Prior to starting with an SEO audit checklist, you need to set up analytics tools. When I was leading marketing for PlushCare, a telemedicine provider that was acquired for $450M, we did some crazy things in the name of search engine optimization (SEO). Google Search Console is one of the best free SEO tools for analytics.
What’s really interesting is how the marketing tone sometimes overshadowed the educational content – a big red flag for Google when it comes to financial advice. It currently ranks 9th for the keyword “how to manage stress”. The Google Search Quality Rater Tool has a detailed evaluation component of the report to get into specific issues that need fixing.
Before crawling a website, search engine crawlers will generally request the robots.txt file from a server. Once you‘ve addressed the three primary goals of a website audit, it’s time to loop in a developer or someone from your IT department for a technical evaluation. You could also hire an outside agency — just be sure to do your homework first. While high-quality, search-engine-optimized content is a great way to boost your traffic numbers, it’s what happens once those visitors are on your website that really counts. It’s also crucial to audit the content you‘re publishing to ensure it’s actually solving your visitors’ problems. Ultimately, fast-loading and optimized pages will lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions.
Key Components of an SEO Audit
It will then scan your entire website to collect the URLs of each page. The generator will then send a file directly to your email, which you can copy and upload to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. Copyscape is a free tool SEO Anomaly that can check for duplicate content. Enter your URL to see if a malicious website has copied your content or is pretending to be your brand. It also analyzes your website’s vitals, enabling you to identify areas for improvement. Looking to invest more in your SEO marketing strategy but don’t know where to start?
- Before diving into the technical audit, there are a number of manual checks I recommend performing on any site.
- Once it’s set up, you can upload any piece of content you’ve written and get an extremely detailed analysis.
- Keep in mind when we perform the SEO audits, we are often making iterative suggestions as we find the most problematic errors in our review.
- Or you can use this link to access a 14-day trial on a Semrush Pro subscription.
Looking for a Google SEO Checker? Here’s 15 to Check Out
In other words, an on-page SEO audit focuses on optimizing elements within your website that impact your site’s SERP rankings. Both metadata and structured data have become increasingly complex in SEO. Here we include 8 quick checks to ensure maximum visibility in all types of search results. One cool thing about this audit checklist is that you can perform it almost entirely 100% for free, or using free versions of SEO tools. This is important for SEO starting out on a budget, or small business owners who want to learn to audit a small site on their own. While GSC provides insights into your site’s performance on Google, it lacks certain functionalities.
A comprehensive enterprise SEO audit requires diving deep into on-site and off-site SEO factors, including technical performance, backlink profile, plus competitor performance. Screaming Frog’s core audit tool crawls websites, much like a spider. It takes snapshots of each page as it crawls, and then uses those snapshots to create a visual representation of a website. This representation includes a list of all broken links, in order of how many times they were found. It is also capable of generating a sitemap, finding duplicate content, and scanning for malware.
Finally, use information from the evaluation to better understand your audience and optimize your social media to engage them. You’ll then be able to update your social media strategy to further delight your audience, more effectively attracting them to your website. Outdated or irrelevant content can hurt conversions and hurt your SERPs ranking. Speaking of content, you’ll also need to analyze the content on your website. Make sure the content is helpful, informative, and up-to-date.