Optimizing your website for search engines is a long process. In this process, SEO audit is a must-do. Even if your website is doing well, an audit helps you identify the room for improvement and get more visitors.
A complete audit is an expert’s thing. But if you have enough time to invest, we suggest performing a moderate audit once in two months to find out and fix the fundamental issues. To help you with this, we’ve designed this SEO audit checklist you can use to check and fix the common and important factors regarding your website’s search engine presence.
Without further discussion, let’s know what’s inside the checklist.
SEO Audit Checklist for All
Check Your Content
You must check your website content to ensure your website pages are keyword-optimized. Make sure you’ve used the main keyword around 6-8 times per 1000 words. Put them as naturally as possible. Also, check if the long-tail keywords are carefully placed or not.
Your article structure and writing quality are related to SEO. Don’t use too long paragraphs. A proper mix of short and long paragraphs is expected. Use bullet points, tables, graphs, etc. where necessary.
Write the article in a way that you’re talking to someone who doesn’t understand anything on the topic. Link external or internal resources when needed.
Sign Up for Google Search Console
Google Search Console is Google’s free tool that helps you get a lot of insights about your site. It comes with many small tools that you’ll need later in the audit process.
Some of the most important insights are crawling errors, visibility status, site speed, indexing status, etc.
Fix Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization is the situation where you optimize more than one page for the same keyword.
In such a situation, search engines get confused as you ask them to rank multiple pages from the same website for a single keyword. This confusion results in your loss.
If you manage the content of the site, you must know the pages with similar keywords. Keep one and delete the rest. Or you can optimize them for a different keyword.
Improve Content
Keeping your content improved and updated is one of the most important parts of this SEO audit checklist. With time, things change. So, the information available on your website may need to be changed too.
Look for opportunities to improve the content to ensure more authentic information and a better experience for the visitors. Add new information or delete backdated information when needed.
Check Image Titles and Alt Texts
Search engines want to know about your images. They rank a page based on all its contents, including images, videos, etc. So, you must optimize the images so that search engines can easily understand what the images are about.
Check if your image titles are meaningful or not. ‘A dog and a red balloon’ is a way more meaningful title than ‘IMG2021110345732’.
Also, use meaningful alt texts that describe the images. Search engines use them to identify images.
Optimize UI/UX
User Interface and User Experience are not directly related to SEO, but they are somehow connected to it. Good UI/UX keeps visitors long time on the site, which influences search engine ranking.
Make sure that your webpage contents are neat and clean. Use enough space between two parts. Also, ensure the proper use of colors and elements. Instead of making the pages crowded, keep them clean.
The better experience you offer to the audience, the more they’ll love to visit your site. So, ensure proper use of call-to-action buttons. Besides, keep the site structure simple.
Check Page Speed
Page speed is an important factor in SEO. So, page speed inspection is a must-have point in this SEO audit checklist.
Google’s PageSpeed Insider will give you an overview of how fast your website pages load. If the speed is not satisfactory, optimize it.
The size of images has a direct influence on page speed. Use a tool to reduce the size of images without hurting the quality. Use lighter CSS and JavaScript. Enable cache to ensure faster speed. Also, reduce the redirects.
Hosting plays a great role in page speed. Try to switch to a better hosting provider or package, if needed.
Test Mobile-friendliness
Mobile-friendly websites are ranked higher because more than half of internet users use mobile devices to browse the internet.
To check your site’s mobile-friendliness, use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test. It’ll show you how friendly your webpages are to mobile users.
If they are not, consider replacing your theme with one that comes with a mobile-friendly design. Also, avoid heavy plugins that are not mobile-friendly.
Check and Fix Indexing Issues
As long as search engines can’t index a page, the probability of your page being shown in search results is zero. So, looking for indexing issues is a must.
Use an Index Checker to see the pages indexed in Google. If the number matches the total number of your website pages or varies a bit, you don’t need to worry much. But if not, look for the pages that are not indexed. Then, submit them again for indexing.
If any of your website pages are not indexed, check your robots.txt to see if it disallows search engines to enter your site. Fix it asap.
Check Website Architecture
Website architecture is the way your web pages are distributed. We prefer flat structures where finding any page takes no more than 3-4 clicks. Such structures allow visitors to reach their destination easily.
However, if you prefer tall structures, that’s okay. But make sure that the structure is well-defined to search engines. Otherwise, crawlers can’t move properly.
Analyze Backlinks
A common assumption about backlinks is the more links you get, the better your website performs. But that’s not true.
Better performance is related to quality backlinks. On the other hand, bad backlinks disturb your SEO strategies. You must remove them from your website. That’s why we suggest analyzing the links.
Use a backlink checker tool for this. Check the anchor texts linked to your site. If they’re aligned to your niche, it’s good. But you’ll find some anchors that don’t connect to your niche anyway. Check their sources. Something might be fishy.
If you find any irrelevant links here, disavow them. However, a few irrelevant links may not hurt much.
Research Competitors
This point is absent in most SEO audit checklists. Most people don’t think competitor research is an important part when it comes to website audits, but it is. Regular competitor research helps you identify the changes in competition, based on which you must change your SEO strategy.
So, look for new strategies your competitors are implementing. Consult SEO experts and brainstorm new ideas to beat them. This is how things should work- identify the change and respond accordingly.
Final Verdict
This SEO Audit checklist will surely help you identify some major issues and fix them. Thus, you can improve your overall SERP position. Invest enough time in it and you’ll see the results.
However, if you don’t have much idea about SEO, I’d suggest taking professional help after following this SEO audit checklist. Our professional SEO audit service offers a deeper audit to find out tiny issues that are hurting your SEO efforts.
Want thorough audit support? Don’t hesitate to communicate with us.
