What I Look For in a Site Audit Before Writing a Single Word

Clients often expect an audit to be a formality before we "get to the real work" of writing. In practice, the audit usually determines more of the eventual outcome than the writing itself. Here's what actually gets reviewed.

Indexation and crawlability first

Before anything else, I check what's actually indexed versus what exists. Pages can be beautifully written and completely invisible to search engines due to a misconfigured robots.txt, an accidental noindex tag, or a broken sitemap. No amount of good content fixes a page search engines can't see.

Redirect chains and broken links

Every broken internal link and every unnecessary redirect chain (a URL that redirects to another redirect, rather than straight to the final page) quietly bleeds authority and confuses both users and crawlers. On one project this meant resolving over two dozen broken URLs through proper 301 redirects before any new content work began.

Existing content: consolidate before creating

• Are there multiple thin pages competing for the same keyword that should be merged into one strong page?
• Is there outdated content still ranking that needs a refresh rather than a brand-new page?
• Are there orphaned pages, live but with no internal links pointing to them, effectively invisible to both users and search engines?

URL structure and information architecture

Unnecessary slug prefixes, inconsistent URL patterns, and a flat structure with no logical grouping all make a site harder for search engines to understand topically. Cleaning this up before adding new content prevents the same structural problems from compounding.

On-page fundamentals, site-wide

Title tag patterns, meta description presence, header hierarchy, and schema markup, reviewed as a pattern across the whole site, not page by page. A single missing meta description is a minor issue. A site-wide pattern of missing meta descriptions is a strategic gap.

An audit isn't the boring prerequisite to the real work. It's usually where most of the actual leverage is found, since fixing structural issues tends to lift an entire site's performance in a way that individual new pages rarely match on their own.