How To Perform An SEO Audit in 15 Steps With Checklist

Although the crooked code is not visible to users, Google can still see what’s under the hood. And if a search engine stumbles upon unreadable code, say goodbye to a decent loading speed and the first positions in the SERP. Search engines use titles BHS Links and meta descriptions to form a search snippet.

Google will not acknowledge various pages, only the strongest one. As a result, you will have a lot of different articles that are useless in terms of SEO and cannot be reached from the search engine. A lot of people, while trying to promote their website and rank higher in Google, start writing on the same exact topic.

seo audit

Some of the most popular SEO auditing tools include Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Sitebulb, Lumar, Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console. Page speed is vital—especially after Google dropped its Speed Update and Page Experience Update. Anyone using a phone to look for stuff on the internet isn’t going to wait around for a slow-loading site. That means the faster your site is, the more likely Google is to reward you with strong organic rankings. 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. Ancillary keywords should, if possible, be used in H2s and in body copy.

When to perform an SEO audit?

If you’re interested in exploring Core Web Vitals of a single page, navigate to the Page Audit section and access the Technical Audit tab. Before you choose any of these solutions, I recommend checking each orphan page with Google Analytics to see if it gets traffic. Once the crawl is complete, you’ll see orphan pages marked with grey nodes in the site structure. You just need to go through these pages and clean up unnecessary links. Prolonging existing redirects to the new site can hinder Google’s ability to reach the intended page and waste the crawl budget.

seo audit

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  • If your pages are not being indexed, there are a number of issues that may be causing this.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools is a suite of SEO tools that looks at your performance data and analyzes them so you can optimize your pages on Bing search results.
  • Most often I see this on external scripts, but sometimes an image on your own site can be missed—particularly if you’ve switched from HTTP to HTTPS.
  • For example, an agency with 25 team members will probably offer a higher price for its SEO audits than an agency with 500+ team members.

To audit your site for JavaScript issues, you need to enable JavaScript execution in expert options when you create a new project (or rebuild an existing one). Though Google has no serious penalties for duplicate content, such pages can still ruin your position and reputation. For instance, Google’s algorithm can index the wrong version of a page and it will get into the SERP. Or the whole website may be poorly indexed and considered spammy due to the huge number of duplicates.

Auditing can be a great way to catch these items, as well as find outdated practices that could be holding your website back. To get more backlinks, you should focus on publishing quality content that speaks to industry topics. As you build more authority, people will link to your website naturally.

seo audit

It contributes to your site’s ranking and sends a signal to the user that they can trust your site. If you don’t have a lot of experience diving into the backend of your website, you might consider consulting a web expert to secure your site. Now you have to use it in your content if you aren’t already. (Well, almost there.) Most SEO audits take place on desktop, but doing a few quick mobile checks can make the difference between ranking or not. Download the free Google Quality Rater Tool and get the kinds of insights on your content that actually improve your rankings. For competitive keywords, the small details often make the difference.

seo audit

Though taking these steps requires some careful foresight, their dividends will pay dividends down the road. While quick wins get you started, long-term strategies are what solidify your site’s authority and visibility over time. These foundational efforts build trust with both users and search engines. Site audit tools have the ability to identify all the 404s within your site.

seo audit

People will bail on your pages if they take too long to load, so you’ll want to optimize your site speed to give your audience a good experience. If you have a majority of short-tail keywords, which only contain one or two words, you’ll want to rethink your strategy. You can drive more valuable leads by using long-tail keywords for your campaign. The average web visitor can’t spot these off-page factors, and it’s difficult to identify them manually. Fortunately, at WebFX, we have a suite of services enabling off-page analysis and comparison.

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