How to Do an SEO Audit: 16-Step SEO Audit Checklist

SEOptimer is ideal for website owners, website designers and digital agencies who want to improve their own sites or theirs of their clients. In the SEO audit, scrutinize the devices through which your website receives traffic. Analyze whether there are variations in user behavior based on the device used (desktop, mobile, tablet). This insight is crucial for optimizing the user experience on different devices and ensuring your website caters effectively to diverse audiences. Generate an image sitemap as part of the SEO audit to offer search engines additional information about the images on your site.

SEO audit

Step #2: Check Technical Foundation

A well-structured sitemap improves indexing efficiency and make sure all important pages are discoverable. An SEO audit is essential for maintaining and improving the website’s search engine performance. By systematically analyzing technical and content-related aspects, one can identify issues that are hindering your rankings and make adjustments. This guide walks you through the key steps of performing an SEO audit and make sure your website remains optimized for search engines. Setting up a website property in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools (and sometimes Yandex) can provide a wealth of information about how these search engines crawl your site.

SEO audit

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For higher ranking pages, PA will typically be higher than your Domain Authority. These are essential tools for any website owner or SEO professional looking to improve their site’s ranking on search engine results pages. The next step before doing a deeper analysis is to check your organic traffic. Login to Google Search Console and view the «Search Results» report. An SEO audit refers to the process of evaluating various elements of a website that impact its performance in organic search. Using your vertical-specific keyword research, write or rewrite your meta tags, making sure to optimize them for the keywords that will help them show up in search.

SEO audit

SEO audit

For example, they might provide supplementary content beyond the target keywords, or incorporate engaging elements like videos and images that enhance the user experience. For search engines to index and rank a site, they need to crawl its pages first. Google, for example, releases a bot to crawl a site by executing internal links.

Use Google’s Rich Results Test tool (free online) on a few pages to see if any schema is detected and if there are errors. Also in Google Search Console, check the Enhancements section – it will list any detected schema types (like FAQ, Breadcrumbs, Products) and if there are errors or warnings in them. If you find that none of your pages have structured data, that’s a strong recommendation to implement relevant schema. For example, sites that implement schema often see increased click-through rates because of rich snippets.

SEO audit

Think of internal links as creating pathways within your website. These pathways guide users to related content and help search engines understand your site’s structure and hierarchy. A well-planned internal linking strategy strengthens the overall authority of your website. They boost your search engine rankings and organic traffic, which leads to more qualified leads and higher conversion rates. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t realize the importance of regular audits and miss valuable optimization opportunities.

This will give you all the publicly available information on a given domain such as the contact information and the hosting company. You can also contact the hosting company directly to try and get closer to the google search console webmaster. If you remember building the link in the first place, you should still have the webmaster’s (google search console) contact information. If not, you can usually find BHS Links it listed on the site itself under the contact page. The first step, of course, is to build exclusively high-quality links in your profile. If you only submit the best links, it makes sense that you’d never have to worry about a penalty, and a link quality audit would seem redundant.

  • This means the latest monthly search volume for a keyword is up by more than 50% versus two months ago.
  • Avoid using session IDs or unnecessary URL parameters that create duplicates.
  • From my experience talking to clients, handling website page speed is one of the most challenging tasks, at least for non-technical users.
  • The web interface for the reporting is great, simple and easy to use.

An SEO audit examines all elements that influence a site’s performance in organic search, including technical infrastructure, on-page content, and off-page factors. The primary goal of an SEO audit is to discover underlying issues that may be limiting a website’s visibility and identify opportunities for improvement. Ultimately, it seeks to ensure that a website is optimized to achieve the highest possible search engine rankings, steering a path that maximizes organic traffic flow. An SEO audit is a process of analyzing a website’s performance and identifying areas for improvement to increase its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).