SEO Audit Checklist 2026: How to Audit Your Website, Step by Step

This guide is the checklist we use at Hovi Digital Lab when we audit websites for brands in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It works for any site, but it pays special attention to the things that break most often in the Gulf: Arabic and English versions that compete with each other, slow mobile pages, and service pages that never say which city they serve.

Before you start: what you need

You do not need a paid tool to run a useful audit. You need four things open in separate tabs:

• Google Search Console for indexing, queries and Core Web Vitals. If you only use one tool, use this one.
• PageSpeed Insights for real-user speed data on your key templates.
• A crawler such as Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) to list every page, status code, title and canonical.
• A spreadsheet to log each issue, the page it affects and the fix.

If you want a two-minute starting point, run your homepage through our free website grader. It checks speed, metadata, structure and mobile readiness and gives you a prioritised list to work from.

Step 1: Technical SEO audit

Technical problems stop everything else from working. A great page that Google cannot crawl or index earns nothing, so start here.

Crawling and indexing

• Open Search Console's Pages report. Compare "Indexed" with the number of pages you actually want in Google. A big gap in either direction is your first finding.
• Check robots.txt is not blocking folders you care about. Staging rules left on a live site are more common than you would think.
• Make sure your XML sitemap lists only live, canonical, indexable URLs and is submitted in Search Console.
• Crawl the site and filter for 4xx errors, redirect chains and pages with no internal links pointing to them.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google's thresholds for a "good" experience are LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS below 0.1. Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console first, because it uses real visitor data, then use PageSpeed Insights on the templates that fail.

The usual culprits on Gulf sites: uncompressed hero images, chat widgets and tracking tags loading before the content, and web fonts loaded twice for Arabic and Latin scripts.

Mobile

Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Open your top five pages on a phone and check that menus work, text is readable without zooming, forms can be filled in and nothing important is hidden on mobile.

Arabic and English versions

This is where we find the most damage on UAE and Saudi websites. Check that:

• Each language version has its own URL (for example /ar/), not a script that swaps text on the same URL.
• hreflang tags link the English and Arabic versions to each other, both ways, with a self-reference on each page.
• Each version has its own canonical pointing to itself, not to the English page.
• The Arabic page sets lang="ar" and dir="rtl", and its titles and descriptions are written in Arabic, not left in English.

Step 2: On-page SEO audit

On-page signals tell Google what each page is about and tell searchers whether to click. Export titles, descriptions and H1s from your crawler and review them in the spreadsheet.

Element	What good looks like	Common problem
Title tag	Main keyword first, under about 60 characters, unique per page	Brand name first, or the same title on many pages
Meta description	150 to 160 characters, states the benefit and the location	Missing, so Google writes its own from random page text
H1	One per page, contains the main keyword	A slogan with no keyword, or several H1s
URL	Short, readable, lowercase, hyphenated	IDs and parameters, or Arabic text encoded into long strings
Images	Compressed, descriptive alt text, explicit width and height	Five-megabyte photos and empty alt attributes
Internal links	Descriptive anchor text pointing to your service pages	"Click here" links, or key pages with no links at all

Check for keyword cannibalisation

Search your own site in Search Console: filter Performance by a main keyword and switch to the Pages tab. If two or three of your pages share the impressions for the same query, they are competing with each other and usually all rank lower. Pick one page to own the query, sharpen the others toward a different intent and link them to the owner.

Step 3: Content audit

List every page with its clicks, impressions and average position for the last three months from Search Console. Then sort pages into four groups:

• Keep: pages that already bring clicks and leads. Protect them and update them once a year.
• Refresh: pages with many impressions and few clicks, usually ranking in positions 5 to 20. These are your fastest wins. Rewrite the title and description, update facts and dates, and add the answer the searcher actually wants near the top.
• Merge: thin pages that cover the same topic. Combine them into one strong page and 301-redirect the rest.
• Remove: pages with no traffic, no links and no business purpose.

For service businesses in the Gulf, also check that every service page names the cities and countries you serve, shows prices or price ranges where you can, and answers the three questions buyers ask before they call: what it costs, how long it takes and what results to expect.

Step 4: Backlink audit

Search Console's Links report shows which sites link to you and which pages receive those links. Look for three things:

• Your strongest linked pages. Make sure they still load and link onward to your service pages.
• Broken pages that still receive links. Redirect them to the closest live page so you keep the value.
• Gaps against competitors. Directories, chambers of commerce, free zone listings, industry associations and regional media are realistic link sources for UAE and Saudi businesses.

Do not panic about spammy links you did not build. Google ignores most of them. Use the disavow tool only if you have a manual action or a clear history of bought links.

Step 5: AI search visibility audit

More of your buyers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Mode before they search. Google says there are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews: a page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet. In practice, the pages that get cited share a few traits, so audit for them:

• A direct answer near the top. The first paragraph after the H1 should answer the main question in 40 to 60 words, in a way that makes sense on its own.
• Facts with sources and dates. Numbers with a named source and a month get quoted. Vague claims do not.
• Tables and lists for comparisons, prices and steps.
• Content in the HTML. Text hidden behind tabs that only load on click, or rendered only by JavaScript, is harder for crawlers to read.
• Crawler access. Check robots.txt is not blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended unless you mean to.
• Brand consistency. Your company name, services and locations should match across your site, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile and directories, so AI models describe you correctly.

Then test it. Ask ChatGPT and Gemini the questions your buyers ask, such as "best SEO company in Riyadh" or "how much does an SEO audit cost in Dubai", and note who gets named. In Search Console, AI Overview impressions are counted inside the normal Performance report. For the full method, see our guide to generative engine optimization (GEO) for UAE and Saudi brands.

How to prioritise what you find

A good audit produces a long list. A useful audit produces a short one. Score every issue on two things, business impact and effort, and work in this order:

1. Anything that blocks indexing of pages that make money.
2. Titles and descriptions on pages with high impressions and low clicks.
3. Speed problems on your main landing templates.
4. Arabic and English hreflang and canonical errors.
5. Content refreshes and merges.
6. Link building and AI visibility work, which compound over months.

SEO audit checklist

Area	Check	Tool
Indexing	Indexed pages match the pages you want in Google	Search Console, Pages
Indexing	robots.txt and sitemap are correct and submitted	Search Console, Sitemaps
Technical	No 4xx errors, redirect chains or orphan pages	Crawler
Speed	LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS below 0.1	Search Console, PageSpeed Insights
Mobile	Menus, forms and text work on a phone	Your phone
Languages	Separate Arabic URLs, reciprocal hreflang, self-canonicals	Crawler, page source
On-page	Unique titles, descriptions and one H1 per page	Crawler
On-page	No two pages competing for the same query	Search Console, Performance
Content	High-impression, low-click pages refreshed	Search Console, Performance
Links	Linked pages load and pass value to service pages	Search Console, Links
AI search	Answer block, sourced facts, AI crawlers allowed	Page review, robots.txt

How much does an SEO audit cost in the UAE and Saudi Arabia?

Prices depend on site size, the number of languages and whether the audit includes fixing the issues or only finding them. As a guide, these are the ranges you will typically see quoted:

Audit type	Typical scope	Indicative price
Automated report	Tool-generated list of issues, no prioritisation	Free to AED 500 / SAR 500
Focused audit	Up to about 100 pages, one language, prioritised fix list	AED 3,000 to 8,000 / SAR 3,000 to 8,000
Full bilingual audit	Arabic and English, technical, content, links and AI visibility, with a roadmap	AED 8,000 to 25,000 / SAR 8,000 to 25,000
Enterprise or e-commerce	Thousands of URLs, faceted navigation, migrations	AED 25,000+ / SAR 25,000+

Whatever you pay, ask for two things: a prioritised list tied to business impact, not a 200-page export, and a clear owner and deadline for each fix. An audit nobody acts on is worth nothing.

DIY audit or hire an SEO agency?

Run it yourself if your site has fewer than a hundred pages, one language and someone who can edit it. Bring in a specialist when you run Arabic and English versions, have thousands of product pages, are planning a redesign or migration, or have seen a sudden drop in traffic you cannot explain. Hovi Digital Lab runs bilingual audits for brands across the GCC as part of our SEO services in Saudi Arabia and digital marketing in Dubai, and fixes the issues with your team rather than handing over a report.

Frequently asked questions

How long does an SEO audit take?

How often should you do an SEO audit?

What is the difference between an SEO audit and a website audit?

Can I do an SEO audit for free?

Does an SEO audit help with ChatGPT and AI Overviews?

Want a second pair of eyes? Start with the free website grader, or book a strategy session and we will walk through your Search Console data with you.