If you want to rank yourself out in the market, it is important for you to consider all the things that fall under the umbrella of site audit. The site audit or SEO audit involves the thorough checking of links, site architecture, page speed, site visibility, duplicate content issues, and much more which helps your site to outperform in all aspects. This is what SEO auditors do. They thoroughly inspect and fix all the issues that are limiting your website to perform at its best.
Even if you don’t want your site to be handled by strangers, you can optimize your site yourself. But for that, you have to be clear about what exactly an SEO audit is and how it is performed the right way. You can even employ the best SEO audit tools that will help streamline your process of SEO audit for websites.
Here is your guide to learning what is an SEO audit checklist and what are its types.
Let’s get started.
What is an SEO Audit?
SEO audit refers to the process of evaluating various elements of a website that impact the website’s performance in organic search. It surfaces out all the issues and negatively impacting factors that need to be addressed ASAP.
For example, if your website or an app is not performing well on mobile interface, the users will ultimately shift to other websites hence causing a high bouncing rate which would have a negative effect for our website’s ranking. In this, the SEO auditors make the application mobile friendly as most of the users use mobile instead of desktop.
It means SEO auditing helps you to stay ahead in Google search engines. In short, an SEO audit is an insight roadmap of websites’ pages, overall traffic, and all the factors that can help you enhance visibility and ROI.
What are the SEO Audit Types
Seo Content Audit
SEO content audit refers to the process of evaluating the content relevancy, accuracy, and recency that will help your content to rank. In addition, the SEO audit services also evaluate the quality of the content. Google ranks the content that fulfills the EEAT which means the content should speak of experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Following this strategy, you can enhance your opportunities for featured snipped or passage ranking.
SEO content audit also involves the updating of the content that has been outdated or no longer relevant with the content that is taking the most lead. It involves the thorough research of keywords to be inserted which helps the content rank in the Google searches.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO involves the optimization of all the factors that help the crawlers to index or rank your content in SERPs. It involves the SEO optimization of meta titles, meta descriptions, content, and image alt texts.
It also fixes all the mentioned things when they are not completed or missed out. In addition, it also involves internal linking of content on appropriate anchor texts.
Off-Page SEO
The process of Off-page SEO mostly fixes the quality of links leading towards the website. It fixes the broken links. It als fixes the quality of links from low-quality websites. By improving the quality of backlinks, the SEO auditor improves the visibility of websites in organic searches.
Technical SEO
The technical SEO audit primarily focuses on the site architecture information which means the site structure and navigational issues. It also fixes code glitches, prevents spam, and also helps to switch from HTTP to HTTPs and more. They also fix canonical tags and robots.txt tags.
The URL audits are also done under this category type where the SEO auditor assures the links are optimized and inserted with the target keyword.
It means this type of audit fixes the technical factors which fulfills the criteria of easy indexing by the search engine crawlers. Though it might be more complex than the other SEO types, it is important to take the lead in SERPs.
Local SEO audit
This type of audit helps you rank your website in local search by geotagging specific keywords. It helps your website to get ranked in your desired area. It is actually a mesh of all the mentioned above SEO strategies.
You can get all the SEO services done from a reputable SEO audit agency which would save you from all the technical hassles and would also help your site rank in the SERPs.
SEO Audit Checklist
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Identify Organic Traffic Drops And What Caused Them
Content is an ever-evolving thing and needs to be updated periodically. Similarly, the Google ranking factors and algorithms are also updated every day. It means if your content might have been ranked before, it might drop down because the Google SEO criteria have been updated and now you need to update those things to get ranked again.
To check which update has hit your previously ranked content, run the URL on Ahref Site Explorer and see if the traffic drop aligns with any recent update.
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Check For Any Duplicate Content
Check for any duplicated content, pages, or URLs because Google crawlers assume them as separate pages and it may affect the ranking of your potential pages. In most cases, it can even dilute equity and can have a negative impact on the site traffic.
The duplication might be caused by the CMS you are using for the website which you haven’t generated manually in the search console.
Fix those duplicated pages and content that are consuming the resource and limiting the site to get the traffic it deserves.
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Find and Diagnose Indexability Issues
To be ranked in Google searches, the first step is to get indexed which means you have to get in the list of Google datapages which is a repository of millions of pages. You can manually do that by individually requesting all the non-indexed links to the Google Search Console to index them.
However, google won’t index those pages that have meta robot tags with them. If you want to get them ranked, you have to remove the meta robot tag from them and give that link to the console so that crawlers can read it.
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Check your Site’s Mobile Responsiveness
Mobile optimization has been the Google ranking factor since the year 2019, so it’s necessary to ensure your site or an app’s mobile interface and responsiveness is up to the mark. To fix it manually, check on the Google Search Console which links are limiting the mobile useability of your site or application.
Also, set the mobile-friendly layout of your website. Compress the size of images and the content length to make sure they are readable on mobile screens.
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Delete The Spamy Or Zombie Links Or Pages
There are many links or pages that Google has ranked or indexed against your websites. These pages are of no use and are usually spammy. So, to enhance the speed of your website and to enhance its traffic, remove and delete all the spammy links and pages. By deleting these pages, your whole SEO process becomes easier because it removes all the duplicates, boilerplate content, thin content, and category and tag pages.
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Analyze the Quality of Backlinks and Fix Broken Ones
Backlinks play a significant role in website traffic. Having broken and low-quality backlinks negatively impacts the overall performance and ranking capability of your website. Research states that good-quality backlinks play a more important role than any other factor.
You can enter your domain name into whatever tool you want for backlink analysis. Check the referring domains and their domain authority to check whether that link is from a high-quality website or not.
If you notice the links from any shady site, just disallow them but it might be one factor that might be limiting your site from getting ranked.
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Spy on your competitors
To get a lead from the competitors, keeping them on watch is always the best strategy. Target all the keywords that their pages are getting ranked on. You can use Semrush for that. It will also help you evaluate what your site is missing and what factors you have already on your site and they just need a little more kick.
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Fix Thin Content
Google doesn’t rank pages that have thin content. Always remember that. For example, if your blog page has less than 300 words and is covering some complex topic, google crawler would consider it thin content and wouldn’t index it likewise.
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Meta Tags Optimization
Meta tags include your page meta title and meta descriptions. Make sure they are covering the target keyword and their character content does not exceed the recommended one. The SEO title should not exceed 60 characters while the meta description should not exceed 160 characters. It is best to use the same keyword for both the meta tags for a single page. However, you can also use the variations of it but make sure the variation has enough volume.
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Run Pagespeed Analytics
Page speed is very important. To make sure, run Google Speed Analytics to check your website’s loading and running speed. Mostly the speed of your site is impacted by the image sizes or the CSS or JavaScript in the first-paint elements.
Compress the large image sizes and also eliminate CSS or JavaScript to increase the site’s loading time.
What Is A Good Seo Score?
A good SEO score ranges between 80-100. Sites whose site score falls within this score range mean their UX, mobile usability, and content meet the quality standards. A score below 70 is also acceptable.
Seo Audit Tools List
For a complete SEO audit, you must know the best SEO audit tools for different SEO audit processes and strategy implementation.
- Semrush
- Moz
- Ahrefs
- Screaming Frog
- Google Search Console
- Google PageSpeed Insight
- Google Analytics and more.
Conclusion
SEO audit is a complete process that involves the thorough checking of all the website elements and factors in depth. If you don’t know how to handle the SEO audit for a website, you can even employ an SEO audit agency. They will not only provide a complete check. Instead, they will fix all the issues that are hindering your site from ranking in SERPs or organic searches. Rightly execute a link-building strategy for your website and there you go you will see your traffic increasing in numbers within days.
