How to Do a Website Audit in 5 Steps + Checklist

Replace SE Ranking branding with your own logo and company name. Next, click the “Formatting” section to create a layout for your report. One of the standout features SE Ranking’s Website Audit tool offers is its ability to group web assets. Once SE Ranking crawls all the pages (which can take up to 10 minutes), it provides an illustrated overview.

While this doesn’t represent a complete link audit, we recommend a few quick link checks to make sure you aren’t leaving rankings behind. Content isn’t often considered “technical” SEO, but many technical issues with the content itself can impact indexing and rankings. Beyond the quality of the content itself, these technical issues need to be checked and addressed. With that in mind, your first step should be to ensure that your business has an active Bing Places profile. If search engines can’t crawl your website properly, they can’t index your content, and you won’t get the rankings and traffic you aim to achieve with SEO. They help Google determine the content of the page it’s crawling, and are two of the bigger factors Google takes into account when determining the order in which to rank pages.

  • Like other services, you can expedite SEO audits — but it’ll cost you.
  • SEOs and webmasters use audits to get a clear picture of a website and uncover the most important improvement points, helping them develop their SEO strategy and prioritize tasks.
  • Before we delve into the actual checklist, let’s talk about the SEO audit tools you’re going to need to successfully conduct it.
  • We’ll also share key metrics to their link portfolio and organic search terms they’re outranking you for.
  • A love for business and competition is what fuels Robb to create dynamic marketing plans to help his clients grow exponentially.
  • Best for getting customized, real-time alerts of website changes and issues.

If you have the same issue and want to get rid of the warning, you can just add the following line to your robots.txt file to stop crawlers from accessing that page. The nofollow page was created by Cloudflare’s email address protection. All the H1 problems picked up by our audit were related to this issue, so this didn’t take too much time to fix. In our case, this returned 1,128 images which were missing alt text. This will bring up a spreadsheet with all images currently contained in the uploads folder of your site, and will also let you know which posts they are attached to. If you don’t want to manually go into each post and edit, you’ll need WP Sheet Editor’s media add on (or an equivalent alternative).

seo audit

Need more sales from your digital marketing?

This will also highlight low CTR pages — ranking well but failing to attract searchers. Then, check the Page Indexing Report for crawl errors, warnings, or blocked pages and review the Core Web Vitals Report to find pages failing on speed or usability metrics. Remember that you don’t have to fix everything, but prioritize the most important issues you feel will have the most impact.

Just watch for patterns that suggest manipulative link building or potential spam that could trigger a Google penalty. A healthy profile should have mostly branded and generic anchors, which shows that the links have been acquired naturally. If you see an excessive number of keyword-rich anchors, that’s a red flag that could trigger Google penalties.

seo audit

Stay updated with the latest search best practices

So check that you’re not making the mistake of targeting the wrong keywords with your web pages, starting with the most important ones first. Learn more in our full guide to finding and fixing broken links (and backlinks). The tasks included in an enterprise SEO audit depend on the scope of the audit itself and the business, and consider any existing SEO strategy. Unlock lifetime access to our battle-tested SEO resources, including real-world audits, expert courses, and exclusive tools.

A comprehensive website audit can boost site performance, improve SEO, and enhance online visibility. That’s why we use Copyscape  and Originality.ai as part of our SEO audit services; it’s a quick and easy way to detect potential plagiarism and duplication issues on your website. SurferSEO is a tool that helps us with many aspects of content analysis and strategic planning.

seo audit

Navigate to the Search Results Report and select SEO Anomaly a period from the dropdown menu. If this is unusually high, your website may have duplicate or similar pages. Duplicate content harms your SEO because Google can’t determine which page should rank higher in search results. If you have a blog with 300 articles but see 1,000 indexable URLs, Google may have indexed multiple article versions. Ultimately, we furnish you with the capacity to improve your ranking, attract an influx of visitors and drive more sales. Additionally, we can use this tool for keyword research and analysis, backlink analysis, and competitive research in your SEO audit.

With everything in one place, it’s also easier to spot patterns and draw connections. Like how ranking improvements might correlate with new backlinks. Or how technical issues could be holding your keyword performance back. SEO audits, whether completed in-house or externally with an agency, are often worth it.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *