Now that we’re done with preparatory work, let’s move on to the key steps of an SEO audit checklist. Before you embark on a technical SEO audit (of a newly bought domain or an existing one), check if it’s not under any search engine sanctions. User experience (UX) plays a significant role in how your website ranks. A tech SEO audit will help you identify things that could spoil UX or even turn users away from your website. I aimed to make this SEO audit checklist universal, covering all major steps of a technical SEO audit.
UX, UI, & Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Services
Choosing the right tool can be the difference between making minor tweaks and undergoing a full-scale SEO overhaul. By understanding your requirements and comparing the strengths of these tools, you can ensure that you’re making the most informed decision for your website’s SEO strategy. Are the pages of your website loading quickly to create a good user experience? Most websites today load within a few seconds, and searchers are used to that. Around half of searchers won’t even wait for your site to load if it takes longer than three seconds.
Top free on-page SEO tools
Assess your site for missing canonical tags, non-indexable canonicals, or conflicting tags. Tools like Screaming Frog or Semrush can help identify issues efficiently. Check how you link your most important pages, like cornerstone articles or product categories. Your content should have a couple of links based on relevance and importance, but not too many.
To evaluate mobile performance, run tests using tools like PageSpeed Insights. These tools can help uncover layout issues, poor interactivity, and slow-loading assets on mobile devices. Pay close attention to whether responsive web design works correctly, meaning your site adapts to various screen sizes.
Login to Google Analytics and go to Traffic Acquisition under Acquisition. Look at the “Organic Search” data, which includes users, sessions, views, and more information. This will give you an idea of how much traffic your website gets from Google. You can see the keywords, pages, devices, countries, and more information. Take the time to reach out to secure legitimate links to your site, and you will be rewarded in the long run.
- Rendering is one of the stages of the overall process Google uses to analyze your page content.
- With Core Web Vitals influencing rankings, it’s essential to guarantee seamless loading times and visual stability.
- Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that assesses your page’s Core Web Vitals, which measure user experience and are SEO ranking factors.
- But you can adjust the approach to align with your unique needs and goals.
- The first thing I did was dive into a thorough content audit.
AgencyAnalytics also lets you create custom logins for your clients. This gives them real-time SEO Anomaly access to their SEO dashboards any time they need. This level of granularity lets you fully customize your SEO reports to make them visually appealing and easy to understand. AgencyAnalytics lets you set and track specific SEO goals for each client. But if you’re building something new or one-off, starting with a blank report or a premade template still gives you all the flexibility you need.
Auditing keyword usage and density means assessing keyword frequency and distribution for natural, relevant, and effective SEO optimization. Audit headers by having one H1 tag per page, reflecting the main topic and keywords. Header tags (H1 to H6) are HTML elements structuring content with headings and subheadings. They guide users in gauging a page’s relevance to their query. Meta descriptions are HTML summaries of web pages, shown below title tags in search results.
You’re going to lose that valuable web traffic to other sites that either have a mobile version or change with a user’s screen size. Once you have an XML sitemap, you can submit it to Google Search Console so it can be crawled. It can get a little technical, so it might be best to partner with an SEO expert if you don’t have a lot of experience with XML sitemaps. Now that we’ve covered the on-page SEO portion of the SEO audit, let’s take a look at what you need for an off-page SEO audit. Admittedly, we’re big fans of a lot of good SEO audit checklists out there, including Annielytics Site Audit Checklist, Andy Drinkwater’s Checklist, and the audits available at SEOSLY. We’re also a fan of Dana Dana DiTomaso’s Technical SEO course on LinkedIn.
