
Ever-changing search engine algorithms are a mystery to many. These days, digital marketers know it’s better to just keep up with the changes rather than try and solve its mysteries. This is why it’s imperative to consistently audit your SEO strategy.
Today we’re sharing our comprehensive SEO audit checklist to help you and your website get back on the right track and improve your organic search performance.
An SEO audit involves crawling your entire site to identify technical and on-page issues that may prevent your site from ranking on Google and other search engines. It’s an opportunity to improve your organic search performance and your website’s visibility.
Did you know that there are actually different types of SEO audits and all of them are important?
The technical SEO audit deals with your website’s inner workings. Consider it the behind-the-scenes part that lets search engines crawl and index web pages in search of newly updated content.
A technical SEO audit allows you to see the state of all your pages as it checks for any issues concerning crawling, indexing, website speed, site structure and redirections. When search engines can crawl and index your website effectively, there’s a greater chance your website will rank higher on search engine results pages.
The technical SEO audit deals with your website’s inner workings. Consider it the behind-the-scenes part that lets search engines crawl and index web pages in search of newly updated content.
A technical SEO audit allows you to see the state of all your pages as it checks for any issues concerning crawling, indexing, website speed, site structure and redirections. When search engines can crawl and index your website effectively, there’s a greater chance your website will rank higher on search engine results pages.
Search engines assess your on-page SEO to determine how valuable the content and website are for users. On-page elements include keywords, headings, content, images and meta tags. An on-page site audit ensures all these elements are in place and correctly formatted.
Backlinks are an important part of search engine optimisation and a backlink audit ensures that all links pointing to and from your site are high quality.
If you run a brick-and-mortar or service-based business, then local SEO is essential for you. Your Google Business profile is the heart of your local SEO site audit. Citations, links and reviews come next.
Before we share our SEO audit checklist, you might be wondering why you need one. Here are just some of the benefits of taking the time to do a site audit.
If you want your website to generate revenue and leads, you need to constantly improve and update. An SEO audit provides important information about technical issues that harm the user experience and derail your hard work. Moreover, Google loves a healthy website and how your site performs is a significant ranking factor. So an SEO audit equals more traffic and more revenue. It’s a win-win.
Keyword research and analysis are part of every SEO strategy. An SEO audit can provide you with invaluable information about your organic traffic and which keywords you rank for, so you can better optimise your content.
With a site audit, you can improve your website’s usability by identifying functional, navigational or structural weaknesses. This includes web development issues, design improvements and on-page SEO issues like internal links and page title tags. Spotting and quickly rectifying these issues boosts your site’s usability and improves the user experience.
A complete SEO audit includes an on-page SEO audit, which analyses your content’s quality through various data points, such as missing keywords, content length and headers.
If your website doesn’t function as it should, don’t be surprised if users go elsewhere. Minimise this risk by removing any website issues that compromise the user experience. The longer users spend on the website, the better it is for your website and organic traffic rankings.
Ready to tackle this SEO audit checklist? Let’s go! We promise it isn’t as overwhelming as it seems.
The first step in the SEO audit process is to gather your tools. This is the SEO software we recommend using for your site audit, so pick and choose what best suits you and your needs.
You’ll need website crawling software and there are several available:
You can do almost everything with Google Analytics, a free site audit tool. Analyse trends, understand your site’s audience, track your website’s organic search traffic and check your site speed. All you do is add a code to your website and Google Analytics does the rest.
Google Search Console is a free online SEO tool that helps website owners track their website’s presence in Google search results. It also features a few SEO website audit tools that provide detailed insights into important search factors to help users resolve technical SEO issues. This includes telling you whether Google’s web crawlers can access your site, the Core Web Vitals SEO report (based on real-world data) and a mobile usability report that analyses your mobile website.
Although Google is the top search engine, there are other search engines to consider, including Bing. Microsoft owns Bing Webmaster Tools, a free SEO tool that allows users to manage and track their website’s search engine performance. Its Site Scan tool crawls your site on-demand to check for common SEO issues and then generates a detailed results report.
One of our favourite WooRank features is the Top Priorities section, which tells you the issues to address first. It might be your internal links, broken links or meta descriptions. Another feature is the social share-ability pane that contains social network data, including the number of comments, likes, shares and bookmarks.
WooRank is a reliable SEO audit tool that can help improve your SEO score and increase your organic search traffic, which is why so many small and big business owners use it. Download the Chrome Extension today.
Now you have your tools assembled, it’s time to crawl your website to identify issues. During this process, you also want to ensure your website is indexed. Use the URL Inspection Tool on Google Search Console to confirm your URL is on Google. There’s no point in auditing if Google isn’t indexing your website, right? Google Search Console’s Index Coverage report also identifies pages the search engine can’t index.
The final step is to ensure you have an XML sitemap, which is what search engines crawl to understand your website. Typically placed in the robots.txt file, you can confirm its existence by typing https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml into the search bar.
Next, identify your site’s broken links and any internal links that need updating. Internal links are important as they pass link equity within your pages.
Use Google Search Console to find broken external links and internal links:
Remember, there is such a thing as too many internal links. Three to five on one landing page is the optimal amount.
The next step of the technical site audit is to identify improvements in the information architecture, which is how your website appears to search engine crawlers. You want to remove duplicate content, broken pages, low-quality and orphan pages.
Duplicate content is self-explanatory, but low-quality can include “thin content,” which is content that doesn’t meet a user’s needs. This might include a 300-word blog post that doesn’t effectively answer a user’s query. Orphan pages are also known as zombie pages and are “orphaned” because there are no internal links pointing to them. This might be archive pages, category pages or tag pages, depending on your website.
Use Google Search Console to find and remove all the affected pages.
Site architecture refers to the site structure. It’s important as it helps search engines crawl all pages on your site and improves the user experience. These are the main elements to analyse and update:
The next step of the audit is to identify on-page technical SEO issues.
In Google Search Console, click on HTML Improvements under Search Appearance. Here, you can click on Titles, Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords to see a list of all the pages with a missing title tag, duplicate titles, missing meta descriptions and missing meta keywords.
Note: Meta keywords refer to a specific kind of meta-tag found in a page’s HTML code that helps search engines understand a website’s theme or topic.
The on-page SEO audit is also the perfect time to check ranking content and see if it can be optimised further. The bare minimum is the target keyword being in the URL, title tag, at least one H2 subheading, meta description and moderately throughout the body.
You should also optimise meta tags so search engines understand your content. Meta tags include the meta title tag and the meta description. We’ve discussed meta descriptions before, but ensure they include target keywords and are under 160 characters. Titles should be under 60 characters.
With over 60% of US Google searches originating from mobile devices, your website needs to be mobile-friendly. Fortunately, Google is one step ahead and has a Mobile-Friendly Test. If you need to make improvements, here are some suggestions:
A site audit report must offer a complete picture of all pages on your site and the issues that may compromise the site’s performance. This is what we believe should be included:
Use this step-by-step SEO audit checklist to audit your own site at least once per quarter. If you can do a site audit on a monthly basis, that’s even better.
If you’re looking to improve your website’s SEO, it’s vital to perform an SEO audit regularly. The tips we’ve shared are a great starting point. But if you want a more thorough analysis, our SEO specialists are more than happy to help. Contact us today for a free consultation and with our expert technical SEO knowledge, we can efficiently perform a complete SEO audit.
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