An SEO audit is a great way to ensure that your website is optimized for search engines. Below you'll find a list of basic and advanced checks to conduct during an audit.
1. Technical Audit
Once you’ve finished with content for your website there’s still some technical aspects to consider:
- Choose a Web Host with Good Uptime and Speed
If your website has poor speeds and uptime, your site will likely be viewed as unprofessional and unreliable by search engines. High quality hosting will help ensure these issues aren’t occurring.
- Crawlability
Crawlability refers to how easily search engine bots can access your website. If it is difficult for them to crawl through your website, then they won’t be able to see all of its contents and might end up ranking fewer pages than they would otherwise have done if they could easily access them all at once.
To prevent this from happening, you should use the robots meta tags on each page so that search engine bots know which pages are important enough for them not only to crawl but also index in their results pages when someone searches for something relevant within those content areas (such as “SEO Audit Checklist" or “how do i use google analytics").
2. On-Page Audit
- Meta tags - Are your meta tags providing the most relevant information to the search engines? Are they clear and concise?
- Content mapping - How is your content organized? Do you have a logical flow of topics, or are some pages scattered all over the place with no justification for their existence?
- Internal links - Is it easy for visitors to navigate through your site by using internal links on each page of content, or do you have an enormous amount of dead ends that make it difficult for them to find what they're looking for?
- Keyword usage and adjustment - The keywords you use should be relevant to all pages across your website, but also pay attention to how many times you use them in each page and whether there's any overlap between pages (a sign that this may be too much).
3. Off-Page Audit
When it comes to off-page SEO, you need to know how your site is perceived by the search engines. You’ll want to:
- Check the number of quality links pointing to each page on your website using Ahrefs, Majestic or Moz Open Site Explorer.
- Find broken links that may be stopping people from reaching your content and correct them.
- Start prospecting for new high-quality link opportunities in places like blog comments, guest articles and press releases.
SEO audit is a complex process that requires experience, knowledge and know-how. Fortunately for you, we’ve put together this checklist so you can easily run through the most important steps in this process. If you want to get started today, contact us to see how we can help with your website's SEO!