SEO without conversion analysis is incomplete. You can triple your traffic and still lose if the people arriving never take action.
Call-to-action clarity. Is it obvious what a visitor is supposed to do on each page? Most sites have vague or buried CTAs that make users work harder than they should.
Form friction. Every unnecessary field, every unclear label, every missing error message is a conversion lost. A good audit looks at every form in your funnel.
Mobile experience. Not just whether your site is responsive — whether it actually works on mobile. Tap targets, font sizes, horizontal scrolling, and form usability on small screens are all common failure points.
Page intent matching. Does the landing page match what the user was searching for? Mismatched intent — sending someone who searched for a pricing page to a homepage, for example — is one of the most common and most fixable conversion problems.
Accessibility (ADA Compliance)
Accessibility audits are increasingly requested as a separate engagement, but they belong in any comprehensive website audit. The Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites, and courts have consistently held that inaccessible sites constitute discrimination.
The WCAG 2.1 AA standard covers four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Common failures include missing image alt text, insufficient color contrast, keyboard navigation that doesn’t work, form inputs without labels, and videos without captions.
Beyond legal exposure, accessibility fixes routinely improve performance for all users — better contrast is easier to read for everyone, proper heading structure helps screen readers and skimmers alike.
What You Get from a Good Audit
A professional website audit delivers:
- A prioritized list of issues by impact, not just by count
- Specific, actionable fixes — not vague recommendations
- A clear picture of where you’re losing traffic and conversions today
- A roadmap that distinguishes quick wins from longer-term infrastructure work
What it doesn’t deliver: a guarantee that fixing everything will produce a specific traffic increase. Anyone who promises specific SEO outcomes from an audit is selling you something.
When to Get an Audit
The right time for a website audit:
- Before you invest in content marketing or paid search — you don’t want to drive traffic to a broken funnel
- After a site migration or redesign — launches frequently introduce technical regressions
- When organic traffic unexpectedly drops
- When conversion rates are lower than they should be for your traffic volume
- Annually as a maintenance discipline, even if nothing has obviously broken
At Webward, our website audits cover all four areas above — technical SEO, on-page, conversion, and accessibility — with a prioritized action plan, not just a report. Get in touch to discuss what you need.