How to Audit Your Website SEO in 2026

Why SEO Audits Matter

An SEO audit reveals the gaps between where your website is today and where it needs to be to rank on Google. Without regular audits, technical debt accumulates silently -- broken links, slow pages, and missing metadata drag rankings down over time.

Step 1: Crawl Your Website

Start by crawling your site to get a complete picture of its health. Orion visits your homepage, product pages, and contact page automatically, flagging every issue it finds.

Key signals to check:

Broken internal links (404 errors)

Missing or duplicate title tags

Missing meta descriptions

Thin content (pages with fewer than 300 words)

Images without alt text

Step 2: Check Core Web Vitals

Google Core Web Vitals are now ranking signals. The three metrics that matter:

LCP (< 2.5s) -- Largest Contentful Paint, perceived load speed

INP (< 200ms) -- Interaction to Next Paint, responsiveness

CLS (< 0.1) -- Visual stability during load

Step 3: Analyse Your Backlink Profile

Backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking signals. Look for:

Total referring domains -- quality over quantity

Anchor text distribution -- over-optimised anchors are a red flag

Toxic links -- spammy sites linking to you can trigger penalties

Step 4: Review Your Keyword Positioning

Map your pages to target keywords. Every important page should target one primary keyword and two to three related terms. Keyword cannibalisation -- two pages competing for the same term -- splits authority and hurts both.

Step 5: Benchmark Against Competitors

The fastest way to find SEO opportunities is to see what your competitors rank for that you do not. Orion's competitor analysis compares your domain against up to five competitors automatically.

Step 6: Prioritise and Fix

Not all issues are equal. Group findings by impact:

Critical -- broken pages, crawl errors, no HTTPS

High -- missing title and description tags, slow LCP, no mobile responsiveness

Medium -- thin content, weak internal linking

Low -- minor schema markup gaps

Fix critical and high-impact issues first. Re-audit after each batch to track improvement.

*Ready to run a full audit? Analyse your website with Orion today.*