Run a full crawl and record every URL with its status code Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or any crawler. You want the complete inventory, not a sample. Flag broken links and 404s Internal links to dead pages waste crawl budget and user trust equally. Find redirect chains A should 301 to C, not A to B to C. Chains dilute signals and slow users down. Identify orphan pages Pages with no internal links pointing at them rarely rank. Link them or retire them. Compare the crawl against what Google has indexed Check site:domain.com and Search Console coverage. Big gaps in either direction are findings.
Unique title tag on every page Under 60 characters, leading with the page topic, ending with the brand. Unique meta description on every page Under 160 characters with the target phrase and a reason to click. Exactly one h1 per page And a heading hierarchy that descends logically underneath it. Viewport meta, favicon, and lang attribute present Small things that signal a maintained site. Canonical link on every page Self-referencing canonicals prevent parameter and duplicate-content confusion. Open Graph and Twitter meta present With a real 1200x630 share image. Links shared without a preview card get fewer clicks.
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Check the infrastructure layer A sitemap exists, builds automatically, and lists real URLs Generated from the site itself, not maintained by hand, and referencing the production domain. robots.txt serves and references the sitemap On a public marketing site, disallow nothing unless you have a specific reason. The sitemap is submitted in Search Console And coverage errors there are reviewed, not ignored. HTTPS everywhere with no mixed content One canonical hostname, with the other redirecting to it. Structured data is present and validates For local businesses: LocalBusiness JSON-LD with name, address, phone, and hours matching the visible page content exactly. Validate with the Rich Results test.
Run Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights on the key pages Home plus the top service or product pages, on mobile first. Try our free Website Grader for exactly this. Check Core Web Vitals field data in Search Console Lab scores are directional; field data is what Google actually uses. Hunt oversized images The most common performance killer on small-business sites. Resize, compress, and lazy-load. Audit third-party scripts Booking widgets, chat bubbles, and old tracking pixels each cost real load time. Defer what stays, delete what does not.
Write findings with evidence Each finding gets a screenshot or metric, the fix, and its priority. An audit without priorities is a data dump. Record the baseline before fixing Coverage count, Core Web Vitals, and Lighthouse scores. Improvement you cannot prove did not happen. Fix, then request recrawl Submit fixed pages for reindexing in Search Console rather than waiting for Google to find them.
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