The Ultimate 16-Step SEO Audit Checklist + Free Template

Anyone using a phone to look for stuff on the internet isn’t going to wait around for a slow-loading site. That means the faster your site is, the more likely Google is to reward you with strong organic rankings. Still—whenever possible, you should make sure all your pages are as optimized as possible for keywords that will help them show up in organic search.

Make the most of your SEO audit tool

It’s better to spend 80% of your time fixing the 20% of things that matter. The average web visitor can’t spot these off-page factors, and it’s difficult to identify them manually. Fortunately, at WebFX, we have a suite of services enabling off-page analysis and comparison. WebFX will identify these hard-to-spot factors and recommend a strategy that helps you build your reputation and increase your presence online. Our team can consult and even implement recommendations to get your website ranking in the search results.

It’s a strategy, and one that’s helped businesses grow their companies, enter new markets, and energize their local economies. That’s why WebFX’s SEO audit services provide a recommended SEO strategy, offering guidance on what to do after fixing your SEO issues. There are other parts of SEO which you should pay attention to after your audit to make sure you stay competitive.

SEO audit part three: Technical SEO

If you have the right tools, you can still win visibility — across Google, YouTube, AI results, and more. Drop in a URL to get a real-time SEO report with actionable insights — no setup, no signup. Some SEOs productize audits based on a set of criteria (usually the size of the website), and a predefined set of deliverables.

  • Your website is the “hub” of your online brand – so, it’s important to have regular checkups to ensure everything is in order.
  • In our case, the “WWW” version of the site redirects to backlinko.com.
  • A technical SEO audit will identify opportunities to fix, eliminate, or reorganize code, prevent spam, switch from HTTP to HTTPS, and more.
  • Depending on the size of your site, a proper audit can take anywhere from 2-6 weeks to complete.
  • Ensure that each of your web pages have a unique meta description that is explicit and contains your most important keywords for each page.

The easiest and most straightforward way to accomplish this is to simply list your sitemap location in your robots.txt file. Placing your sitemap here works for all major search engines, and doesn’t require any extra work. Okay, so you’ve verified that your URL is listed in an XML sitemap. Next, you want to ensure that search engines — all search engines — can easily find your sitemap files.

SEO audit

URL Resolve

Each plan includes a set number of domains/campaigns you can use, users, and position checks that increase with each specific plan. But, as a data tool, Google Trends should only indicate what kind of searches you could expect from going after a specific keyword. Google Trends is a rare tool that provides a ton of data that can help you inform your SEO strategy. It shows you the interest in a search term over the span of months to years.

SEO audit

With our SEO checker, you can learn your site’s index status, plus if it follows best practices for robots.txt files and XML sitemaps. BHS Links Clearscope’s primary purpose is to analyze the copy on a webpage and provide AI-assisted suggestions on improving its searchability. Loading up blog content like the AI-generated one in the image above, you can see metrics like how long the post should be, text readability, relevant keywords you can add to the copy, and keyword density.

SEO audit

These are the pages you’ll want to link from (the top pages on your site related to that keyword, according to Google). We’re using Semrush for this step (the Backlink Analytics tool in particular). If there are issues with your JavaScript, Google (and potentially your users) won’t be able to see your pages properly. Rendering is one of the stages of the overall process Google uses to analyze your page content. To determine whether it should be indexed and, if so, where it should rank.

If you have a better SEO profile overall, you’ll be more likely to outrank them for your target keywords. Benchmarking allows you to see exactly where you stand when compared to your competitors and identify opportunities for improvement. Most of these updates are minor, but occasionally there are major updates that can significantly impact rankings. And Google will announce these major updates on their Search Central Blog.

Implement relevant schema markup to enhance the appearance of your content in search engine results with rich snippets. Get useful information about the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your website, ordered by their importance. Save your backlinks lists, export them in different formats and track your backlinks status over time. We provide a set of SEO tools to help you understand your website from a search engine’s perspective. Ready to take the first step toward helping prospective customers find your business in the organic search results?