12-Step Technical SEO Audit Checklist + Free Template
A search engine optimization audit (SEO Audit) will help you identify problematic areas that need improvement with an action plan to correct them. It’s also a great way to keep your website up-to-date with the latest developments in search marketing and on top of the competition. Next, I manually analyzed the search results for those keywords, carefully reviewing the content of top-ranking pages. I compared their content against ours, taking detailed notes on differences in structure, depth, and relevance.
- We tailor all our services, from SEO audits to SEO strategies, to every client’s company, products, and industry.
- Each issue is properly categorized, shows its importance and tells you how many pages are affected by it.
- A content audit examines your website’s content, which can range from service pages to blog posts.
- Although you may advise search engines on how to crawl your site, it is easy to make errors.
- To improve this, ensure images and embedded videos have dimensions, and avoid inserting new content above existing content unless in response to a user’s action.
Review Content Quality
This lets you pull all your SEO, PPC, and marketing data into one clean, interactive dashboard. Google Looker Studio is a free tool that helps you create SEO dashboards that are visually appealing and customizable. You can waste hours each month collecting data from various platforms.
Fixing broken links is important because they negatively impact user experience, leading to frustration and higher bounce rates. They harm SEO, as search engines view broken links as a sign of neglect or poor site quality. Broken links prevent search engines from properly crawling and indexing your site, which reduces its visibility in search results.
Add the domain link and a set of specific URLs you want to crawl. If your site has been penalized, you will see a corresponding notice in Google Search Console. Make sure to address the warning before you proceed further with an SEO audit checklist.
Initially, after running the audit, you will be directed to the “Overview” page. This will give you a top-level view of what the tool has found, including the number of indexable vs. non-indexable pages, top issues, and an overall website health score out of 100. First, to run an audit with Site Audit, you will need to ensure your website is connected to your Ahrefs account as a project.
Upon auditing your site, check to make sure your site is encrypted with HTTPS. As long as you have that designation, your site will be secure for your audience, and Google will allow your site to rank. One of the easiest ways to make your site mobile-friendly is by using a responsive design. A responsive design ensures that your website adapts to whatever device a user is using.
Since Google prioritizes spotless UX, the algorithms will consider your site more trustworthy as well. The most frequent cases include checking a website before launch, optimizing ongoing processes, handling site migrations, or resolving Google sanctions. The 24/7 Monitoring is essential (and free with all plans) if you’re an entrepreneur or a search marketer that wants to stay on top of site health.
Technical SEO Audit Services for Websites Large and Small
Generally speaking, to perform and SEO audit, you need a good checklist and proper SEO tools. That means maximizing your visibility in the search results of Google and other search engines is essential. Use “red shoes” or variations of this keyword in the anchor text of any internal links pointing to that page. While not directly influencing rankings, meta descriptions remain an important part of SEO. Sometimes there are valid reasons for allowing a page to return a SEO Anomaly 404 status.
But it turns out that most of these were due to missing alt text (ergo zero anchor text) on images. I covered the importance of internal anchor text in the section on fixing issues with alt text. If there’s not too many, you’re probably best just to run through them one at a time and update them.