When performing an SEO audit, the list of tasks and to-do’s seem to be dynamic and ever-growing! It’s important to stay organized to ensure that you are doing it properly and adhering to best practices, but it can be mind-boggling if you don’t have a good place to start.
This off-page and on-page SEO audit checklist will simplify all the tasks in one place. So, keep this handy for reference to help you get everything done that’s needed for a successful audit.
SEO Audit Defined
Before we go into the process, let’s first take a look at what an audit is and why it is necessary.
An SEO audit is simply the process of identifying issues that could prevent your website from getting higher rankings on Google and other search issues. And if these issues are not resolved, your site will be missing out on organic traffic and it will hinder you from standing up against your competitors.
The Tools You Need
While there are a lot of tools that can help you, you just need these top tools to successfully perform an audit and make the entire process more effective:
- Ahrefs
- Alexa
- Google Analytics
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Google Search Console
- Google Structured Data Testing Tool
- Moz
- Screaming Frog
- SEMRush
The Process
An SEO analysis or audit consists of two parts – using tools to find issues on the website and implementing fixes. On average, the process takes between two to six weeks, depending on the size of the website.
Crawl Your Website. Your first step in an SEO audit should be crawling your website. Evaluate how your website is currently performing and detect site issues using the right tool.
Then after knowing such issues, prioritize which of them to fix first. You want to make sure that your website’s top pages are easily accessible by search engines.
Start With the Basics. It’s always good to start with the basics, and these include understanding your competitors, checking for duplicate versions of your site, and checking your site’s indexed URLs.
It is also important to analyze your site’s speed, check for mobile-friendliness issues, and audit your on-page SEO. The latter relates to H tags, image alt tags, internal linking, meta descriptions, optimized content, and title tags.
Identify simple issues and make a quick fix. Often there are simple issues that could be easily fixed. These include cleaning up your sitemap, checking for toxic links, checking your redirects, and fixing broken internal links.
These issues can create a poor user experience, lose a lot of potential traffic, and make the visitor leave your website and go to your competitor instead. Be sure to prevent these things from happening.
Include content checks. It is likewise imperative to understand and assess your website’s content and make it a part of your SEO initial analysis report. Compare your content to top-ranking pages, find & fix duplicate content, fix issues with orphan pages, and identify thin content pages.
Content remains king, and with great content, the higher chances of ranking your site on the search engines.
Conclusion
Doing an SEO audit remains to be a crucial part of your SEO strategy. It will help you identify the issues or problems preventing your website from ranking higher on Google and at the same time, it will provide opportunities for improving your current SEO strategy. Just remember this checklist, and you are set to boost your search traffic!