How to Perform an SEO Audit for Your Website in 2025

An SEO audit is a comprehensive analysis of a website from an SEO perspective. It’s performed on a regular basis to assess the current positioning of your site in search engine result pages (SERPs) and relate it to different on-page, off-page, and technical performance indicators.

The goal?—To see high-performing strategies and detect areas that need to be improved. In the long run, conducting such audits regularly is a way to improve SEO performance and align it with your bigger business goals.

That being said, performance analysis is an important part of the big SEO strategy that should not be neglected. In this guide, we’ll tell you how to perform it stage by stage and what areas to focus on in 2025!

Stage 1: Website Health Check

An effective way to start an SEO audit is to perform an overall website health check first. Traditionally, site health consists of three main pillars—performance, security, and user experience.

However, when you are running an audit to boost performance in SERPs, you will be looking for basic SEO issues instead.

The key things you should look at include:

Traffic
Backlinks
Top pages

Tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs can make this task simple. You can check out a comprehensive Ahrefs Review and compare it to other similar SEO software to see if it suits your needs.

And when you are finally equipped with all the necessary SEO tools, use them to look for drops and surges in traffic, crawling errors, indexing issues, toxic backlinks, etc.

Find your top-performing pages that should be emphasized and note signs of declining performance to improve your optimization and rank higher.

Stage 2: Delve Into On-Page SEO Audit and Technical SEO Audit

After the performance analysis of your website, you will have a list of pages that perform well and not so well. In the latter ones, you need to dive into a deeper audit to detect specific on-page and technical SEO issues that hold these pages back from ranking and during traffic.

First, use your SEO audit tools to evaluate the on-page elements of pages with low performance. Pay attention to headers, meta tags, internal links, and image optimization. Detect the potential for further content optimization to improve the quality of your pages.

Also, flag duplicate content to be removed and find orphaned pages that aren’t connected to any internal links pointing at them, and fix the problem.

Then move on to technical issues. Sometimes, it’s not exactly the content or on-page optimization that hinders rankings but rather a poor user experience that makes visitors bounce. Use technical SEO audit tools to check:

Page speed
Mobile usability
Core Web Vitals
Structured data
Broken links
Robots.txt files
Redirections
404 errors

If any of these issues are present, they might be causing a high bounce rate. So, if you explore any of them, take your time to make a technical performance checklist that corresponds to your pages’ performance and find ways to optimize load time and other issues.

Stage 3: Focus on Your Content Quality and Backlink Profile

After you perform an on-page and technical SEO audit, move on to the most important part of your optimization strategy—your content.

In 2025, Google will continue embracing content that matches its E-E-A-T quality guidelines. It must be original, high-quality, and trustworthy to bring tangible value and rank high. Hence, when assessing the quality of the copy on each page, you have to consider whether:

It’s optimized well for your primary and secondary keywords.
It meets the relevant search intent.
It’s well-structured and is easy to skim through.
It’s written by a credible expert in the field and provides fresh insights into the topic.
It links to trustworthy external sources and provides evidence for the points made.
It links to other relevant articles on your site to create a solid network of internal links.

While assessing, also pay attention to content freshness. Some of your pages might be performing worse because the copy located on them is too outdated. In this case, you can update it with more relevant and up-to-date insights and thus improve SEO performance.

And you should also look for content gaps—are there any topics that are relevant to your niche and audience but aren’t covered on your website? If so, you can flag these gaps for your updated content strategy and bridge them in the future.

Next, assess the power of your backlinks. In tools that provide insights into backlink profiles, you will find a comprehensive overview of metrics that shape the quality and authority of your profile. Pay attention to:

The quantity of backlinks
Quality of domains that refer to you
Placement
Anchor text distribution
Follow and no-follow links
Potentially harmful links

What exactly should you be looking for? According to the latest and most prominent SEO trends, Google prioritizes quality and authority in everything, including backlinks. That is, you shouldn’t rely on the quantity of referring domains as much in 2025.

Instead, you should focus on creating a good balance of different link types, anchor texts, placements, and domains. Most importantly, you need to keep only relevant and quality links that contribute to your trust level.

It’s also a good idea to detect any broken or lost mentions to use them in your link-building strategy post-audit and improve your profile further.

Conclusion

In 2025, it’s no longer a secret that search engine optimization is a long-term game that requires data-driven decisions and constant improvement. Thus, conducting regular performance analysis and fixing mistakes that are there is pivotal for securing competitive positioning and exposure.

Luckily, keeping track of your performance isn’t hard. As you now know, you can detect issues and improve SEO performance fairly easily with the help of the right tools and a structured approach.

Use the guide provided above to handle your SEO audit effectively. And get ready to outshine your competitors in SERPs.