How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit in 14 Steps

Now, this may lead you to think that an SEO audit is a one-time thing where, once you’ve completed the most important fixes, you can simply sit back and watch the money roll in. For every search query, there are literally HUNDREDS of signals that determine where your site will rank. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures interactivity; aim for an INP of less than 200 milliseconds. This can be achieved by reducing the impact of third-party code, minimizing JavaScript execution time, and more. Use Google Search Console’s Page Index Coverage report to see which pages are not being indexed and why. The second step is to search for your brand name on Google and review the results.

Are you defining how your web pages are crawled and indexed by search engines?

seo audit

We’ll discuss a few of these areas in more detail throughout this guide. But performing a site crawl is a quick way to assess lots of aspects at once. Running a website crawl is the most efficient way to gather lots of useful data about every page of your website. We are a digital marketing agency that works with the fudamental goal of increasing profitability and profit to our clients’ investment in an ethical and conscious way. Conduct thorough assessments of both on-page and off-page factors, making note of potential improvements. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses — and careers.

Off-Page Factors

If you’re looking for professional help, consider resources available through platforms like Shopify Academy to further enhance your skills. Delve into your analytics to gather data on user behavior, traffic sources, and conversion rates. SEO tools and AI are increasingly helpful, but they’re still SEO Anomaly just tools. Ultimately, your own human judgment, experience, and common sense remain the most critical factors in effective SEO. Meanwhile, fundamental aspects of SEO, such as strategic keyword targeting or on-page optimization, are completely missing since no tool can fully capture these nuances. A clear keyword map ensures every page has a defined role, which makes your entire SEO strategy more effective.

seo audit

A sitemap is a structured list of a website’s pages and content hierarchy for easy navigation. Sitemaps helps search engines understand your website’s structure. However, it should not contain broken links, redirected pages, or non-canonical URLs. Inspect your sitemap in Google Search Console to make sure it’s correctly configured and free of errors. A well-structured sitemap improves indexing efficiency and make sure all important pages are discoverable.

A social audit investigates your presence on social media platforms. It looks at how many people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest share, comment, and like your content. This audit also checks your website for social sharing buttons, which can encourage users to share your site. A few recommendations for increasing your site’s speed include compressing the images on your website, optimizing your HTML structure, and modifying your server configuration.

That means you should look up phrases that include your brand name followed by your product or services. There are several files on your server — like .htaccess, robots.txt and sitemap.xml to name a few — that dictate how search engines access and index your content. Optimizing these files, so they are configured appropriately, can have a huge impact on your rankings (which is why we prioritize them as a part of our technical SEO audit services). It helps you find technical issues, track keyword rankings, and improve your content strategy. Understand your competitors and monitor your SEO progress with custom reports. Overusing exact match keywords or a lack of diversity in anchor text can trigger red flags for search engines and negatively affect your search rankings.

seo audit

It’ll give you insights on aspects of your site like title tags, meta descriptions, and images. And it’ll help you identify broken links, understand your website’s architecture at a deep level, and much more. Another takeaway is that SEO audits have become more efficient and insightful with AI and automation. What used to take days of manual checking can now be streamlined – from crawling millions of pages quickly to using AI to analyze patterns in your data. Embracing these tools means you can conduct “free SEO audits” on the fly, anytime, with minimal effort – allowing you to focus more on strategy and less on grunt work.

seo audit

An SEO audit is the process of analyzing a website to identify issues that affect its organic visibility in search engines like Google. All of these factors are compiled and organized into an audit document for consumption by the business owner or marketing manager. SEO audits can just be a list of issues but often includes a proposal from the SEO auditor to complete the work.

  • Look at the “Organic Search” data, which includes users, sessions, views, and more information.
  • 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.
  • Once, my client in the home care industry was hit with a content penalty back in 2019.
  • From an SEO perspective, it is really bad to have various conflicting topics that have nothing to do with the website’s main idea.
  • Together, these determine how enjoyable users find your site.

If you have existing keyword targets, we can analyze your choices and your performance for each of them here; otherwise, we can help you generate a vision for the future. Trusted by over 5,000 clients and SEO agencies, our backlink-focused SEO services are the best in the business. We can vary how aggressive we build links based on any budget and any scale. You receive regular backlink reports included in your standard monthly SEO work reports. But more than just looking at indexing, our SEO audit will help explain why you are not ranking well compared to the competition.

The paid version, known as the ‘Licensed’ version, is priced at £149.00 per year. “SEO Site Checkup will assign your site an overall letter grade and identify the most important fixes to help you improve.” The more profitable your project is, the more expensive each error costs. Google Search Console and Google Analytics collects valuable data about your website. You can upgrade or downgrade your plan at any time (including during the trial) within the ‘My Account’ area of your account.