A search engine optimization (SEO) audit describes examining your site material technique for ranking higher on online search engine. The much better it’s enhanced, the higher rankings, traffic, and income it will have.

Carrying out routine SEO evaluations can likewise help you acquire insights into your rivals’ methods and identify areas where you can outshine them. In addition, you will have the ability to determine and fix issues once they arise, avoiding potential penalties, costly recovery efforts, and lost income.

As a result, you will improve the overall user experience.

In this tutorial, we will share 17 simple actions to perform an efficient SEO audit for your site. Before we dive deeper into the steps, you will need to specify your service goals. Doing so will show you which steps to concentrate on and how to select the very best SEO tools for an effective audit.
Specify Your Business Goals
Before diving directly into an SEO website audit, you should recognize the target you aim to hit with this procedure. The most common goals include:

Increasing your site position on online search engine result pages (SERPs) to bring in more natural traffic.
Optimizing your user experience and website performance by improving page load times, improving mobile responsiveness, and guaranteeing smooth navigation.
Analyzing the website efficiency from a technical viewpoint.
Setting clear SEO audit targets guarantees clarity and positioning with your company objectives. It helps you allocate resources, focus on tasks, and keep track of executed actions.

As soon as you have a clear vision of what you wish to accomplish, you can perform targeted audit processes and make data-driven decisions for long-lasting online success.

17 Steps for Conducting a High-Quality Website SEO Audit
Learning how to perform an SEO audit is foundational to planning and constructing a successful SEO technique.

While this procedure can differ from one case to another, we put together a list of 17 important steps that the majority of online marketers follow as part of their SEO audit checklist.

Website Development
Optimization
Oct 31, 2023

Anastasia K.

18min Read

SEO Audit Process in 17 Simple Steps: Boost Your Content Visibility on Search Engines
A search engine optimization (SEO) audit refers to examining your website content method for ranking higher on online search engine. The better it’s optimized, the greater rankings, traffic, and income it will have.

Performing regular SEO evaluations can also help you acquire insights into your rivals’ methods and determine areas where you can outshine them. In addition, you will have the ability to recognize and repair concerns once they emerge, avoiding possible penalties, costly healing efforts, and lost revenue.

You will improve the overall user experience.

In this tutorial, we will share 17 easy steps to carry out an efficient SEO audit for your site. Before we dive deeper into the actions, you will require to specify your company goals. Doing so will reveal you which steps to concentrate on and how to choose the best SEO tools for an effective audit.

Define Your Business Goals
17 Steps for Conducting a High-Quality Website SEO Audit
1. Inspect Website Crawlability
2. Examine Website Speed
3. Carry Out Technical SEO Examination
4. Check for HTTPS and Security Issues
5. Evaluate Your Backlink Profile
6. Examine Site Structure and Internal Linking
7. Look For Broken Links
8. Analyze On-Page SEO Elements
9. Examine Content Quality
10. Screen Keyword Rankings
11. Carry Out Keyword Analysis
12. Examine Structured Data and Schema Markup
13. Analyze User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI).
14. Examine Mobile Responsiveness.
15. Evaluate Local SEO.
16. Develop an Action Plan.
17. Establish Regular Monitoring and Reporting.
Specify Your Business Goals.
Before diving straight into an SEO site audit, you must recognize the target you intend to strike with this process. The most common objectives consist of:.

Increasing your website position on online search engine result pages (SERPs) to draw in more natural traffic.
Optimizing your user experience and website efficiency by enhancing page load times, boosting mobile responsiveness, and ensuring seamless navigation.
Analyzing the website efficiency from a technical point of view.
Setting clear SEO audit targets ensures clarity and alignment with your business objectives. It helps you assign resources, focus on jobs, and monitor executed actions.

As soon as you have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish, you can carry out targeted audit procedures and make data-driven decisions for long-lasting online success.

17 Steps for Conducting a High-Quality Website SEO Audit.
Learning how to carry out an SEO audit is foundational to planning and developing an effective SEO method.

While this process can differ from one case to another, we compiled a list of 17 necessary steps that a lot of marketers follow as part of their SEO audit list.

Suggested Reading.
Before beginning to work on a premium website SEO audit, ensure you have produced an SEO-friendly website in the first location.

1. Check Website Crawlability.
Website crawlability describes the online search engine’s capability to reach and scan your material. If automated bots, also referred to as spiders or crawlers, stop working to crawl your website’s pages, they won’t be indexed and shown in search engine result.

Issues like damaged links, looped redirects, or robots.txt misconfiguration can hinder your site’s crawlability and prevent you from ranking well on the SERPs and getting organic traffic.

To assess and enhance the crawlability of a site, you can utilize various devoted SEO audit tools. Here are some of the best ones:.

Google Search Console.

This SEO audit tool offers important insights into how crawlers communicate with your site by highlighting crawl errors, indexing issues, and other crawlability-related issues. Just place the wanted URL into The URL Inspection Tool and have a look at the supplied report. A green tick means your page has actually successfully been crawled and indexed, whereas the grey one suggests that Google has found some problems on this page.

Yelling Frog.

Its SEO Spider software application is particularly created to crawl websites and offer a thorough analysis of their structure and content. It identifies concerns like damaged links, replicate material, missing meta tags, and more, which can hinder crawlability. The platform has a limited free version that you can use to analyze as much as 500 URLs. To exceed this limitation, you’ll require to pay $259/year.

Shrieking Frog’s main homepage.
2. Evaluate Website Speed.
Website speed determines the length of time it considers a page to load and display its material. This aspect not only impacts the user experience but also has a substantial influence on SEO.

To begin with, poorly performing sites typically have a high bounce rate. The longer a page takes to pack on a website, the most likely users are to leave the site. If left unsolved, this can prevent repeat gos to and hurt your brand name credibility.

For instance, if you’re running a site on a CMS like WordPress, utilizing a lot of styles and plugins can basically slow down your website. In this case, you’ll need to enhance your WordPress site speed and pay unique attention to the platform-specific elements of performance enhancement.

Furthermore, search engines normally consider site speed when ranking sites. While website speed isn’t a separate ranking aspect, it is an essential part of the Core Web Vitals metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID).

In March 2024, FID will be changed with a new metric called Interaction to Next Paint (INP). As an outcome, the faster your site reacts to user interactions, such as clicks, the better. Lessening the time needed to respond to the first user input to at least 200 milliseconds substantially boosts user experience.

This increases your opportunities of ranking higher on online search engine.

Websites with sluggish speed and heavy page filling time might be subject to a penalty in search results, eventually resulting in a reduction in visibility and organic search traffic.

Online marketers intending to examine and improve website speed usually turn to tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. These are some of the very best SEO audit tools for evaluating metrics like server action time, web browser caching, image optimization, and more. Based on the identified findings, they supply in-depth reports and actionable suggestions for boosting speed.

By using Google PageSpeed Insights, you can assemble a report that highlights both mobile and desktop efficiency, using scores and recommendations for enhancements. It conducts a thorough Core Web Vitals evaluation and highlights opportunities along with suggested time savings for each.

GTMetrix not just evaluates your site’s performance however also provides extra information and insights. It lays out how your page carries out in 22 different worldwide test areas and sends you alerts when your page underperforms.

Among GTmetrix’s strengths is its capability to produce a waterfall chart that visualizes the filling sequence of your web page’s resources. This helps you identify traffic jams and areas needing attention. GTmetrix likewise recommends specific actions to enhance your site, such as allowing browser caching, compressing images, or minifying CSS and JavaScript.

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3. Perform Technical SEO Examination.
Understanding the technical aspects of your website is necessary to guarantee its optimization for search engine crawling and indexing. Particularly, you must pay attention to the following elements:.

XML sitemaps– make certain your XML sitemaps depend on date and include all the essential pages on your website. That way, online search engine can quickly navigate through your pages and material. Structure your XML sitemap by site sections, use descriptive names, include only canonical variations of URLs, and prioritize the essential pages by using the concern and change frequency.
Robots.txt files– ensure your robots.txt file doesn’t block essential pages or possessions mistakenly. Likewise, follow basic SEO practices like placing it in the primary directory site of your website, starting each directive on a brand-new line, and preventing making use of spaces, quote marks, or semicolons when composing directives. Plus, double-check whether separate robots.txt files are produced for each domain.
Canonical tags– validate that canonical tags are correctly executed on pages with similar or duplicate material to signal the preferred variation to online search engine. When enhancing your canonical tags, keep in mind to make use of one canonical tag per page, usage absolute URLs, and define the proper domain protocol– whether HTTP or HTTPS.
To simplify the process of manually evaluating and optimizing these technical SEO elements, consider using a sophisticated SEO audit tool like SE Ranking’s Website Audit. With its assistance, you can scan your site under over 120 specifications in just a few minutes, get a prioritized list of determined issues, and receive extensive issue descriptions with how-to-fix descriptions.

SE Ranking’s Website Audit tool.
Just enter your site’s domain into the search, and the system will begin the site audit immediately. You can customize this analysis according to the categories that reflect your needs, specify site audit durations, and share your website SEO audit reports with customers and colleagues by means of customized reporting.

4. Check for HTTPS and Security Issues.
Website security plays a vital function. Besides developing trust with your audience and securing their sensitive data, security can enhance your SEO because search engines like Google prioritize safe and secure websites when ranking them.

Among the primary steps in ensuring your website’s security is to look for HTTPS. HTTPS secures the data transmitted in between a user’s browser and your site, preventing eavesdropping and information breaches. The presence of HTTPS is a visual indicator of trust for users, as web browsers display a padlock icon next to the URL, assuring them that their connection is secure.

With this in mind, we consist of limitless complimentary SSL certificates in all our web hosting strategies.

In addition, utilize the exact same SE Ranking’s Website Audit tool. Apart from examining a site’s performance for its crawlability, speed, functionality, localization, Javascript and CSS files, this tool also takes a close take a look at site security.

SE Ranking’s Website Audit identifies things like HTTP URLs in the XML sitemap, your security certificate expiration date, and whether you use a dated variation of the SSL or TLS procedure. By frequently running site audits with SE Ranking, you automatically guarantee that your website stays safe and preserves its SEO efficiency.

5. Evaluate Your Backlink Profile.
Backlinks are external links pointing to your site from other websites. Both online search engine and users see them as a vote of self-confidence in your site.

Put simply, getting a backlink from a credible, pertinent, and reliable site will have a favorable effect on both your website’s exposure and authority on SERPs. On the other hand, having a comparable link from an undependable and irrelevant site can provide you the opposite outcomes. For this reason, examining backlink profiles is integral to the SEO website audit process.

When assessing your backlink profile, always put quality over quantity.

Top quality backlinks originating from respectable websites in your niche carry more value and contribute more favorably to your site’s trustworthiness. In contrast, low-grade backlinks, frequently from spammy or unassociated sites, can hurt your SEO efforts.

To examine the quality of backlinks, consider elements like domain authority, page authority, and the importance of the linking domain. A top quality link profile should consist of a combination of diverse links with varying anchor texts.

In fact, when you’re mentioned by an abundance of links with exact-match anchor texts, it may appear unnatural to search engines and adversely impact your own authority. According to Google, links meant to control rankings might be considered spam.

Amongst a large range of backlink analysis tools, we suggest thinking about Ahrefs and Majestic.

Ahrefs’ main homepage.
Ahrefs provides insights into domain and page-level statistics for any target. It likewise permits you to keep an eye on the increase and decrease of backlink profiles over a specific period, get a total breakdown of the target’s backlink profile in regards to link type, either dofollow or nofollow, platform, URL ranking (UR), domain name score (DR), referring domains, and more.

Unlike lots of other tools, Ahrefs offers data on approximated natural traffic to each linking page and referring domain.

Majestic, on the other hand, offers in-depth insights into trust circulation, or the quality of pointing links, and citation flow, or the quantity of pointing links. In this manner, it adds to the overall assessment of backlink quality.

Majestic’s official homepage.
Majestic’s Visibility Flow Score helps in figuring out the significance of editorial-style links that are located on pages with a high Trust Flow. The Topical Trust Flow rating indicates a site’s position in relation to the leading sites in over 800 categories.

That stated, these tools offer the chance to detect poisonous backlinks negatively affecting the health of your pages and website in general.

As soon as you identify a poisonous link, disavow it. This will either avoid penalties from Google or assist you recuperate from them if your site has already been penalized due to these links.

6. Analyze Site Structure and Internal Linking.
Normally speaking, backlinks pass authority juice from one site to another, whereas internal links ensure a logical and organized content structure within your own website.

Internal links help online search engine comprehend where pages suit the hierarchy and how essential they remain in relation to other pages. A hierarchical structure with clear categories and subcategories makes navigation intuitive, lowering bounce rates and encouraging users to explore more of your content.

When creating internal links, it’s essential to utilize detailed anchor text that matches the content of the page you’re linking to. This adds to SEO and helps with simple navigation for users simultaneously.

To simplify the analysis of your site’s structure and internal connecting, we advise using an SEO audit tool like the Screaming Frog.

This powerful SEO tool crawls your website and supplies insights into your site’s architecture. It identifies damaged links, helps envision the hierarchy of your pages, and finds orphaned pages, those with no internal links, that may need attention.

7. Look For Broken Links.
Broken links point to URLs that no longer exist or can’t be discovered. Normally, they happen when site owners delete pages or move them without establishing a redirect.

Without repairing damaged links, you risk adding to a bad user experience, which will ultimately lead to high bounce rates and a decline in rankings. In addition, broken links are a dead end for search engine crawlers.

To recognize broken links, think about benefiting from these tools:.

Shouting Frog– use the SEO Spider as a damaged link checker. Simply start the crawling of your website and wait till it’s completed. Then, filter results by status code, such as the 403 forbidden mistake, to find damaged links.
Ahrefs– this platform uses a separate Broken Links report that provides a list of all outgoing damaged links on a site.
Once you’ve discovered all broken links, make certain to fix them in one of the following ways:.

Update the URL or set up a redirect– if the linked page has moved, update the link to indicate the new URL. Set up 301 redirects to send users and search engines to the appropriate location.
Remove dead links– if a connected page no longer exists or is unimportant, think about getting rid of the link.
8. Analyze On-Page SEO Elements.
Upon completing an SEO audit site evaluation, you’ll acquire important insights about your total efficiency online. Besides analyzing your site as a whole, we likewise suggest evaluating your essential pages separately.

This is where on-page SEO analysis enters play.

By checking how well basic on-page components like title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags are optimized for appropriate keywords, you’ll understand what to do to win more clicks.

Since title tags and meta descriptions are your website’s first point of contact with visitors, it’s important to make them engaging and attention-grabbing to drive clicks. Even if these elements do not straight affect rankings, they have a huge influence on your click-through rate (CTR).

Make certain your title tags and meta descriptions precisely represent your page’s material and naturally consist of target keywords. Plus, these components require to be special and have a succinct length.

Header tags are used to organize the content hierarchically, which considerably boosts readability along with total SEO. When crawling sites, search bots pay specific attention to header tags to understand what the content on the page is about. Through this analysis, online search engine like Google provide search engine result that line up with user intent.

As an outcome, following the best on-page SEO practices, you instantly increase your opportunities of reaching the first page of search engines.

However to perform an extensive SEO page audit, taking a glimpse at these aspects won’t suffice. If you want to ensure both the page’s material and its HTML source code are optimized for chosen search inquiries, you’ll need to use an advanced tool like SE Ranking’s On-Page SEO Checker.