How to audit
your website
using AI.

What an SEO audit actually covers

An SEO audit is a systematic review of everything that affects your site's ability to rank. It's not one thing — it's four distinct areas, and you need to check all of them because a problem in any one can undermine work done in the others.

Free tools you'll need before involving AI

Technical audit with AI — what to check and how

Step 1: Pull your GSC coverage report

In Google Search Console: Index → Pages. Note how many pages are indexed vs excluded. For excluded pages, check the reason — "Crawled but not indexed" is the most common problem and often the most impactful to fix.

Step 2: Check Core Web Vitals

GSC → Experience → Core Web Vitals. Any URLs showing as "Poor" need attention. Then run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights for a detailed breakdown of what's slowing it down.

Step 3: Run a Screaming Frog crawl

Even the free 500-URL limit is enough for most small SA business sites. Look for: pages with missing title tags, duplicate title tags, title tags over 60 characters, missing H1s, broken internal links (404s), and redirect chains.

Step 4: Feed your findings to AI

This is where AI becomes useful. Paste your issue list into ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to prioritise and explain. See the prompt below.

On-page audit with AI

For on-page, AI can actually read your pages and give you actionable feedback — not just interpret data. The most useful approach is to paste your page content directly into the AI and ask specific questions about it.

Copy-ready audit prompts

I've run a basic SEO audit on my website. Here are the issues I found:

[Paste your list of issues here — from GSC, Screaming Frog, PageSpeed, etc.]

My website is [your URL]. It's a [describe your business] based in [location], South Africa. The site is built on [WordPress/Wix/Squarespace/custom].

Please:
1. Prioritise these issues in order of SEO impact — what will make the biggest difference to rankings if fixed?
2. For the top 5 issues, explain in plain English what the problem is and exactly what I need to do to fix it
3. Flag any issues that need a developer vs ones I can fix myself
4. Identify anything that might be causing pages not to rank even if other signals look fine

I want you to audit the SEO of this page. Here is the full page content:

[Paste your page content here]

The target keyword for this page is: [keyword]
My business: [brief description] in [location], South Africa
Target reader: [describe who this page is for]

Please audit:
1. Title tag — is it optimised, the right length, compelling enough to get clicks?
2. Does the content match the search intent for this keyword?
3. What is missing that a well-ranking competitor page would include?
4. Heading structure — is it logical and keyword-relevant?
5. Internal linking opportunities — what related pages should this link to?
6. What schema markup would help this page?

Give me a prioritised list of changes with clear before/after examples for the most important ones.

How to prioritise what you find

Every audit produces more issues than you can fix in one go. The prioritisation framework that works:

Fix immediately: 404 errors on important pages, pages excluded from Google's index that should be indexed, missing title tags on key pages, site not loading on mobile.

Fix this month: Slow page speed (below 50 on mobile), duplicate title tags, pages with no H1, broken internal links, missing meta descriptions.

Fix when you have capacity: Image alt text, schema markup additions, internal linking improvements, content gaps on existing pages.

Don't obsess over: Minor speed optimisations that move you from 78 to 82, exact keyword density, pages with thin content that get zero traffic anyway.

FAQ