Nick QuirkMost SEO audits die in a 40-tab spreadsheet. This is the opposite: the seven checks that surface 90% of the problems on a typical WordPress site, in the order you should fix them.
1. Title tags: 30–60 characters, keyword early
Too short wastes the single strongest on-page signal; too long gets truncated in results. Every page needs a unique title with its target phrase near the front. Sitewide duplicates ("Home - MySite") are the most common failure.
2. Meta descriptions: 120–160 characters, written to be clicked
Descriptions don't directly move rankings — they move click-through rate, which does. Missing or auto-truncated descriptions hand Google the job of writing your ad copy. It's bad at it.
3. Exactly one H1 per page
Zero H1s deprives the page of its topic statement; multiple H1s (a classic theme/page-builder bug) dilutes it. H2s and H3s should outline the content like a table of contents.
4. Content depth: 500+ words where it counts
Thin pages rarely rank and drag down the site's quality profile. Find pages under ~500 words and either expand them, merge them, or noindex them. Readability matters too — walls of text lose mobile readers within seconds.
5. Broken links
Broken internal links leak authority and frustrate users; broken external ones erode trust. Check them live (link rot is continuous) rather than trusting last month's crawl.
6. 404s getting real traffic
Your logs will show visitors hitting URLs that no longer exist — old campaigns, renamed pages, external links you can't update. Each one deserves a 301 redirect to the closest live page. This is the fastest authority reclamation there is.
7. Core Web Vitals on your money pages
Run your top pages through PageSpeed Insights (mobile). LCP over ~2.5s usually traces to oversized images, render-blocking scripts, or WordPress bloat — emoji scripts, unused block CSS, jQuery Migrate — that ships with every default install and can simply be turned off.
Make it continuous instead of annual
Every check above decays: links rot, new posts ship thin, plugins add bloat. The audit you run once a year is mostly documentation of how bad things got. Power Up WP runs these exact checks across every post with one click — scores each page, generates and applies AI-written titles and metas in bulk, monitors 404s with one-click redirects, and re-audits weekly with an emailed scorecard, so the audit becomes a baseline that never drifts.