A complete Devis Audit SEO checklist is essential for any website looking to improve its online presence. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the key areas to focus on.
Start by reviewing your website's technical setup, ensuring it is crawlable by search engines. This includes checking for duplicate URLs, canonical tags, and proper use of HTTPS.
Next, analyze your website's content, focusing on keyword optimization, meta tags, and header tags. Use tools like Google Search Console to identify areas for improvement.
A well-structured website with clear navigation is crucial for user experience and search engine rankings. Ensure your website's mobile responsiveness and page loading speed are optimized.
Your website's content should be regularly updated with fresh and engaging material. This will not only improve user engagement but also signal to search engines that your website is active and relevant.
Optimize your website's internal linking structure to help search engines understand your content hierarchy. This will improve user experience and search engine rankings.
On a similar theme: How to Use Yoast Seo
Understanding SEO Audit
An SEO audit is a thorough examination of your website's search engine optimization to identify areas for improvement. This process helps you understand how search engines like Google perceive your website and make data-driven decisions to boost your online presence.
During an SEO audit, your website's crawlability and indexability are checked to ensure that search engines can easily access and understand your content. This involves reviewing your website's structure, meta tags, and internal linking.
By identifying and fixing technical issues, you can improve your website's visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). For instance, fixing broken links and optimizing image alt tags can significantly enhance your website's crawlability and indexability.
What Is SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a thorough examination of a website's technical and content-related aspects to identify areas that can be improved for better search engine rankings.
It's a process that helps you understand how your website is performing in terms of search engine optimization.
A comprehensive SEO audit typically involves analyzing website crawlability, indexability, and accessibility.
This is crucial because search engines like Google use these factors to determine the relevance and credibility of your website.
A website's crawlability refers to its ability to be crawled and indexed by search engines, which is essential for search engine rankings.
Indexability, on the other hand, refers to the process of adding your website's pages to the search engine's index, making them searchable.
What Is It?
Authority Score is a metric that grades the overall quality of a website, using a 100 point scale.
SEMRush provides this score, which is gaining more trust over other authority metrics.
The score is based on different variables, including the number of backlinks a website has.
Authority Score also factors in organic search data and website traffic.
This makes it a more comprehensive metric than some other authority metrics.
By incorporating these variables, Authority Score gives a more accurate picture of a website's quality.
This is especially useful for SEO audits, where understanding a website's authority is crucial.
Preparing for SEO Audit
To prepare for an SEO audit, you'll want to gather the right tools and data. Semrush and Google Search Console are two essential tools that will help you assess your website's technical health, traffic, and backlink profile.
You'll also need access to data from the past six to twelve months to identify any inconsistencies. This can include using Matomo or Google Analytics to track your website's performance.
A comprehensive SEO audit should include a technical SEO audit, content audit, and competitive analysis. These will help identify potential coding issues, boost the relevancy and quality of your content, and understand what your competitors are doing right.
To ensure your SEO audit is effective, you should have access to the following tools and data:
- Semrush
- Google Search Console
- Matomo or Google Analytics
- Google My Business
Remember, the more data you have available, the better your chances of getting to the bottom of any inconsistencies.
Site Crawl
Running a Site Crawl is a crucial step in any SEO audit. It helps you identify issues that might be preventing your site from being crawled and indexed by search engines.
Expand your knowledge: Semrush Website Audit
You'll want to start by clicking the "Start Site Audit" button. This will begin the crawling process, which can take some time depending on the size of your site. Don't worry, it's a high-speed process that can handle up to 150,000 pages per project.
Once the audit is complete, you'll be taken to a dashboard that displays your "Site Health" score. This score is an overall indicator of your website's SEO health, based on the number of issues found and their severity.
The dashboard will categorize the issues into three types: Errors, Warnings, and Notices. You'll want to prioritize your fixes by addressing the Errors first, then the Warnings, and finally the Notices.
Here are some examples of the types of issues you might find:
- Crawlability issues, such as pages returning a 5xx status code
- Redirect issues, like looped redirects
- Sitemap issues, like incorrect pages in your sitemap
- Issues with HTTPS, like linking to HTTP pages
- Internal links issues, like broken internal links
- On-page SEO issues, like missing title tags
- Markup issues, like non-compliant structured data markup
- Performance issues, like slow-loading pages
Each issue will have a link to a brief explanation and a "How to fix it" guide to help you resolve the problem.
By running a Site Crawl, you'll be able to identify and fix these issues, improving your site's crawlability and indexability. This will ultimately help your site rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Analyzing Website
Analyzing a website is a crucial step in SEO auditing. With SE Ranking, you can perform a website audit easily by choosing a website and hitting the "Analyze" button. This tool provides in-depth analysis with over 120 metrics, ensuring no crucial tech issues go unnoticed.
The website audit also includes a dedicated Core Web Vitals report, which measures three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). You'll see a breakdown of each metric, including Total Blocking Time as an approximation for INP. A table labeled "Analyzed Pages" shows all the metrics for each page.
Internal linking issues can also be analyzed, with a report showing issues related to internal links and tips on how to fix them. The report also gives you an overview of your pages based on Internal LinkRank (ILR), helping you identify pages with good ILR scores to distribute link equity to other pages.
A unique perspective: Website Audit Report Sample
Usability
Usability is key to a great user experience. A website that's easy to navigate and understand can keep visitors engaged and coming back for more.
The best sites are user-friendly, and you can find out how to make your website work better by performing a website audit with SE Ranking. Choose a website you want to audit and hit the "Analyze" button to get started.
A user-friendly website is essential for search engine ranking, and it's not just about looks. Make sure all your important pages return the correct HTTP status code for a better user experience and search engine ranking.
Core Web Vitals can also help you identify areas for improvement. Check your site's Core Web Vital scores and enhance the user experience by making necessary adjustments.
To ensure your website is mobile-friendly, display it on mobile devices and check for errors. Google separates search results into mobile and desktop indices, so it's essential to evaluate both mobile and desktop views of your website separately.
Here are some tools you can use to check your website's usability:
- Search Console
- Your browser's developer tools
- Google Lighthouse
- Your mobile device
By using these tools, you can identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to enhance your website's usability and user experience.
Mobile Display Errors
Mobile Display Errors are a common issue that can affect your website's performance. Google informs you about critical errors in the Search Console, but only critical errors are reported, not all display errors.
You should also check your website's mobile display, as Google separates search results into two different indices - mobile and desktop. This means your mobile view should be error-free, especially since mobile visitors often make up around 70 percent of your website's traffic.
To fix mobile display errors, you can test all URLs and elements of your website on your own mobile device. However, there's a risk that the version of your website will still be displayed incorrectly for other device sizes or screen resolutions.
You can use browser developer tools to simulate the display on other devices, but you'll need to follow the specific instructions for your browser, such as Google Chrome, Apple Safari, or Firefox.
Here are the tools you can use to find and fix mobile display errors:
- Search Console
- Browser's developer tools
- Google Lighthouse
- Your mobile device
By following these steps and fixing mobile display errors, you can improve your website's performance and increase your chances of ranking higher in search results.
Speed
Fast websites rank better and attract more users. Data shows that the slower a page loads, the higher the chance of users leaving the website.
To check your site's speed, head to the "Site Performance" report from your Site Audit dashboard. You'll see a list of all the issues affecting your site's loading time.
Better loading speed helps you rank higher on Google. Address as many issues as you can, and you should see your site speed (and rankings) improve as a result.
Fast websites are not just good for rankings, but also for the user experience. A fast website is more likely to engage and retain users.
Here are some specific metrics to focus on for a fast website:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes to load the largest element on the page
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures how long it takes for a site to respond to user interactions
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how much the layout of the page shifts unexpectedly for the user
Duplicating Site Versions
Duplicating Site Versions can cause issues with crawling, indexing, and ranking. Having multiple versions of your site can dilute PageRank, which can negatively impact your SEO rankings.
Google will see multiple versions of your site as duplicates, which can lead to crawling and indexing problems. It's essential to ensure that Google indexes only one version of your site.
You can easily check if your site has multiple versions by entering all the versions into a web browser. If you're automatically redirected to the preferred version, that's a good sign.
For example, if your preferred URL version is "https://yoursite.com", you should be redirected to it if you enter any other version into your browser. If you can access your site through various versions, use a 301 redirect for the other versions.
Here are the different versions of a site that can cause duplication issues:
- http://www.yoursite.com
- http://yoursite.com
- https://www.yoursite.com
- https://yoursite.com
To avoid these issues, make sure to use a 301 redirect for the other versions of your site. This will help ensure that Google indexes only one version of your site.
Your Backlink Profile
Your backlink profile is like a report card for your website, showing you how well you're doing in terms of getting high-quality links from other websites. A high-quality link is like a recommendation in real life, and Google uses this information to assess your website's authority and ranking.
Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors in Google search results, with a high-quality link being worth a lot more than a low-quality one. Unfortunately, not all backlinks are created equal, and some may even harm your website's reputation.
Possible reasons for this could be purchased backlinks from dubious sources, spam attacks, referring websites that are no longer maintained, or websites that have been sold or not renewed and are now spam. Google is good at assessing the quality of backlinks, but sometimes you need to help "manually" by using tools like the Disavow tool.
Fortunately, with the Disavow tool, you can permanently exclude harmful links from the calculation of your rankings. This can lead to significant results, as shown in an example where tens of thousands of links from spam domains were "devalued" in the Disavow tool, resulting in a noticeable improvement in rankings.
Here's a checklist to help you analyze your backlink profile:
- Are the backlinks from thematically related websites?
- Are the backlinks from spam websites (e.g. pornographic content, scam, fake websites)?
- Are the backlinks from websites that are no longer maintained or have been sold/not renewed?
By regularly checking your backlink profile and removing any low-quality links, you can improve your website's authority and ranking over time.
The Local
The Local SEO Audit is a crucial step in optimizing your website for local search. It involves optimizing local subpages, Google My Business, and business directories.
You can use tools like Google My Business, Whitespark, and Yext (for German-speaking countries) to make this process easier. The difficulty level of a local SEO audit is relatively easy, but it can be time-consuming.
To ensure a successful local SEO audit, ask yourself questions like: Is there a suitable listing in Google My Business for every location? Is the data for each location in Google My Business up-to-date? Are the right business categories selected on Google Maps?
Here are some key points to consider during a local SEO audit:
- Is there a suitable listing in Google My Business for every location?
- Is the data for each location in Google My Business up-to-date?
- Are the right business categories selected on Google Maps?
- Does the Google My Business entry have sufficient and high-quality photos or videos?
- Is your company listed in Germany's most important business directories?
- Is the company data in every business directory entry up-to-date?
- Is the information in each business directory entry relevant?
- Interface to link building: If your services or products are only offered in this region, are there also backlinks from the region that are important for local rankings?
Additionally, you should also consider the following:
Google My Business Posts / local posts are a great way to engage with your audience. Availability for questions or a chat function can also improve user experience. However, be careful not to engage in keyword stuffing in your company name, as it may be against Google My Business guidelines.
Intriguing read: Seo for Small Business Packages
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is the best tool for SEO audit?
For an SEO audit, consider using Ahrefs Site Audit or Semrush, both of which offer comprehensive site audits and detailed analysis to help improve your website's performance.
Are SEO audits worth it?
Boost your website's performance and revenue with an SEO audit, which identifies opportunities to improve your online presence and outshine competitors
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