Organic SEO offers trust and greater visibility at a lesser cost, but how do we ensure that it drives results? Just be thorough with your SEO audit and excel on as many parameters as possible! SEO audit is a detailed analysis of your website’s performance on various SEO metrics. It tells you where you need to improvise to enhance lead retention.
However, audits are challenging. Hence, we have compiled a detailed SEO audit checklist. If you want to maximize efficiency, go through our blog.
Table of Contents
What Are The Important SEO Audit Steps For Website?
Are you wondering what steps the SEO audit comprises? We have compiled a detailed list of SEO audit parameters that matter.
Let’s go through different parameters that are counted in Website SEO Audit List.
1. Ensure Your Website Is Mobile-friendly
A mobile-friendly website means that the said website is viewable and also easy to navigate across different mobile devices. People tend to use mobiles more frequently while searching for information, so Google crawlers rank websites based on mobile compatibility.
- Install the Google developer extension and generate a report for any website you visit, whether your own or your competitor’s.
- Use this tool to list all indicators that need attention.
- Based on competitor analysis, prioritize indicators that you will work on.
2. Only One Version of your Web page should be Indexed
Your website has multiple versions from a search engine’s perspective. Every time you update your website layout, modify the URL, or use responsive elements that adjust according to the size of different devices, multiple versions come into existence.
- Link search console with only one domain.
- Index pages after every update, redirect, or publish.
- Use 301 redirects for canonical pages.
3. Page Speed Matters for SEO Audit
Google algorithms prioritize page speed, which also impacts user engagement. If the page speed is low, users will bounce off. Let’s look at 7 tips that allow you to keep Page Speed in check.
- Use the Google developer tool to see the page speed and indicators that affect it.
- Use lighter elements.
- Avoid cheap website hosting services and instead use efficient ones.
- Reduce redirect requests.
- Cache pages in a limited manner – it creates multiple site versions but aids your page speed.
- Use an asynchronous loading pattern for website elements. This means that they don’t load at the same time, thus increasing strain on website servers.
- Your page speed has to be good on all devices.
4. Delete Irrelevant Pages
Having many pages gives you an upper hand, but not if the pages are repetitive or pointless. So get rid of them! You can either delete or redirect pages. Redirect pages that are pointless but have huge traffic and DR, so that its authority can be passed onto other pages. Delete pages if they perform poorly and are also irrelevant Here are pages to evaluate if you want to keep your website clean.
- Archives.
- Category pages.
- Old press releases.
- Irrelevant or repetitive blogs.
5. Fix Page Indexing Issues
Pages that are not indexed are at a competitive disadvantage, as they lower their visibility. Page indexing is paramount if you want to drive leads from your website! There are two ways of finding page indexing issues. Let’s have a look at both.
- Method 1: Open Google Search Console and view the “Index Coverage” report.
- Method 2: You can also use the screaming frog tool. Open the “Overview” menu and navigate to the “SEO Elements” section before clicking on “Internal.”
How to Fix Indexing Issues?
- Re-submit relevant pages for indexing.
- Optimize meta tags and keywords with careful consideration for relevancy.
- Enhance content depth, keeping user intent in mind.
- Don’t violate guidelines, and ensure your pages are listed on the XML sitemap.
6. Lead Conversion SEO Audit
If you take SEO audit seriously, you can gain more traffic from organic sources and improve user retention. The objective of a lead conversion audit is to know the sources of organic traffic, their behavior and retention time, which gives you the scope to optimize pages.
- Open Google Analytics.
- Go to the “Acquisition” tab, click on the “All Traffic” section, and select the “Channels” option.
- Check results in the “organic search” row.
A. Align pages with customer needs: Classify your existing web pages and topical keywords into 3 categories based on different stages of the Customer Journey, and publish or tweak pages accordingly.
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Buying
B. While optimizing pages, consider these parameters:
- What offers do I have in my content pipeline to publish landing pages for?
- Do my landing pages & CTA forms align with users of all stages? How much variation is needed?
- Which offerings should I utilize landing pages for, and which ones need CTA forms?
- Should I do A/B testing via Google Analytics to understand what ads are more effective in terms of placement/texts/other factors?
Reach out to your local digital marketing guru and know more!
7. Content SEO Audit
Before publishing content, review it multiple times to ensure quality, SEO compliance, and accuracy!
- Avoid Keyword Cannibalization: This happens when multiple pages on your website target similar primary keywords with the same intent, such as “best doctors worldwide” and “best doctors globally.” One of your pages will not let the other rank.
- Always review content based on these parameters: When you publish content, ensure that your content is original (Grammarly tool), readable (Hemmingway tool), and appealing! Also ensure that you organize your content into multiple H2s and H3s so that everything is organized and easier to interpret, and don’t forget to add alt-text phrases to images.
8. Backlink Analysis SEO Audit
While numerous backlinks are good, they can still be toxic if received from spammy sites; they result in your website getting penalized. For your ease, we have listed the toxic referring domains below. These are the spammy backlinks that you need to get rid of.
- If they have content in a different language that doesn’t serve your targetted audience.
- If they have way too many pop-up ads.
- If they are part of a PBN (private blog network), it means that they are an empty site that merely passes links to other sites.
- Or if their services don’t relate to yours.
How to remove toxic backlinks?
- Google Search Console will show you all the referring domains.
- Just identify suspicious ones and remove them using the “disavow” tool.
9. Fix Broken Page Links
Broken links are dead links that lead to nothing. They are generated when the page URL is changed or deleted without redirects or if you use images/icons as hyperlinks, and if the image becomes broken then the link on it is rendered broken as well.
Step 1 – Finding Broken Pages:
- Open Google Search Console and head over to the “Index” tab.
- Then click on the “Coverage” Option.
- View the “Index Report.”
- Look at all the pages with 404s; they need deletion.
Step 2 – Locating Pages that contain these broken links:
- Even if you delete broken links, you will still have web pages that passed links to them, so those pages need to be edited.
- Open Semrush and click the “issues” tab.
- Type “broken” in the search bar
- You will find broken links – but you will also find pages that link to them.
10. Content Gap
Simply put, you have to optimize your pages for those keywords/insights that aren’t included in your website yet. But you also have to consider the scope, which means assessing those parameters on which your competitors lag.
- Up-to-date information.
- Depth & relevance.
- Structure & Format.
- Credibility factors (expertise, experience, service/product metrics).
- You can either publish new pages to target such gaps or modify existing ones.
Tools you can use to your advantage:
- Ahrefs/MozBar/SemRush: These tools help you find keywords where your competitors rank but which your website has yet to utilize.
- Google Ad Keywords: Find the keywords on which your competitors are performing well.
11. Website Architecture
This audit involves keeping your site well-organized. All pages on your website should be within 3 clicks so that Google crawl bots can effectively scan and index them. Here’s how you can organize pages.
- Top: Your home page is the most important page; it would be the first page, passing juice to broader category pages – such as the “blogs” section, “news” page, and more!
- Second: Your category pages will be next. They will lead to more specific pages, such as all the articles (within the “blogs” section) and press releases (within the “news” section).
12. Important Layout Schemas
Schemas are coded formats that present information to the users and search engines in a slightly different way which stands out. They help google crawl bots index your pages, and sometimes these pages are also pulled in the “featured snippets” of Google.
- FAQ schema
- Video schema markup
- Breadcrumb
- Review & rating schema
- Product schema
A seasoned digital marketer will help you implement everything with ease!
13. For Multi-lingual sites – Hreflang Issue
This attribute conveys the region and language that your page targets. Thus, users in different places are served a different version of your site based on their language preferences.
Ahref gives you a comprehensive view of issues related to hreflang. On ahrefs, go to the “international SEO” section. You will see a thematic report in the “Site Audit” section.
14. Data Privacy SEO Audit
Your website must be a safe space for visitors. Privacy-compatible pages also tend to have higher website authority. This especially matters for e-commerce sites and digital service providers.
- Identify the laws your website qualifies for and collect user information accordingly.
- Document all the cookies installed on your website, and if possible, give users the option to accept or reject cookies.
- Publish a “Privacy Policy” page mentioning the use of cookies just as a precautionary measure.
- Also, an SSL certificate must be obtained to enable an encrypted connection.
15. Auditing User Journey
Lay down all the touch points where a customer will leave, purchase, or get deviated, and track the user journey with tools like “Full Session.”
“Full Session” equips you with the following insights:
- Session recordings
- Heatmaps
- Customer feedback
- Statistical insights include conversion metrics, abandonment rates, and other behavioral analyses.
Conclusion
As our research shows, managing websites isn’t easy. They are like intricate frames composed of various aspects. Hence, monitoring every minor detail is crucial so that it doesn’t nullify years of SEO efforts! Through this blog, we aim to educate users about SEO audits so that they can scale their businesses digitally.
