A Complete Web Design and SEO Audit Checklist
- Logan C.
- Nov 14, 2025
- 4 min read
Running a comprehensive website audit can feel overwhelming, where do you start? What should you check? For businesses competing in increasingly crowded digital spaces, a thorough web design and SEO audit isn't optional – it's essential for staying competitive.
If you keep updated with our blog, our team have taken a deep dive into 13 different ways that website design and SEO are killing your rankings with our post about "7 Website Design and SEO Mistakes That Are Killing Your Rankings", with a follow-up looking at 5 more ways - this checklist is essentially a spin-off of that.
As someone with hands-on experience conducting professional audits, backed by a Marketing degree, founding and running a digital marketing company, years of experience working at a market-leading Fortune Global 2000 company, and industry certifications in SEO, I've developed a comprehensive checklist that covers everything from technical foundations to user experience elements. This guide provides a complete, actionable framework you can use to audit your own website or understand what a professional audit should include.
Table of Contents
Summary
What this checklist covers:
Technical SEO foundations (crawlability, indexing, site speed)
On-page optimisation elements (content, keywords, meta data)
Web design and user experience factors
Mobile responsiveness and Core Web Vitals
Content quality and structure assessment
Backlink profile and authority evaluation
Bottom line: Regular web design and SEO audits identify issues before they damage your rankings, use this checklist quarterly to maintain peak performance.
Web Design and SEO Audit Checklist Breakdown
Technical SEO Foundations
Crawlability and Indexability
Ensure search engines can access and index your content, check your robots.txt file isn't blocking important pages. Review your XML sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console, use the coverage report to identify indexing errors or crawl issues.
Site Speed and Performance
Test key pages using Google PageSpeed Insights, aiming for scores above 90, Identify render-blocking resources, oversized images, and inefficient code. Your Time to First Byte (TTFB) should be under 600ms and consider implementing a CDN for faster UK-wide content delivery.
HTTPS and Security
Verify your entire site uses HTTPS with valid SSL certificates, check for mixed content warnings that can prevent pages ranking properly.
On-Page Elements
Content Quality
Each page should target a specific keyword, provide comprehensive information (800+ words for main pages), and answer user questions thoroughly. Check for duplicate content using tools like Copyscape and consolidate duplicates or implement canonical tags where appropriate.
Meta Data
Every page needs a unique meta title (55-65 characters) and description (155-165 characters) with target keywords. Review your heading structure – one H1 per page with logical H2 and H3 hierarchy.
URL Structure
Audit URLs for consistency, clarity, and keyword inclusion, use hyphens, maintain lowercase, and avoid dynamic parameters or unnecessarily long URLs.
User Experience and Design
Mobile Responsiveness
Test your site on actual devices, not just browser simulators, ensure buttons are easily tappable, text is readable without zooming, and navigation works intuitively on smaller screens.
Navigation and Site Structure
Important pages should be accessible within three clicks from the homepage, check for orphaned pages with no internal links, implement breadcrumb navigation to improve user understanding.
Core Web Vitals
Check your scores in Google Search Console for Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), aim for "Good" ratings across all three metrics.
Content Strategy
Keyword Targeting
Review which keywords each page targets, check for keyword cannibalisation where multiple pages compete for the same term, use Google Keyword Planner to identify opportunities for UK searches.
Internal Linking
Important pages should have more internal links pointing to them, use descriptive anchor text with relevant keywords, identifying and fixing broken internal links that waste link equity.
Advanced Technical Checks
Schema Markup
Implement appropriate schema markup for your content type – LocalBusiness, Product, or Article schema, use Google's Rich Results Test to verify your markup displays correctly.
Image Optimisation
Compress images appropriately and use modern formats like WebP, Ensure every image has descriptive, keyword-rich alt text and meaningful file names.
Off-Page Factors
Backlink Profile
Use tools like Ahrefs or Moz to analyse your backlink profile, look for toxic links from spammy sites and compare your profile to competitors and identify opportunities for quality UK backlinks.
Download Your Free Checklist
To make this audit process easier, I've created a comprehensive downloadable checklist you can print or save, this PDF includes all the items above in a tick-box format, making it simple to work through systematically and track your progress.
This checklist is perfect for:
DIY website audits conducted quarterly
Briefing your development team on priorities
Understanding what a professional audit should cover
Training internal marketing staff on web design and SEO fundamentals
Ready to Transform Your Website?
This web design and SEO audit checklist covers the essential elements that determine your website's success in UK search results, while you can tackle many items yourself, a professional audit provides the expertise to prioritise fixes and implement solutions efficiently.
Regular audits – ideally quarterly – ensure your site maintains peak performance as search algorithms evolve, the businesses dominating your industry's search results aren't standing still; they're continuously optimising and refining their presence.
Don't let hidden issues hold back your rankings and traffic, get in touch today for a professional web design and SEO audit that identifies exactly what's holding your site back and provides a clear roadmap for improvement.
Your competitors are optimising right now – can you afford to wait?