A quiet morning running site audits

I wake up around 6:30, make coffee, and open my laptop before anyone else in the house stirs. This is when I do my best SEO audit work. No Slack notifications, no video calls, just me and the data.

First thing I check is Google Search Console. I pull up the last 28 days of performance data and export it to a spreadsheet. I'm looking for pages that dropped more than 30% in clicks or impressions. Sometimes it's seasonal, sometimes it's a real problem. I mark anything suspicious in yellow.

Then I move to crawl errors. I use Screaming Frog because it runs in the background while I work through my second coffee. I set it to crawl up to 10,000 URLs on smaller sites, unlimited on larger ones. The crawl usually takes 20-40 minutes depending on site size.

While that runs, I check Core Web Vitals in PageSpeed Insights. I test five pages: homepage, two top landing pages, one product page, one blog post. I write down the LCP, FID, and CLS scores. Anything above 2.5 seconds for LCP gets flagged.

By 8 AM, the crawl finishes. I filter for 404 errors first, then 301 chains, then orphaned pages. I export these into separate tabs. The 404s usually come from deleted products or moved blog posts. I make a list of URLs that need redirects.

Next is the content audit. I sort all pages by word count and check anything under 300 words. Thin content tanks rankings fast. I also look for duplicate title tags and meta descriptions in the crawl data.

I spend about 90 minutes on this morning routine, four days a week. By the time my first meeting starts, I have a clear list of technical issues to fix. No guessing, no panic, just methodical work that actually improves rankings.