The Complete SEO Audit Checklist Guide

An SEO audit checklist is a comprehensive guide that helps you evaluate and improve your website's search engine optimization. It's like a doctor's checkup for your website, identifying areas that need attention and providing a roadmap for improvement.

A well-crafted SEO audit checklist should include a thorough examination of your website's technical foundation. This includes checking for crawl errors, which can prevent search engines from accessing certain pages of your site.

To conduct a successful SEO audit, you'll need to assess your website's content and structure. This involves reviewing your page titles, meta descriptions, and header tags to ensure they're accurate and descriptive.

A good SEO audit checklist will also evaluate your website's internal linking and content duplication. This includes checking for broken links, which can harm user experience and search engine rankings.

In an SEO audit, it's crucial to detect crawlability and indexing issues. This is because Google and other search engines need to be able to crawl and index your website for your pages to rank.

To identify crawlability and indexing issues, use a tool like WebSite Auditor to navigate to Site Audit > Indexing and crawlability. There, you'll need to pay attention to three key elements: robots.txt, XML sitemap, and proper HTTP response codes.

Here are the specific issues to look out for:

By addressing these issues, you can ensure that your website is crawlable and indexable, which is essential for good search engine rankings.

To analyze your organic traffic, start by checking your Google Analytics account. Head to "Reports" > "Acquisition" > "Traffic acquisition" and look for "Organic Search" as the primary channel group.

This will give you an idea of how much traffic you're driving through search engines. You can tweak the timeframe to see your organic traffic performance over a longer period.

Identify which pages on your site drive the most clicks from Google using the "Performance" report in Google Search Console. Go to the "Pages" tab to see which pages perform best and which need work.

Understanding which pages drive the most clicks will help you prioritize your efforts during and after your SEO audit. If your organic traffic is flat or declining, don't worry – the goal in this step is just to establish benchmarks.

To segment your users and learn more about their behavior on site, identify the traffic sources that are the highest value or lead to the most conversions in Google Analytics.

To scan your site and detect crawlability and indexing issues, you'll want to run an in-depth site scan to gather all website pages and resources. This approach sets the stage for a thorough analysis of your entire site.

You can initiate the scan by opening WebSite Auditor and creating a project. Enter your website's URL and click Next. You can also set up additional parameters, such as scan depth limits, JavaScript rendering, and URL parameters, in the expert options.

A thorough examination of every page may take some time, so feel free to grab a coffee or proceed with other tasks while the process is completed. There are cases when you don't need to crawl the entire website but rather check specific sections or campaigns.

To verify if there are any crawlability and indexing issues, navigate to Site Audit > Indexing and crawlability in WebSite Auditor. Here, you need to pay attention to the following elements: robots.txt, XML sitemap, and proper HTTP response codes.

Two types of crawlability and indexing issues exist: a URL is NOT indexed but it should be, and a URL is indexed although it's NOT supposed to be. You can use WebSite Auditor to detect these issues and fix them accordingly.

To ensure your website is crawled and indexed properly, check for the following:

By addressing these issues, you can improve your website's crawlability and indexing, which will help your pages rank better in search engines.

Identify your 5 most important pages and focus on optimizing them. These pages can be the ones that target an important keyword, get less traffic than they did in the past, or already rank well but have the potential to crack the top 5.

To optimize these pages, include your keyword in the title tag, first 100 words, and meta description. Add 5+ external links and 5+ internal links to improve the user experience. Use helpful, SEO-optimized images to enhance the content.

Here are some common mistakes to avoid:

By avoiding these mistakes and following the optimization strategies, you can improve the on-page SEO of your website and increase your search engine rankings.

Technical SEO and optimization are crucial for ensuring that your website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines. A technical SEO audit can help identify crawlability and indexing issues that may be hindering your website's visibility in search engine results.

To perform a technical SEO audit, you can use tools like Screaming Frog or Semrush, which can help you identify issues like broken links, internal redirects, and "spider traps" that can hinder effective crawling. You should also check your website's XML sitemap and robots.txt file to ensure that they are properly configured.

One of the most common crawlability mistakes is the lack of links on certain pages, such as mobile sites missing header menus, which can result in orphan pages. To address this, you can implement extra code or directly add links into the HTML.

It's also essential to check that your website is properly indexed by Google. You can do this by searching for "site:domain.com" and checking if the number of pages indexed is close to the number of pages on your site. Ideally, the number of pages indexed should closely align with the number of landing pages recorded in analytics over a year.

If you've made changes to your website, such as moving from HTTP to HTTPS or adding structured data, you can ask Google to recrawl your site by submitting the updated URL to the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console.

Here are some common crawlability and indexing issues to watch out for:

To fix these issues, you can use tools like Screaming Frog or Semrush to identify and resolve crawlability and indexing problems. You should also regularly check your website's crawlability and indexing issues using tools like WebSite Auditor.

By addressing technical SEO issues, you can improve your website's crawlability and indexing, which can lead to better search engine rankings and increased visibility.

To rank well in Google, you should optimize for UX signals, which means your content needs to make users happy. This includes creating a step-by-step guide, including actionable tips, and adding examples from different industries.

To show up in the featured snippet spot, you need to use lots of relevant headers, include short answers to questions, and optimize your content for mobile. The ideal answer length is around 40 words or less.

Featured snippets can dramatically increase your organic traffic, as seen in an example where a YouTube channel description guide showed up in the featured snippet spot and organic traffic shot up.

Don't ignore AI overviews, which may replace or appear alongside featured snippets for many searches. Following general SEO best practices, such as ensuring Google can crawl and index your content, targeting the right keywords, and creating helpful optimized content, can help with AI overviews.

To optimize for UX signals and featured snippets, consider the following:

By following these tips, you can improve your rankings in search results and create a better user experience.

Content and Keyword Analysis is a crucial step in optimization and improvement. This is where you evaluate your site's content and keyword strategy to ensure it's aligned with your target audience and business objectives.

Conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant phrases and topics for your content assets. This will help you understand what keywords to target and how to optimize your on-page elements.

Keyword usage is also important, as it can impact your site's topical authority and ranking. Aim for a keyword density of 0.5-2% and use variations of your target keywords throughout your content.

A common mistake is using generic title tags or keyword stuffing, which can harm your site's credibility. Instead, use descriptive and unique title tags, and incorporate your target keywords naturally into your content.

To evaluate your site's authoritativeness, look for keywords with high search volume and relevance to your business. Use tools like Google Search Console to identify areas where your competition ranks but you don't, and create more authoritative content to fill those gaps.

Here are some key areas to focus on during your content and keyword analysis:

By analyzing your site's content and keyword strategy, you can identify areas for improvement and optimize your site for better search engine rankings and user experience.

To optimize and improve your online presence, you need to understand how people are interacting with your website. This is where analytics and tracking come in.

You should check if Google Analytics has been set up correctly before auditing the actual results.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but it's not much use if it's not set up right.

To track your progress, you need a way to monitor your keyword rankings.

We'll use Semrush's Position Tracking tool, which automatically finds keywords that you rank for, in addition to tracking the ones you give it.

Pro tip: Use our free keyword rank checker to see where you rank for top keywords.

Moving the Google Analytics tracking code into Google Tag Manager can be a good idea, especially if it's currently embedded directly on the website or implemented via a 3rd party plugin.

Analyzing your competitors and topical authority is a crucial step in optimization and improvement. You can use tools like Semrush to find your competitors' best keywords and analyze their pages that are ranking for those terms.

This will give you an idea of what type of content works best in your niche. For example, if you look at some of the highest-ranking pages, you'll notice that they often have long-form content (3k+ words), custom visuals and illustrations, and cite research studies and data.

To analyze your competitors' backlink profiles, you can use Semrush's Backlink Analytics tool. This will tell you what content gets links and what kinds of websites already link to the kind of content you might want to create.

You can also use Semrush to find your competitors' best keywords and analyze their pages that are ranking for those terms. By doing this, you can identify areas where you can improve your content and increase your chances of ranking.

To check your website's topical authority, you can use a tool like Graphite's Topical Authority Analysis spreadsheet. This will automatically pull information from your Google Search Console property and provide you with a breakdown of keywords and phrases your website ranks for and gets clicks for.

By analyzing your competitors and topical authority, you can gain a better understanding of your strengths and weaknesses and make informed decisions about how to improve your content and increase your chances of ranking.

Here are some key metrics to track when analyzing your competitors:

Adding subheaders and structured data can make a huge difference in how search engines understand and display your content. Relevant subheaders help break up your content into digestible chunks, making it easier for users and search engines to understand what the surrounding content is about.

According to Example 8, "Add Lots of Subheaders" is a key strategy to improve your content's readability and search engine visibility. By using relevant subheaders, you can help Google and users understand what the surrounding content is about.

Structured data, on the other hand, is a semantic markup that lets search bots better understand a page's content. If your pages contain information about an individual, product, or local business, among others, then the markup is especially recommended. As mentioned in Example 12, structured data can help you land rich snippets in search results, like this:

To implement structured data correctly, you can use a tool like the Schema Validator or check your Site Audit report in Semrush. It's also essential to review the markup for errors and strategically plan the optimal schema for key website templates.

By adding subheaders and structured data to your content, you can improve its readability, search engine visibility, and user experience.

To start with an SEO audit checklist, you need to set up analytics tools. Google Search Console is the go-to tool for getting basic audit data and assessing your rankings from Google's perspective.

You'll also need an additional tool to provide a comprehensive technical overview of your website, which is where SEO PowerSuite's WebSite Auditor comes in.

A competitor analysis is a crucial step in understanding how to improve your website's performance. You should analyze your competitors' best keywords using a tool like Semrush, as they can give you a good chance to rank for them too.

Backlinks are still really important, and you want to analyze your own backlink profile. Enter your domain into a backlink analysis tool like Semrush to get a report on your links. Pay particular attention to how many referring domains you have pointing to your site.

You also want to take a look at your domain's Authority Score, which tells you how much authority your site has based on factors like the quantity and quality of your backlinks. Don't sweat the exact numbers too much; you're just benchmarking where you're at.

To analyze your competitors' backlink profiles, jump back into Semrush's Backlink Analytics tool for each page. This will tell you what types of websites already link to the kind of content you might want to create.

Here are some key metrics to compare between your website and your competitors:

Spammy links are a normal part of any link profile, so don't stress if you see a few suspicious links. Google is quite good at filtering for these anyway.

Using an XML sitemap is a crucial step in helping search engines understand your website's structure and crawl it more efficiently.

A sitemap should reside in the root folder on the server, typically found at mydomain.com/sitemap.xml or linked to/from the robots.txt file.

You can automate your CMS to update XML sitemaps with each new content piece, or use tools like seoClarity to generate sitemaps by crawling your site.

A well-structured sitemap should adhere to the sitemap protocol required by search engines for correct processing.

To ensure your sitemap is error-free, crawl the sitemap URLs to make sure they are free of errors, redirects, and non-canonical URLs.

A sitemap can contain up to 50,000 URLs, but if you exceed this limit, create a sitemap index linking to multiple sitemaps.

To monitor and error-check your sitemaps, organize them by page type (e.g., product pages, blog pages, category pages) and submit each to Google Search Console.

Common mistakes with XML sitemaps include containing URLs that redirect, return an error (404), canonical to a different URL, or are blocked.

Here are some common HTTP response code errors that can lead to indexing issues:

Regularly checking for these errors and fixing them can help improve your website's crawlability and search engine rankings.

HTTPS and SSL Encryption is no longer just a recommendation, it's a necessity for SEO. Google uses HTTPS encryption as a ranking signal, and not having it can put you at a competitive disadvantage.

Google Chrome marks secure sites with a padlock image in the address bar, and warns users when they try to access an insecure site. This is a clear indication that HTTPS is now the standard.

To ensure a smooth transition to HTTPS, it's essential to automatically convert any non-HTTPS visits to HTTPS through 301 redirects. This can be done using crawl tools like webconfs to verify the status code of your pages.

Mixed content issues can occur if you fail to move all assets (images, CSS, JavaScript) to HTTPS. This is a common mistake that can be avoided by carefully planning your HTTPS migration.

Here are some common mistakes to watch out for:

To avoid indexing both HTTP and HTTPS versions of your website, it's essential to set them properly. This can be done using tools like WebSite Auditor, which will automatically recrawl your website and send timely alerts if something goes wrong.

To access professional SEO tools, you'll need to set up analytics tools like Google Search Console, which provides basic audit data and ranking assessments from Google's perspective.

Google Search Console has limitations, so you'll also need an additional tool like SEO PowerSuite's WebSite Auditor for a comprehensive technical overview of your website.

You can download WebSite Auditor for free and use it to conduct a technical SEO audit.

Before embarking on a technical SEO audit, ensure your domain is penalty-free by checking Google Search Console's Security and Manual Actions tab.

If your site has been penalized, you'll see a corresponding notice, and it's essential to address the warning before proceeding with an SEO audit checklist.

Testing load experience and mobile-friendliness is crucial for a seamless user experience. Google prioritizes spotless UX, so the algorithms will consider your site more trustworthy as well.

More than 55% of all global traffic is on mobile devices, and Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means they use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking in mobile AND desktop search results.

To ensure your site is mobile-friendly, use a responsive design, create mobile-friendly content with short sentences and paragraphs, and use high-quality images that look crisp and clear on mobile.

You can use a tool like PageSpeed Insights to test your site's mobile-friendliness, or check your site's mobile-friendliness using Google Search Console.

Here are some common issues that affect mobile-friendliness:

Regular technical SEO audits can help you identify and fix these issues, ensuring a better search experience for your users.

Spot coding errors and hreflang issues can significantly impact your website's performance and visibility in search engine results. Incorrectly specified country codes or conflicting hreflang tags can lead to misinterpretation by search engines, improper indexing, and lower visibility.

Google can still see the code under the hood, even if it's not visible to users, and can affect loading speed and search engine rankings. Check your website's code during a technical SEO audit, scrutinizing aspects like formatting and syntax.

Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to specify language and geographical targeting of webpages in multilingual websites. To check your hreflang annotations, navigate to the Site Audit module and examine the Localization box.

Check Language Versions to see what language versions your website has, and review Pages with hreflang elements to get a list of URLs with those elements. This will help you identify and fix any potential issues.