How to Do an SEO Audit: The Ultimate Checklist
Tools like Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) let you build real-time dashboards for tracking keyword growth, page performance, traffic sources, and goal completions. Other SEO techniques such as building more relevant and authority links to your page will slowly improve your score as well. 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. Unless you’re auditing your own site, IA-based recommendations should hinge on the goals of project stakeholders. Your target audience and business goals will inform the way you define and organize content.
It offers a direct line to Google’s own data, presenting an unfiltered view of how websites perform in Google’s search results. Selecting your agency’s ideal SEO site audit tool involves more than just comparing features and prices. It’s about finding a solution that aligns with your agency’s specific needs, client profiles, and long-term objectives. With many SEO audit tools available, including free versions and premium products, you have a wide range of options to choose from. Staying ahead isn’t just about being good; it’s about being the best.
Find On-Page SEO Issues at Scale
First, you need to know if search engines can actually find and understand your pages. At SEO.co, we specialize in supplying businesses with high-quality content marketing and white-label link-building for agencies. But we’ll also be the first to admit that these services will benefit your company very little if your website doesn’t have a strong SEO foundation to support it. Once you’ve found some broken links, there are a few different ways to fix them. If the link is on your own website, you can simply update the URL to point to the correct page. If the link is on someone else’s website, you’ll need to reach out to them and let them know so they can update it.
Audits Founder, Carl Hendy
There are several files on your server — like .htaccess, robots.txt and sitemap.xml to name a few — that dictate how search engines access and index your content. Optimizing these files, so they are configured appropriately, can have a huge impact on your rankings (which is why we prioritize them as a part of our technical SEO audit services). As you run your crawl through the audit process (and follow along with our checklist!), you’ll gather a list of technical issues. Intuitive experiences also signal to search engines that your site is valuable to users. An SEO audit is an important task that should be carried out regularly in order to maintain a good ranking in search engines. There are many benefits of SEO audits, including improved website visibility, increased traffic, and higher conversion rates.
In order to avoid these negative consequences, it is important to regularly check for and fix any broken links on your website. Unfortunately, most search marketers only implement a link quality site audit after they’ve already been hit with a penalty. It’s easy to spot a penalty when it happens, especially if you keep a tight watch over the progress of your campaign. Your rankings will start to diminish for some or all of your keywords, and your organic traffic numbers will start to dip. In 2019 and beyond, visibility is one of the primary factors in online success. And if you want visibility, you must BHS Links pay attention to the technical aspects of SEO and how Google, Bing, and other search engines rank websites and deliver search results to their users.
- From the main dashboard, you can download PDF reports, connect to Looker Studio, send reports directly to partners, or generate a sitemap.
- Optimizing these with keywords can help boost your pages in the SERPs.
- You can expect helpful recommendations that go beyond, “Get more links,” too.
- Likewise, agencies and consultants often perform in-depth technical SEO audits, sometimes running hundreds of pages, to help improve the search visibility of their clients.
- Examine multimedia use (images, videos, charts) to determine if they support and improve the textual content.
Organic traffic analysis helps identify content gaps, technical issues affecting performance, and opportunities to capitalize on emerging search trends. High-quality content is one of the most critical factors for search engine rankings. Google’s algorithms prioritise SEO content that is helpful, relevant, and authoritative. Well-written and informative pages tend to attract more backlinks, reduce bounce rates, and improve time on site, which contributes to better visibility in search results and long-term SEO performance. Except for very small websites, SEO audits are impossible without special tools. Audits process massive amounts of data about the site’s traffic, technical elements, backlink profile, content, and rankings, among other things – in addition to competitor insights.
The quality and quantity of relevant websites sharing and linking to your content is a good sign that your content is worthwhile. You should also conduct research to determine keyword opportunities at different intent stages related to the target keyword. A thorough site crawl can identify these issues, revealing whether the appropriate tags are applied to match search demand and ensure effective SEO for faceted navigation. Start by analyzing the top-ranking sites for your target keyword on Google. Investigate why they are ranked highly, focusing on what sets them apart and how they provide value. By navigating to the last search results page, you can access a message indicating removed duplicates, revealing consolidated pages.
With your prioritized task list of SEO improvements, you will immediately know where to start to achieve quick and noticeable results. And the tool separates issues into different tabs to help you stay organized. JetOctopus’ pricing depends on the number of pages you need to have crawled every month.