SEO Audit Guide: How to boost your organic rankings

Author : Mia El Jamali

An SEO audit is, above all, an in-depth analysis of your site’s indexability, architecture, web performance, and user experience. Its goal is to provide a precise diagnosis of the factors driving your site’s organic rankings on search engines (like Google), identifying the technical and content solutions needed to maximise them.

However, while traditional SEO remains the foundation of your acquisition strategy, it is no longer enough on its own to maximise your visibility and profitability. Generative AI has now taken a central role in your prospects’ lives. When searching for a product or service, users no longer simply type a query into a search bar and mechanically click the first blue link. They want to verify the quality of what they are about to buy and compare its value against competitors: to do this, they now directly query LLMs.

For a brand, it has therefore become essential to appear in the sources these AI models rely on and to be actively cited by them. This is known as GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation).

Fortunately, the criteria for excellent search engine rankings (flawless technical performance, clear semantic structure, strong domain authority) closely align with those favored by generative AI. A modern audit therefore identifies and prioritises the pages that need optimisation to jointly meet the dual requirements of both SEO and GEO.

The Business Impact of Organic Traffic

SEO, or organic search, focuses on capturing organic traffic—all the visitors who land on your site via standard search engine results. Unlike paid campaigns, it is an unpaid acquisition channel: the brand does not spend any media budget to generate these clicks.

The goal is to capture maximum traffic by ranking your site among the top Google results for keywords related to your industry.

Companies often rank very well for their brand name, yet remain invisible on non-branded (or generic) queries. However, the very purpose of SEO is to capture these users during their active research phase. Even if they haven’t settled on a brand yet, their behavior indicates high purchase intent that is crucial to intercept before your competitors do. It is therefore essential to identify your target audience’s most frequent search queries to determine the strategic keywords that will drive your visibility.

Finally, the audit examines your competitors’ rankings and organic traffic to analyse your opportunities for capturing market share.

Safeguarding and reacting to algorithm updates (Core Updates):

Beyond identifying these growth levers, the audit also serves an essential defensive purpose. Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving, with several major updates deployed each year to refine the relevance of its search results. These shifts can completely upend rankings overnight. A site that previously generated significant traffic can suddenly see its visibility plummet if its architecture or content no longer meets the search engine’s new requirements. This is where the audit proves invaluable: it diagnoses whether a traffic drop is linked to one of these algorithmic updates and outlines a remediation plan to quickly recover lost rankings.

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The 3 Pillars Analysed in a Comprehensive SEO Audit

1. The Technical Audit (On-Site): Accessibility and User Experience

Google first analyzes your site’s technical foundation to ensure it is easily and quickly accessible.

For your brand to be visible in search results, it is essential that users, traditional web crawlers, and AI bots (like OpenAIbot) can access your pages without encountering technical roadblocks. Your robots.txt file and meta tags dictate whether these bots are allowed or restricted from crawling different parts of your site. Concurrently, the XML Sitemap acts as a roadmap to help them navigate efficiently.

The role of the technical audit is therefore to rigorously inspect these elements, detecting and resolving even the slightest anomaly that could prevent search engines and AIs from reading and indexing your strategic pages. To evaluate this performance, we analyse several criteria:

• Robots.txt status and URL structure: Ensuring proper crawl directives and a clean URL architecture.
• Internal linking quality: The audit specifically tracks “broken” links leading to deleted or non-existent pages. These dead links frustrate users and severely hinder search engine crawling.
• Technical tag optimisation and SSL security: Checking for proper tag implementation and the presence of an SSL certificate (enabling HTTPS, a data-encrypting security standard now required by Google to protect users).
• SXO and Core Web Vitals: The audit no longer settles for analyzing theoretical site speed. It evaluates the real-world user experience (SXO—Search Experience Optimisation) based on Google’s three official criteria, known as the Core Web Vitals:
  • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Measures the loading time of the largest visual element rendered on the screen.
  • INP (Interaction to Next Paint): Measures the site’s responsiveness and reaction time when a user interacts with a page.
  • CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Verifies the visual stability of page elements as they load.
• Mobile-First Indexing: Because Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, the audit verifies that mobile usability and ergonomics (such as text size and tap target spacing) are flawless on smartphones.

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2. The Semantic and GEO Audit: On-Page Optimisation, Topic Clusters, and E-E-A-T

Modern SEO requires linking the technical optimisation of your pages with true semantic mastery. Google’s algorithm relies on a powerful Knowledge Graph to evaluate whether your brand establishes itself as a comprehensive authority on a given subject. The semantic audit will therefore guide your content overhaul based on the following areas:

On-Page optimisation of strategic pages:

• Hn tag (heading) optimisation: When bots crawl your page, they look to identify the terms typed by users. If your headings have no connection to these frequent queries, search algorithms will deem the page irrelevant. Beware of over-optimisation, however: forcing your target keyword into every heading is now a penalized practice. The audit thus ensures that your semantic field remains rich, varied, and natural. This semantic richness is also the absolute prerequisite in GEO for successfully answering the conversational and complex queries posed to AIs.
• Data clarity: Whether to facilitate readability for a user or data extraction by a generative AI, the audit will ensure your pages incorporate direct answers and clear visual structures (tables, bulleted lists).
• Product assortment depth (E-commerce specific): For online stores and marketplaces, the audit analyzes the richness of your category pages. The algorithm seeks to satisfy the user’s need for choice. Therefore, if your category page displays 20 products while your competitors feature 50, Google will consider their page more relevant and rank it ahead of yours.

Content strategy and site structure:

• Identify and clean up: Identify expert articles that generate traffic to optimize them, and delete or recycle obsolete content that attracts no visitors. An overabundance of useless pages drowns out your high-performing content.
• Structure a semantic cocoon: The semantic cocoon designates a way of structuring a website and interlinking its pages by favoring semantic connections. Concretely, the audit evaluates the effectiveness of your current internal linking. If it is flawed or nonexistent, it will propose the architecture of a new logical network of internal links between your articles, in order to efficiently transmit SEO power to your priority content.

Algorithms today penalize generic texts devoid of added value. The audit therefore ensures that your site meets the expectations set by the EEAT evaluation grid, which are also the primary criteria used by artificial intelligences to decide if a source is reliable enough to be cited:

• Experience: You must prove that you concretely master your subject. For retail sites and marketplaces, Google loves pages integrating videos that illustrate the concrete installation of products or the explanation of their use. In B2B, this experience is demonstrated by the publication of detailed and quantified case studies.
• Expertise: Whether it is Google or Perplexity, algorithms favor unique information (exclusive numerical data, internal expert opinions). Your publications must be embodied by authors whose skills are verifiable. Purely generic or anonymous content is devalued.
• Trustworthiness: Search engines refuse to rank sites that could deceive or harm internet users. Your site must therefore display clear reassurance elements (accessible legal notices, transparency on the company’s identity, regular updates). This level of requirement becomes absolute for sensitive sectors (health, finance, legal, or e-commerce). In these fields, the slightest doubt about the honesty of your site is eliminated.

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3. The Off-Site (Popularity) Audit: Link Building

The off-site audit analyses your site’s overall popularity. It evaluates the “A” in the E-E-A-T acronym: Authoritativeness. This refers to your ability to be recognized and cited by key, authoritative players in your industry. Much like a human, a generative AI is far more likely to cite your brand if it sees that you are widely recommended throughout the web ecosystem.

The mechanics of SEO power

Backlink acquisition is not just a numbers game; it is a highly precise mechanism based on three fundamental principles that the audit will evaluate:

• Authority transfer (“Link Juice”): When an external site links to yours, it directly transfers a portion of its own credibility. Mechanically, the more links a page receives from trusted domains, the more authority it accumulates in the eyes of search algorithms.
• Topical relevance: A backlink’s impact depends heavily on its context. A link only truly transfers SEO power if the overarching theme and semantics of both pages are closely aligned. Earning a link from a recognised player in your industry strengthens your credibility, whereas a link from an off-topic site provides virtually no benefit.
• Overall domain expertise: The combination of in-depth content and relevant backlinks creates a powerful synergy. Search engines and AIs then identify you as a legitimate subject matter expert, which actively drives up your overall organic rankings.

Your backlink profile audit

The audit verifies that your current link profile adheres to fundamental integration rules and tracks down even the slightest irregularities:

• The predominance of “Dofollow” links: By default, a web link is “Dofollow”: it tells crawlers they can follow it and authorizes the transfer of SEO power (link juice) to your site. Conversely, a “Nofollow” link blocks this transfer of authority. The audit therefore verifies that your backlinks are indeed Dofollow, an essential condition for your popularity and rankings to genuinely increase.
• Referring domain analysis: The audit meticulously checks the origin of your backlinks. It is common, especially when using link-buying networks, for your links to be published on low-quality sites. However, a mention from a dubious or toxic environment provides no benefit and may even penalize your site. It is therefore critical to identify legitimate players capable of appropriately recommending your brand, and to systematically disavow or exclude low-authority sites.
• The danger of anchor text over-optimization: The clickable text containing your link (the anchor text) should indicate the topic of your page. However, if all your backlinks use the exact same commercial keyword, the algorithm will flag an obvious manipulation attempt. Refusing to be gamed, the search engine will severely downgrade the site. Maintaining a diverse anchor text profile is therefore vital.

Do you want to precisely identify the technical, semantic, or popularity obstacles that are currently limiting your visibility? Our experts are at your disposal to conduct an in-depth SEO audit of your site and define your future action plan, as we did for Volvo. Contact us !

Questions frequently asked :