Complete Automated Website Audit Checklist and Tools

An automated website audit is a thorough evaluation of your website's performance, accessibility, and security. It helps you identify areas for improvement and optimize your website for better user experience and search engine rankings.

To conduct a comprehensive website audit, you'll need to use a combination of tools and techniques. This checklist will guide you through the process, ensuring you don't miss any crucial steps.

Start by checking for broken links and images, which can negatively impact user experience and search engine rankings. According to our analysis, broken links can account for up to 10% of your website's total links.

Next, review your website's accessibility features, ensuring that it meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1). This includes checking for alt text on images, closed captions on videos, and navigable menus.

A website audit also involves assessing your website's security, including SSL certificate installation and regular software updates. This is crucial to protect user data and prevent potential cyber threats.

An automated website audit is a game-changer for businesses looking to improve their online presence.

You can compare your website to your competitors and identify areas for improvement, giving you a competitive edge.

With an automated website audit, you'll get an overview of a site's health in one simple dashboard, making it easy to communicate any issues to clients.

This dashboard will show you crucial metrics in easy-to-read graphs, helping you quickly identify problems and prioritize fixes.

An automated website audit can help you improve your SEO, optimize conversion rates, and optimize your website performance.

Here are some key benefits of using an automated website audit:

To start an automated website audit, you'll want to run your website URL through a site audit tool. This will help analyze how your site is performing and provide specific recommendations.

You'll need a mix of tools to get the job done, depending on the size of your website and overall audit goals. Google Analytics is essential for identifying which pages to audit, based on traffic and goal performance.

For technical SEO audit, you'll need Google Search Console, which is also necessary for requesting pages for reindexing after you've fixed them.

Page speed calculators like Google's PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix are great tools to have. You'll also want an image compressor like Tinypng.com to optimize your images.

For deeper SEO metrics like backlinks, competitive information, and keyword data, you'll need a tool like Ahrefs, Moz Pro, Screaming Frog, SEMrush, etc. Some of these offer free trial versions or free services for the first 500 links.

To check accessibility, you can use tools like WAVE or webaccessibility.com.

Here are some tools you may find useful:

Remember, you can choose the website audit categories that reflect your needs, so you can focus on the areas that are most important to you.

A content and SEO audit is a crucial part of any website's health check. Analyzing your website with custom segmentation can help identify pages with thin content, and the website audit tool supports word counts or XPath expressions in on-page audits to find where appropriate content is missing.

Assessing website content involves evaluating pages such as blogs, landing pages, and product/service pages to identify areas of improvement and ensure that the content targets readers at every stage of the buyer's journey. This includes looking at meta descriptions and review image alt text.

To ensure your content is ranking well in search engines, you should also consider how your on-page SEO and performance are aligned with your traffic numbers. A website audit can help you identify missing headlines or nonhierarchical headlines that might have ranking issues or usability problems.

Duplicate content can be a major issue for your website. Tell search engines which URL to list higher in the search results by resolving duplicate content issues.

Duplicate content groups can help you identify all pages with identical titles, meta descriptions or HTML body. This can include similar URLs that lead to the same content.

You need to pick a canonical (preferred) URL as the preferred version of the page to gain more control over how your URLs appear in search results. This is called canonicalization of your website content.

The canonical tag (rel=“canonical”) in an HTTP header can indicate your preference to Google. Be sure to have someone check that it's properly implemented across the site.

Not internally linking pages on your site can make them less likely to be indexed by search engines. This is why site structure is also important for search engines.

Assessing content is a crucial step in a content and SEO audit. It involves evaluating website content such as blogs, landing pages, and product/service pages to identify areas of improvement.

To assess content effectively, you need to evaluate how the current pages are stacking up, identify areas of improvement, and ensure that the content targets readers at every stage of the buyer's journey. This includes reviewing meta descriptions and image alt text to ensure they are optimized for search engines.

One way to evaluate content is to ask yourself questions like "Is my content ranking well in search engines?" and "Is my on-page SEO and performance aligned with my traffic numbers?" This will help you identify areas where your content may be falling short.

In addition to evaluating content, it's also essential to identify and remove thin content from your website. Thin content refers to pages with inadequate or missing content, which can negatively impact your website's SEO and user experience.

Here are some common types of thin content to look out for:

By identifying and removing thin content, you can improve your website's overall content quality and user experience, leading to better SEO and increased engagement.

Indexable and non-indexable content can be a challenge to navigate, but understanding the basics can make a big difference. You can see the indexability status of each document based on meta robots directives and disallow rules within your robots.txt file.

To ensure your web pages are crawled and indexed by search engines, you should define how they are handled. This can be done through various methods, including robots.txt files and sitemaps. The robots meta tag allows for a granular, page-specific approach to controlling how an individual page should be indexed and served to users in search results.

The robots.txt file is a text file that specifies how you'd like your site to be crawled. Search engine crawlers will generally request the robots.txt file from a server before crawling a website. Within the robots.txt file, you can include sections for specific or all crawlers with instructions that let them know which parts should or should not be crawled.

A public sitemap is one that users can access to review the pages of your site, like the index of a book. The XML sitemap, on the other hand, is for search engines to review pages that get added to your site, all in one place. The usual location of a sitemap.xml file is www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.

Having an XML sitemap offers an opportunity to tell Google and other search engines which pages on your site you want to be crawled and indexed. While search engines don't guarantee they'll abide by your sitemap, anecdotal evidence has proven that XML sitemaps help provide insurance that your pages are found and found faster, especially if your sitemap(s) dynamically update your new web pages.

Localization is a crucial aspect of ensuring your website is accessible to users worldwide. Choose a website you want to audit and hit the "Analyze" button to help users find the right language versions of your page.

To achieve this, you need to find and fix hreflang and HTML lang mistakes. Hreflang links in the HTML head, HTML header, and within sitemaps should be validated to ensure they're correctly connected.

Validating hreflang groups is essential to test hreflang implementations. This will help you find all URLs connected using hreflang links and ensure they're correctly grouped.

Validating your XML sitemaps is a crucial step in ensuring search engines can easily crawl and index your website's pages. You can use tools to crawl and validate XML sitemap index files and xml sitemap files.

XML sitemaps help provide insurance that your pages are found and found faster, especially if your sitemap(s) dynamically update your new web pages. The usual location of a sitemap.xml file is www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.

To validate your XML sitemaps, you should check for issues with the format, referenced URLs, and lastmod dates. This will help you identify any problems that might be preventing search engines from properly crawling and indexing your site.

Having a well-structured XML sitemap is essential for search engine optimization. It's like having a map that tells search engines which pages on your site you want to be crawled and indexed.