Most SEO audit you’ll be sold cost between ₹15,000 and ₹75,000 and arrive as a 40-page PDF you never read. About 80% of what’s in them is the same list of checks, run with the same free tools, that you could run yourself in an afternoon.
So here’s the list.
This is the seo audit checklist we work through on client sites at Namo Marketing, in a Google Sheet you can copy and use. 63 checks across crawling, technical health, on-page, content, local, links, tracking and AI search readiness. Every row tells you why the check matters and which tool to use. The score tab updates automatically as you fill it in, and it counts your outstanding Critical and High issues separately, because those two numbers are the actual output of an audit.
It’s built for Indian businesses. That means the local section covers Google Business Profile and NAP consistency across JustDial, IndiaMART and Sulekha, and the technical section assumes your visitors are on mobile 4G rather than office fibre.
Free, no email required to view — though if you give us one we’ll send you the updated version when Google changes something.
What’s inside
Four tabs:
Start Here — how to use it, what the statuses mean, and a worked example row.
Audit Checklist — the 63 checks, grouped into eight categories, each with a plain-English explanation of why it matters and the exact tool to check it with. Dropdown status field on every row.
Score — updates itself as you work. Per-category percentages, an overall score, and separate counters for Critical and High issues still outstanding. N/A rows are excluded from scoring, so the number stays honest.
Action Plan — a blank tracker for turning the failures into assigned, dated tasks.
The eight categories:
| Category | Checks | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Crawl & Indexing | 10 | Whether Google can find and index your pages at all |
| Technical | 12 | HTTPS, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, redirects |
| On-Page | 9 | Titles, descriptions, headings, URLs, alt text |
| Content | 8 | Intent match, cannibalisation, thin pages, freshness |
| Local SEO (India) | 9 | Google Business Profile, reviews, NAP consistency, Indian directories |
| Links | 7 | Internal linking, broken links, backlink quality |
| Tracking | 5 | GA4, Search Console, conversion and call tracking |
| AI Search | 3 | Structured data and whether AI tools can parse your pages |
How to use it
Make a copy into your own Drive, then work top to bottom. Set the status on every row — Pass, Fail, or N/A if it genuinely doesn’t apply. Leave it blank if you haven’t checked yet; the score only counts rows you’ve actually assessed.
Budget about two hours for a small site. Most of it is quick. A handful of checks need a crawler, and Screaming Frog’s free tier handles up to 500 URLs, which covers most Indian SMB sites entirely.
When you’re done, ignore the percentage and look at the two numbers at the bottom of the Score tab: Critical outstanding and High outstanding. Work the Critical list in order. Nothing else matters until that number is zero.
Tools you’ll need (all free)
- Google Search Console — the only direct view of how Google sees your site
- Google Analytics 4 — for the tracking section
- PageSpeed Insights — Core Web Vitals, use the mobile tab
- Rich Results Test — validates your structured data
- Screaming Frog — free up to 500 URLs, for the crawl-based checks
- Your phone — genuinely. Several checks only reveal themselves on a real device on mobile data
An honest note on what a checklist can’t do
A perfect score doesn’t mean you’ll rank. It means your fundamentals are clean and nothing is actively broken — which is the floor, not the ceiling.
Rankings come from being the better answer, having content people cite, and earning authority over time. A checklist can’t tell you whether your page deserves to beat a competitor who’s been publishing for eight years. It can tell you whether you’re losing to them for a stupid, fixable reason, and that’s worth two hours of anyone’s afternoon.
Also: don’t run this once. Re-run it quarterly. Sites decay — plugins break things, redirects pile up, someone ships a staging noindex to production. Most of the problems this catches were introduced by people who work at your company.
If the Critical list is longer than you expected
That’s common, and it’s usually a handful of root causes rather than 15 separate problems.
Namo Marketing has run technical SEO for Indian businesses for over nine years. If you’d like someone to walk through your completed sheet and tell you what’s actually urgent, book a free 30-minute call or ring +91 9717 710 650. We’ll tell you which items you can safely ignore, which is usually more useful than a longer list.