Did you know that Stanford University research indicates that 75% of users evaluate a company's trustworthiness based on its website quality? This statement shows that a well-designed website with a good SEO strategy can boost a business's ranking and credibility.
As online competition gets tougher, your business website needs to be optimized for search engines. The best way to evaluate a website is to do an SEO audit. Read the article below for further insight into the SEO audit and checklist guide!
What Is SEO Checklist Audit?
An SEO audit checklist is a detailed guide to assessing the effectiveness of a website's search engine optimization. It typically involves reviewing and improving various aspects such as site structure, content quality, keyword implementation, backlinks, technical SEO components, and on-page factors.
If you follow the checklist, you can spot where you can make improvements and put strategies in place to boost your site's visibility and Google rankings.
SEO Audit Checklist
It's not enough to just put SEO strategies into action. You need to consistently assess and enhance them, which is where an SEO audit comes in. This lets you examine all the different parts of your website. Here's a checklist to help you through the process:
1. Check Organic Traffic
The first thing that should be on your SEO audit checklist is a review of your organic traffic. You can start by looking at your website's data in Google Analytics or a similar tool. Next, using that data, you can analyze and track your website traffic performance, such as the number of page views, visits, and organic bounces.
Furthermore, you can assess performance across different pages and keywords to determine which areas are performing effectively and which need improvement to increase visibility and user engagement.
2. Run Site Crawl
Conducting a site crawl is a highly effective method for gathering comprehensive data on every page of your site. It provides valuable insights into some aspects like crawlability, loading speed, internal linking, structured data, and on-page SEO. This process allows you to quickly evaluate multiple site elements, including title tags, meta descriptions, and images.
3. Optimize On-Page SEO
Next, to optimize on-page SEO as part of your SEO audit checklist, start by reviewing and improving key elements on each page of your site. Make sure that meta descriptions, title tags, and headers include keywords and are relevant to the page content. Furthermore, keep URLs clean and clear and ensure the website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly.
4. Optimize Internal Link
Don’t limit your internal linking to only what you consider the most important pages. Ideally, each page should have at least one relevant internal link directing to it. This practice prevents "orphaned pages" and improves content accessibility for users and search engines.
5. Enhance UX Signals
Another aspect of the SEO audit checklist is optimizing UX signals. UX signals mean click and user satisfaction, and to optimize it, you can improve navigation with a clear menu and effective search functions, make sure your site is mobile-friendly, make engaging content, and have a clean design to retain users.
6. Customize for Featured Snippets
Your web traffic can increase significantly if your website page appears in a Google snippet. To get this position, you can use many relevant headers on your content, including short answers to questions related to the topic, and make it mobile-friendly.
7. Check Page Rendering
The next SEO audit checklist is checking page rendering. You need to see how Google renders your pages using the URL Inspection Tool by Google Search Console. After the check, you will be able to identify and resolve any problems that may affect the way your page is displayed and indexed by search engines.
8. Optimize Mobile-Friendliness
Afterward, you can include mobile-friendliness optimization in your SEO audit checklist. This is because Google uses a mobile-first indexing system. You can optimize your content by using responsive design, creating mobile-friendly content, and using high-quality images instead of lots of text.
9. Check Google Indexing
Google can index different versions of the website. You can be helped by the Google Search Console to analyze the indexing of your website and redirect all the versions to the one that you want to use. These steps also help you ensure that your pages are indexed properly by Google.
10. Optimize Website Speed
A web page's loading speed is one factor that impacts Google rankings. To analyze loading speed, you can use Google PageSpeed Insight, which provides detailed insights into loading speed and recommendations for improving it.
11. Remove Duplicate Pages
Another step you can add to your audit list is removing duplicate pages. Continuously check your site to avoid the creation of new duplicate pages, and make sure that every page offers unique and valuable content to boost your SEO.
12. Fix Indexing Problem
Next, Google Search Console can be used to identify pages that Google hasn't indexed. Under the 'Indexing' section, go to the 'Pages' report, which details the pages not indexed by Google. By selecting any of the issues listed, you can view specific pages that are affected by these issues.
13. Fix Broken Links
User experience can be impacted negatively because of broken links. They can also affect your SEO. SEO tools will scan your website to find any dead or broken links and provide you with a report so that these may be addressed and fixed immediately.
14. Do a Backlink Audit
Conducting a backlink audit is crucial for optimizing a website on Google ranking. Evaluate the quality of backlinks based on domain authority, relevance, and trustworthiness. Focus on high-quality, authoritative sites and reject low-quality or spammy links. Improving backlink quality is the same as increasing website credibility.
15. Analyze Competitors
You can start to analyze your competitors by identifying their top-ranking keywords and content strategies. In addition, evaluate their backlink profiles to understand their link-building tactics and domain authority
16. Make Improvement
After you know the competitor's strengths and weaknesses, compare their performance metrics to your own to identify opportunities for improvement and potential areas where you can outperform them.
17. Audit Structured Data
The next step in the SEO audit checklist is to analyze structured data or schema markup that helps search engines understand your content well. Check your markup for errors or warnings, make sure the data matches the content on your page, and verify that the structured data types you've chosen (like product, review, or event) match your content.
18. Set Up Keyword Tracking
Lastly, for your SEO checklist, set up keyword tracking. Carrying out an SEO audit will provide you with a lot of data to help you understand where your website is positioned within your industry. From this, you can monitor whether the changes you can make and improve.
An SEO audit is an important practice for ensuring a website's optimal performance. This leads to better search engine visibility, higher traffic, and an enhanced user experience. Investing in SEO audits is important for staying competitive in the digital space and achieving long-term online success.
If you encounter challenges with your SEO audit, utilizing Sequence Stat’s Site Audit Tool may provide valuable assistance. Our advanced features offer detailed site audits, including HTML structure evaluation, web performance insights, page redirection lists, Google data structure assessments, and many more. Sign in now to access these powerful tools and optimize every aspect of your site for peak performance!