How to Do an SEO Audit - Ultimate Site Audit Checklist

How to Do an SEO Audit

As SEOs, your priority is to rank your website (or your client’s website) on top of organic search for its target keywords. But to get there, you need to know how your website is currently performing.

This is where the SEO site audit process comes in.

It allows you to effectively break down your website into its core SEO foundations and identify which among them needs fixing. If done correctly, you should eventually see your website move up the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

The biggest obstacle you must overcome now is organizing your audit process to help you effectively analyze the most important ranking factors to generate the fastest SEO results.

This post is an SEO audit checklist that breaks down four critical SEO areas in detail. We’ll then discuss how to audit your website for these areas and fix any issues you find there.

Technical SEO

In layman’s terms, technical SEO is all about making your website easier to access by search spiders.

There are many factors under technical SEO that you can work on. Here are the most important ones you need to look for when performing a technical SEO audit:

#1. Crawlability and Indexability

Your goal under technical SEO is to optimize your site for crawling and indexing. However, just because search spiders can crawl your website doesn’t mean they can index your site on search results. At the same time, it doesn’t mean you should get the spiders to index them.

For example, you may have pages on your site, i.e., Terms and Conditions, Privacy Policy, that you don’t want Google or other search engines to show on search results.

Aside from the fact that they don’t add value to search engine users, they also waste your crawl budget. It refers to the number of pages Google can crawl on your site over a given period. Once the budget runs out and your site still has lots of pages to crawl, the search engine will crawl them once your crawl budget is replenished.

In this case, you won’t be able to get search spiders to crawl all pages, especially the most important ones. This results in a longer wait before search spiders can crawl and index your new pages.

To avoid this from happening, you want search engines to crawl your most important pages first. Here’s a few things you should do as part of your audit process to improve technical SEO performance of your website:

#1A - Create an XML Sitemap

A sitemap is an extensible markup language (XML) file containing all the important pages on your site. With a sitemap, search spiders don’t have to look far and wide for pages on your site that they need to crawl and index. A quick look at your sitemap would give them all the list of pages they need to process and index on SERPs.

Most Content Management Systems have built-in sitemaps that you can submit on Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster. Once uploaded, the search spiders will do their job crawling your site for pages to index.

#1B - Identify and Get Rid of Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is pages in your site with the same content but has different separate URLs. These create an index bloat on your site and deplete your crawl budget, which prevents your site from being crawled properly.

Below are the causes for the creation of duplicate content:

To find if your site has duplicate content, you can use Google search operators. If your site serves non-WWW URLs, search for the term below on Google:

site:yourdomain.com inurl:www

The search operator will find if Google indexed WWW URLs of your site. If the search results return lots of pages, you have a duplicate content issue.

Depending on the duplicate content issue, each one requires a different solution. Regarding WWW URLs, you must redirect them to their non-WWW versions by configuring your .htaccess file. Insert these lines of code in the file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1

#1C - Create and Set Up Your Robots.txt

This file on your site instructs search spiders which files and folders to crawl and/or index. Robots.txt helps manage your crawl budget by preventing spiders from crawling unnecessary pages and directories on your site. As a result, spiders can prioritize reading and indexing the more important pages on your site.

For example, you can set up your robots.txt to prevent search spiders from crawling your site’s tags and categories. If your site doesn’t have robots.txt yet, create one and include these in the file:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /category/

#2 - Increase Site Speed

The faster your site loads, the better experience you provide users.

This is the principle that governs site speed as a ranking factor since 2018.

More recently, Google rolled out the Page Experience Update that prioritizes websites that create optimal browsing experiences for users. The search engine determines this using the Core Web Vitals score of your site pages.

Core Web Vitals takes into consideration the following metrics aside from site speed:

You can compute the Core Web Vitals score of each URL on your site using Google PageSpeed Insights.

On the results page, you will see the exact issues of the page and suggestions on how you can fix them.

#3 - Organize Site Structure

Site structure refers to the organization of pages in your site into silos and clusters.

You can improve your site structure by grouping pages together that share the same topic to form a silo. Under silos, you can create sub-silos and expand the topic even further if necessary.

Source: MarketMuse

The goal is to make browsing your site pages and finding the information they’re looking for much easier. Since pages with similar topics are grouped together, users are just one to two clicks away from getting to the page they need to be at.

At the same time, you enable spiders to better understand the relationships of pages on your site. This can help increase your site’s relevance to a topic, which influences the SERP rankings of your pages.

The approach to site structure depends on the kind of site you’re running. For blogs and publication sites, the site structure process is simpler. All you must do is categorize the posts according to topic and interlink the most relevant pages together.

#4 - Be Mindful of Other Advanced Technical SEO Factors

Below are advanced technical SEO factors that aren’t as crucial as the ones above. Nonetheless, they can help move the needle and improve your site’s SEO performance down the line.

On-Page SEO

Once you have the technical SEO down pat, it’s time to move on to on-page SEO. In this part, we want to make sure to optimize your pages for their respective target keywords. And to do this, you must include the keyword on-page elements that bear the most weight as a ranking factor.

Below are the elements where including your keyword is a must:

#5 - Include Keyword in Page Title

The page title tells users and search engines what the topic of the page is. It is wrapped in the title tag and is the first thing users see on search results about a page.

As a result, it’s not simply about including the page’s keyword here. You also need to write a title that users would want to click on when they see your page on SERPs.

#6 - Include Keyword in Heading

You also need to mention the keyword in the page’s heading, in particular its H1 tag which is a huge ranking factor.

#7 - Include Keyword in URL

The URL rounds out the “three kings of on-page SEO,” with the page title and the H1 tag being the first two.

#8 - Optimize Images

Mention the keyword on the alt text of images, but only do so when applicable. You don’t want to include the keyword on all images as it may appear spammy in the eyes of Google.

#9 - Build Internal Links

Internal links are links from pages in your site that point to other pages within your site. These links are responsible for helping you build your site structure, particularly your content silos.

Through internal links, you should be able to trace pages that don’t have internal links. Also referred to as orphaned pages, these don’t rank high or are currently not ranking at all on Google as a result. From here, you need to find related pages that could link out to your orphaned pages.

Content

Unlike on-page SEO, content audit pertains to analyzing the usefulness of a site.

Below are the factors you need to review in your content audit:

#10 - Make Sure the Content Satisfies the Page’s Search Intent

You can categorize keywords into these three groups:

#11 - Improve the Content’s Readability

The higher the readability score of your content, the easier it will be for readers to understand it.

#12 - Fix Thin Content

Thin content refers to pages that don’t provide any value to readers.

#13 - Eliminate Duplicate Content

If you used the same chunk of text on different pages of your site, Google could flag those pages as duplicate content.

#14 - Observe E-A-T at All Times

E-A-T first appeared in Google’s 168-page Search Quality Raters Guidelines document.

#15 - Keyword Cannibalization

As much as possible, you only want a single page to target a unique keyword. However, it’s possible that another page ranks for the same keyword and unintentionally ranks higher than the intended page.

Off-Page

Off-page SEO, most commonly known as link building, refers to your link profile. The goal is to get backlinks from authoritative pages relevant to your niche.

#16 - Identify Top Linked Pages

Pages on your site with the highest domain links have content that has value to your audience.

#17 - Keep a Healthy Balance Between Nofollow and Dofollow Links

Ideally, you want to get as many dofollow backlinks from high-quality websites.

#18 - Anchor Text

There are different types of anchor text you can use to link back to your site:

#19 - Identify Low-Quality Backlinks

As mentioned earlier, spammy backlinks may affect your search rankings.

#20 - Find Broken Links and Recover Them

A drop in rankings may also coincide with losing some of your backlinks.

Conclusion

There’s a lot that goes into ranking your websites on top of search engines, and an SEO audit plays a crucial role in it. By understanding how your site is currently performing and how you can improve it, you can constantly scale your website’s SEO success and reach the very top of search results.