You have to check and tidy up the titles, meta descriptions, and H1–H6 headings on all of your pages. In this SEO audit checklist, I’ll walk you through the essentials of a technical SEO audit, from theory to practice. By taking these 12 essential steps, you’ll be able to fine-tune your website so that it not only impresses search engines but also makes users happy.
Investing a little extra time in improving your internal links is always worth it. They’re one of the easiest yet most powerful SEO tools you have. Everyone talks about backlinks from external sites, but internal linking – when done correctly – can actually make a huge impact. SEO Anomaly Many websites rush straight into link building, generating hundreds or even thousands of low-quality backlinks with exact-match anchor texts, before laying any SEO groundwork. You can label almost anything – products, articles, reviews, events – to clearly explain relationships and context. This clarity helps search engines understand why your content is relevant for a given query.
Speaking of content…your pages aren’t going to get any respect in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) if they’re thin. Panda, a 2011 Google algorithm update that cracked down on sites with thin content, made sure of that. An SEO audit is your roadmap for how you’ll eventually get there.
Consistency in quality over time is your best ally for regaining rankings and trust. This final step in your SEO audit can help you to understand—without any additional tools—the general health of your website, technical SEO errors, content duplication and so much more. There are two common types of page redirects; a 301 redirect which is permanent and a 302 redirect which is temporary. Internal links that redirect slow down the experience of the user on your website and send mixed signals to search engines and should be replaced. Your sitemap is what it sounds like — a map of all the main pages on your website.
Indexed URLs
An enterprise SEO audit should also consider how the website’s performance compares to competing sites in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Our SEO audit process begins with our team analyzing your website content, code, structure, and more to determine your strengths and weaknesses. We’ll also review your competitors to see what they are doing well and reverse engineer their strategies. Our SEO audit final report will include all findings along with recommendations and how to find the problems. Issues we may find may include similar tag tags, duplicate content, HTML / code problems, load speeds, and more. Determining which are most important and which items will help you rank better is an essential part of our plan.
- FAQFox is a free SEO tool that can scrape the Internet for questions your target audience might be asking or searching.
- If your site doesn’t meet these criteria, it won’t be eligible for search engine rankings.
- If you notice that the number of pages isn’t increasing, there a good chance that some of your pages aren’t getting indexed.
- The report labels pages as “Good,” “Needs improvement,” or “Poor.” Expand each issue to see the affected pages.
- The task list of SEO improvements will show you which issues are the most important ones as eliminating them will have a noticeable impact on your SEO performance.
Step #10: Speed Up Your Site (Core Web Vitals)
Essentially, orphan pages are lost pages, no longer connected to the internal linking structure of the website. To find all broken links on your website, scroll down to Broken links in the Links section of the Site Audit module. Check out the blue nodes for redirects and the red ones for broken links. And if you see any lonely grey nodes hanging around, those are your orphan pages. In the Site Audit module, explore the Indexing and crawlability section, namely Resources with 4xx status code, Resources with 5xx status code, and 404 page set up correctly. For that, select List Mode in the project creation dropdown menu.
An SEO audit checks how well optimized your website is for search engines. It finds issues that may be hurting the site’s rankings and provides opportunities to improve them. Meta tags, such as title tags and meta descriptions, are essential for SEO. They help search engines understand the content of your pages and improve click-through rates from search results.