Most WordPress SEO audits fail for the same reason: they check fifty things in no particular order and hand back a list nobody prioritises. The checklist below is ordered by leverage — fix the top of the list first, because it tends to unlock or invalidate everything below it.
1. Confirm the site is actually crawlable
Before anything else, check robots.txt and each template’s meta robots tag. It is common on WordPress for a staging-time Discourage search engines from indexing this site checkbox to survive into production, or for a plugin to add noindex to an entire post type by mistake. If Google can’t crawl or index a page, nothing else on this list matters for that page.
2. Check indexation against reality
Compare the number of URLs in Google Search Console’s index coverage report against the number of real, canonical pages the site should have. A large gap in either direction is a signal: too few indexed pages usually means a crawl or quality problem, too many usually means parameter URLs, tag archives, or paginated duplicates are leaking into the index.
3. Audit the sitemap
WordPress sitemap plugins (or WordPress core’s built-in sitemap) should list exactly the URLs you want indexed — no drafts, no redirected URLs, no 404s. A sitemap full of noise trains Google to trust it less, which slows discovery of genuinely new content. If you haven’t already, this is also where you’d confirm your own sitemap and robots.txt aren’t quietly working against you.
4. Fix broken internal links and redirect chains
Every 404 an internal link points to, and every redirect chain longer than one hop, wastes crawl budget and dilutes link equity. This is especially common after a WordPress theme change or URL structure change. A crawler pass that lists every internal link’s status code is non-negotiable here.
5. Check title tags and meta descriptions for uniqueness
Duplicate or missing titles are one of the most common findings in a WordPress audit, usually caused by a template that doesn’t override the SEO plugin’s default pattern for a given post type. Every indexable page needs a unique, descriptive title under roughly 60 characters and a meta description that gives someone a reason to click — see our guide on writing meta descriptions that actually get clicks.
6. Review heading structure
Each page should have exactly one <h1>, and headings below it should nest logically rather than jump from H2 to H4. This matters less for rankings directly and more because a broken heading structure is usually a symptom of a template problem that also affects accessibility and readability.
7. Check Core Web Vitals, especially on mobile
WordPress sites accumulate render-blocking plugins over time. Largest Contentful Paint is the most common failure point — see our dedicated guide on fixing slow LCP on WordPress if this comes back red in PageSpeed Insights.
8. Audit content depth and intent match
For your priority keywords, check whether the ranking page actually satisfies what someone searching that term wants. A thin, generic page targeting a specific commercial query is a common and fixable gap — our guide on turning thin pages into ranking pages walks through the fix.
9. Check internal linking to priority pages
Your most important pages — pricing, cornerstone guides, category pages — should receive internal links from multiple other pages using descriptive anchor text. If your highest-value page only has one inbound internal link, from the nav, that’s a gap worth closing.
10. Verify structured data
Validate any schema markup you’ve added (or that your theme adds automatically) against Google’s Rich Results Test. Invalid schema is worse than none, because it can trigger manual review flags without ever producing the rich result you wanted.
Running through all ten steps by hand takes most people a full afternoon. Paste your URL and get a prioritised version of this exact checklist in under 90 seconds.
Run your free auditNone of these steps require guesswork — they’re all things a crawler and a bit of judgement can verify. The hard part is doing it consistently, on a schedule, rather than once and never again. We cover how often that should be in how often you should audit your site’s SEO.