SEO Audit Checklist Pdf for Improving Website Performance and Rankings

An SEO audit is like a health check for your website, helping you identify areas that need improvement to boost performance and rankings. It's essential to have a clear checklist to guide you through the process.

To get started, download our comprehensive SEO audit checklist PDF, which covers over 100 key areas to evaluate. This will save you time and ensure you don't miss any critical aspects.

The checklist includes a thorough examination of your website's technical setup, including page speed, mobile responsiveness, and SSL encryption. Don't worry if you're not tech-savvy; the PDF provides clear explanations and actionable steps for each section.

A well-structured SEO audit checklist PDF will help you prioritize tasks, allocate resources, and track progress. By following this checklist, you'll be able to identify and fix technical issues, optimize content, and enhance user experience, ultimately leading to improved search engine rankings.

An SEO audit is a thorough examination of your website to identify areas for improvement and increase organic traffic. It's a crucial step in optimizing your website for search engines.

During an SEO audit, you can find the target audience portrait, which helps you understand who your ideal customers are. This information can be used to tailor your content and marketing efforts.

An in-depth technical audit can also help you collect primary information about your project, including its goals and objectives. This information is essential for creating a solid SEO strategy.

An SEO audit allows you to assess current SEO metrics, such as traffic and engagement. This information can be used to identify areas for improvement and track progress over time.

By conducting an SEO audit, you can customize meta tags, which are the HTML tags that provide information about a webpage's content. This can help improve your website's visibility in search engine results.

An SEO audit can also help you improve backlink crawling, which is the process of search engines discovering and indexing your website's links. This can increase your website's authority and ranking.

Here are some key benefits of an SEO audit:

To gather project information, you should start by deciding on the goals of the audit, which can vary depending on the scope and objectives.

First, obtain as much information as possible about the client's work, business data, and approximate performance indicators. This will help you understand the project's context and requirements.

You can use tools like Serpstat or alternative services to get data on keywords the site already ranks for, analyze links and visibility for the last year, and more.

Required accesses include Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Analyzing an SEO report, if available, can also be helpful in understanding the work that has already been done and identifying pending tasks.

A content audit is a crucial step in an SEO audit, and while it's impossible to delegate this process completely to robots, you can automate a major part of it with specialized tools. This process involves working with texts and content, which requires human expertise.

A harmonious site structure is essential for a successful SEO audit. A large site is not homogeneous, but rather consists of several sections, each corresponding to a sub-niche with its own search demand, competition, and user behavior patterns.

You can identify opportunities to improve the accuracy, recency, and quality of content on your pages by conducting an SEO content audit. This type of audit may also include identifying opportunities to optimize for the featured snippet, people also ask section, and passage ranking.

Here are some key areas to focus on during an SEO content audit:

Content is a crucial aspect of any website, and it's essential to get it right. A content audit can help identify areas for improvement, but it's impossible to delegate this process to robots completely - a human SEO auditor still needs to work with texts and content.

Google E-A-T is a guide for SEO content audits, which involves identifying opportunities to improve the accuracy, recency, and quality of content on specific pages. This type of audit may also include optimizing for featured snippets, people also ask sections, and passage ranking.

Thin content can harm your website's performance in search engine results pages (SERPs). Panda, a 2011 Google algorithm update, cracked down on sites with thin content. Thin content fails to meet user needs, and a 300-word blog post explaining a complex concept would be considered thin.

To identify and fix thin content, select pages that have dropped in performance or rank, and export your top pages by traffic. Ensure each page is sufficiently beefed up with content. You can also use site audit tools to identify pages with little to no content and create a plan to fix each one.

Long-form content has two big benefits: more opportunities to link internally and more opportunities to squeeze in target, ancillary, and LSI keywords. This can help pages get found.

Analyzing your website's structure is crucial for an SEO audit. It involves looking at the overall organization of your site, including the types of site structures, such as linear, branched, tree, and mixed.

There are many types of site structures, and you should determine if your site's structure looks harmonious after expanding the keyword list. If not, it may need to be redone. For example, in an online store, you can categorize goods into sections like "Microphones and accessories", which can then be divided into "Microphones" and "Accessories."

A large site can consist of several sections, each corresponding to a sub-niche with its own search demand, competition, and user behavior patterns. This means an audit must contain a comparative analysis of the sections to identify potential problems and inconsistencies.

To analyze your site structure, collect data on the number of pages, indexing, traffic, conversions, and backlink profile in a pivot table. This will help you identify issues and inconsistencies at a glance.

Here are some tips to improve your site architecture:

Unless you're auditing your own site, IA-based recommendations should hinge on the goals of project stakeholders. This will help you define and organize content in a way that aligns with your target audience and business goals.

Having multiple language versions of your website is a great way to reach a broader audience, but it requires some extra work to make it work for search engines.

For search engines to consider all site versions (language), arranging them on separate URLs is necessary.

You'll also need to set the hreflang attribute for alternate pages, which is relevant primarily for Google.

It's essential to include links from one page to another, so each page version has a connection to the others.

Don't forget to add all your page versions to the Sitemap using the "loc" element.

If you're not careful, you might end up with errors related to the incorrect use of the hreflang tag.

Natural content is all about authenticity and relevance. It's essential to create content that resonates with your audience and provides value to them. To achieve this, you can start by identifying opportunities to improve the accuracy, recency, and quality of your content, as mentioned in the SEO content audit section.

Natural links are another crucial aspect of content creation. Unfortunately, there's no exact way to automate determining naturalness, but you can check link anchors through the Serpstat report "Backlink Anchors." This will help you understand how authoritative the site is.

When evaluating links, consider each one separately and assess its naturalness. For instance, how concisely and unobtrusively is the link presented? This will help you determine whether the link is genuinely relevant to your content or just a paid promotion.

To create high-quality content, focus on the following:

By following these tips, you can create natural content that resonates with your audience and improves your website's credibility and ranking.

Meta tags are snippets of HTML code that help search engines understand what a page is about.

They're crucial for getting ranked in search results, and the two most important tags are the title tag and meta description.

Search engines will use this information to understand the content of the page, and it's usually displayed in search results.

Your title is the first thing people will read in the search engine page results and decide whether they want to click on your link or not.

Meta descriptions are short text that appears under your post title and URL on search engine page results, and they help describe your article to search engines and users.

To add meta tags, you can use AIOSEO in your WordPress editor and scroll down to the ‘AIOSEO Settings’ meta box.

AIOSEO’s on-page SEO analysis, called TruSEO, will also alert you if any page or post is missing meta tags.

You should ensure that the meta tags aren’t missing from your blog posts or product pages during an SEO audit.

Duplicate content is a common issue that can hinder your SEO, but it's often unintentional.

Google is smart enough to know whether or not you're intentionally duplicating content to clog the SERP with your site's URLs.

A more likely scenario is that duplicate content is happening unintentionally, such as with dynamically generated archive pages in CMS systems like WordPress.

Anything that causes Google's crawlers to have to do more thinking or more work can hinder your SEO.

If you're concerned about incurring Google penalties, this post from Google can set you at ease.

A technical SEO audit is a crucial step in any SEO audit checklist. It involves on-page efforts like image optimization and performance metrics like site speed and security. A technical SEO audit will identify opportunities to fix, eliminate, or reorganize code, prevent spam, switch from HTTP to HTTPS, and more.

Server parameters play a significant role in site loading speed, affecting usability and search engine rankings. To optimize your site at the server level, use caching, compression, and a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

To fix broken links, use a tool like Broken Link Check or crawling software like Screaming Frog. Broken links can fracture your internal linking structure and negatively impact user experience.

Google Search Console is a great tool to review your robots.txt file and see which pages are being crawled.

You can also use Serpstat Site Audit to check if the correct pages are closed in robots.txt.

Be careful when setting up robots.txt on test subdomains, as they should not be indexed and should be closed in robots.txt.

One wrong move, like changing "Allow: /" to "Disallow: /", can cause your site to not be indexed or even dropped out of the index.

To find webpages that Google isn't indexing, head back to Google Search Console and click the "Pages" report under "Indexing."

This report provides information about pages Google hasn’t indexed.

Clicking into any of these reasons will show you a list of the pages with that issue.

You might accidentally block a page with your robots.txt file or with a noindex tag.

Note that not everything you see in this report is an issue to fix, and you might want to block some pages with robots.txt.

Pages that no longer exist should return a 404 error to avoid sending your readers to them.

Follow the next step to avoid these issues and ensure your site is properly indexed.

You can use an XML sitemap to help search engine algorithms find and index your website pages easily. It's a crucial step in technical SEO.

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content. This is especially helpful for new websites with few backlinks.

You can use modules or plugins to generate a sitemap on a traditional CMS, such as WordPress, where you can install the Yoast SEO plugin to enable sitemap generation.

Employing a non-standard CMS, you can use the free SiteAnalyzer tool to generate a sitemap in XML format. After that, you need to download the file to the file's root folder and use it to submit to the systems you need.

Having a sitemap won't instantly boost your search engine rankings, but it will help search engines crawl your website better.

Server parameters play a significant role in the site loading speed, which affects the usability and the position in the search results. This is especially important because a slow-loading site can lead to frustrated users and a higher bounce rate.

To optimize your site at the server level, consider the following best practices. Caching is a must, as it reduces the load on your server by storing frequently accessed data in a faster, more accessible location.

Compression is also essential, as it reduces the file size of your website's content, making it load faster for users. This is a simple yet effective way to improve your site's performance.

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is another great way to speed up your site. A CDN stores copies of your website's content in multiple locations around the world, reducing the distance between users and your site's data.

To perform a thorough technical SEO audit, you'll need the right tools. SEO software like Ahrefs, Moz Pro, and SEMrush are essential for crawling your website and identifying common inefficiencies that can drag down your site's organic performance.

You'll also need Google Search Console to analyze keywords, organic CTR, technical fixes, Core Web Vitals, and submit pages for reindexing. And don't forget Google Analytics to measure the impact of your actions and prioritize your action items based on traffic.

For page speed analysis, Google's PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix are reliable and free tools. You can also use Screaming Frog's crawling software to identify broken links, which can hurt user experience and SEO.

Here are some essential tools for technical SEO:

Remember, getting an instant SEO audit with the LOCALiQ Website Grader can also be a helpful starting point.

Broken links are a natural part of a website's evolution, but they can still cause problems for users and search engines. 404 errors occur when a link goes to a page that no longer exists at that URL.

A 404 error is generally caused by broken links and images within your site. Broken links don't result in site penalties, but they can fracture your internal linking structure and be a pain for users trying to navigate from one page to another.

To find broken links, you can use the Broken Link Checker plugin by AIOSEO, which scans your WordPress site to look for broken links in your posts, pages, and custom post types. It's an essential tool for making sure all of your internal and external links are functioning correctly.

Having a lot of broken links can be bad for your site's SEO, as they can have a negative impact on your keyword rankings and user experience. You can fix broken links by setting up 301 redirections or using AIOSEO's powerful redirection manager.

Fixing broken links is a matter of determining how important each link is to your linking structure and user experience. You can use a tool like Broken Link Check or crawling software like Screaming Frog to identify and fix broken links on your site.

Page rendering is a crucial stage in Google's analysis of your content. It's the process of rendering your page as a user would see it, which involves executing your JavaScript.

Google's crawling stage is the first step, followed by rendering. If there are issues with your JavaScript, Google won't be able to see your pages properly. This could be a broken reviews section or interactive buttons that don't work.

You can check how Google renders your pages using Google Search Console's URL Inspection Tool. Just test a page and click the "View Tested Page" button. You'll see a screenshot on the right-hand side that shows how Google "sees" your rendered page.

Look for differences between that and how your page should appear. If you spot any issues, the Semrush Site Audit tool can quickly highlight any problems with your site's JavaScript.

Page rendering is especially important for interactive elements like reviews and buttons. If they're not working properly, it can hurt your site's user experience and search engine rankings.

Optimizing images on your website is crucial for improving loading speed. The main reason for slow loading is often large images, so it's essential to fix them first.

You can use tools like Serpstat Audit to find and optimize large images on your site. This will help reduce the load time and improve user experience.

Large images can significantly slow down your website, so it's worth identifying and compressing them.

Backlink analysis is a crucial part of an SEO audit. You want to understand how many different websites are linking to your site, a metric known as referring domains. A study of 11.8 million search results found that the top result in Google has 3.8x more backlinks than pages in positions 2-10.

To analyze your backlinks, enter your domain into a backlink analysis tool like Semrush's Backlink Analytics tool. This will give you a report on your links, including your Authority Score, which measures the quality and quantity of your backlinks. A higher Authority Score indicates more authoritative links pointing to your site.

Remember, a few suspicious links are normal, and Google is good at filtering them out.

Backlink analysis is a crucial step in understanding your website's link profile. It's essential to analyze your backlinks to identify opportunities for improvement.

You'll want to enter your domain into a backlink analysis tool, such as Semrush, to get a report on your links. This report will show you the number of referring domains pointing to your site, which is a key indicator of your website's authority.

Your domain's Authority Score is also an important metric to look at. This score is based on factors like the quantity and quality of your backlinks, and it tells you how much authority your site has.

Toxic links can be a problem, so be sure to look for any suspicious links in your report. If you notice that most of your links are from shady sites, you may need to disavow those links to avoid any penalties.

Here's a breakdown of what to look for in a backlink analysis report:

Remember, a few spammy links are normal, and Google is good at filtering them out. But it's still essential to monitor your backlinks and address any issues that may arise.

You have a large website, you may want to consider the different types of SEO audits so you can prioritize accordingly. This way, you can break down your SEO audit into manageable chunks.

There are various types of SEO audits to choose from, depending on your website's specific needs. For example, a technical SEO audit focuses on website crawlability, mobile-friendliness, and page speed.

A content SEO audit, on the other hand, looks at the quality and relevance of your website's content. This includes keyword research, content optimization, and content creation strategies.

If you're looking to improve your website's user experience, a user experience (UX) SEO audit is a good place to start. This type of audit examines how your website's design and functionality impact user behavior.

A link equity SEO audit is also an option, which analyzes the quality and quantity of your website's backlinks. This can help you identify opportunities to improve your website's authority and ranking.

When creating a report after an SEO audit, keep it simple and understandable for non-specialists. This means highlighting the key issues and the required time and budget to fix them. Be prepared to tailor the report for different sites, as the content of some blocks may vary.

A SWOT analysis and competitor analysis should be included in the report to provide a comprehensive overview of the project. This will help stakeholders understand the strengths and weaknesses of the project, as well as the competitive landscape.

To ensure everyone is on the same page, include a summary that lists the most significant mistakes, assesses the risks and conditions of the site, and outlines the expected timeframe and required budget. This will provide a clear overview of the project's objectives and requirements.

To create a comprehensive reporting and optimization plan, start by making sure your report is simple and easy to understand, even for non-specialists. This will help everyone realize the problems and issues that need to be addressed.

A good report should include a summary of the most significant mistakes, an assessment of the risks and conditions of the site, as well as the expected timeframe and required budget.

To speed up the SEO reporting process, you can use custom reports in Serpstat, which will simplify the collection of statistics, make the data more accurate, and automate some of the processes.

You should also include additional blocks in the report, such as a SWOT analysis, which shows the strengths and weaknesses of the project, and an analysis of competitors.

Here's a list of the key points to include in your report:

By including these points, you'll provide a clear overview of the project's objectives and requirements, and help ensure that everyone understands what needs to be done.

Adding subheaders to your content is a simple yet effective way to improve its readability and search engine optimization (SEO). Relevant subheaders help break up your content into digestible chunks.

Google and users can quickly understand what the surrounding content is about. This is especially important for long-form content, where a clear structure helps keep readers engaged.

For example, a well-structured article with subheaders can improve user experience (UX) signals, which can in turn improve your rankings in search results. To rank well in Google, you should optimize for UX signals, and one way to do this is by making users happy with your content.

A good rule of thumb is to use subheaders to break up your content into sections that are 500-700 words long. This makes it easier for readers to scan and understand your content.

Here are some tips for adding effective subheaders:

By following these tips, you can improve the readability and SEO of your content.

Your WordPress site's performance can impact its search engine rankings. A good score of 70 or above in the AIOSEO plugin's SEO audit is a sign that your site is well-optimized for search engines.

To improve your site's performance, you can use the AIOSEO plugin's SEO Analysis Tool, which offers actionable insights to help you boost your organic traffic and keyword rankings. This tool is available in the AIOSEO free version and offers advanced features in the premium version.

Images missing alt attributes can hurt your SEO, so make sure to add alt text to your images. AIOSEO will highlight any critical issues on your site, including missing alt attributes, not setting an SEO title, and more.

Having an XML sitemap is essential for search engine algorithms to find and index your website pages easily. It also allows website owners to tell search engines about the most important pages on their website.

An XML sitemap helps search engines crawl your website better, especially when you're starting a new website with little backlinks. This is because it helps Google or Bing quickly discover new content on your website.

To create sitemaps, you can use the AIOSEO WordPress plugin. Simply head over to All in One SEO » Sitemaps from your WordPress dashboard and go to the ‘General Sitemap’ tab.

Make sure that the toggle for ‘Enable Sitemap’ is switched on to activate the sitemap. You can also preview the sitemap and use different options provided by the WordPress plugin to edit the sitemap.

Besides creating a general sitemap, the plugin also allows you to create video, news, and RSS sitemaps for your WordPress site.

Here's a quick rundown of the types of sitemaps you can create with AIOSEO:

Once the sitemap is created, you can submit it to different search engines like Google and Bing.

Internal links are links from other pages on the same website, while external links are links to other websites. They are crucial for SEO success, yet many business owners overlook their importance.

Search engines follow different links to find and index new pages in the search results. Creating internal and external links allows search engine crawlers to discover new content on your website and boost rankings easily.

You can use tools like AIOSEO's Link Assistant feature to discover any pages that need more internal links. It even shows orphaned posts, which are pages with no internal links at all.

Fixing broken links is crucial for a smooth user experience and healthy SEO. Broken links occur when a link goes to a page that no longer exists at that URL, resulting in a 404 not found error.

A 404 error can happen due to various reasons, including moving a WordPress site to a new domain, deleting a page, or moving it to a new location. It can also occur due to typos.

Having a lot of broken links can negatively impact your keyword rankings and user experience. Search engines and website users won't find the page they're looking for.

To find broken links, you can use the Broken Link Checker plugin by AIOSEO, which automatically scans your WordPress site to look for broken links in your posts, pages, and custom post types.

You can fix broken links by editing the URL or removing the link in just a few clicks. Broken Link Checker monitors broken links without slowing down your website.

If you have broken links from changing the URL of an existing post, deleting content, or moving your site to a new domain, you can fix them by setting up 301 redirections. AIOSEO's powerful redirection manager allows you to easily set up redirects.

Site audit tools can also identify all the 404s within your site, making it easier to fix broken links.

Internal and External Controls are crucial for SEO success. Many business owners overlook their importance.

Search engines follow different links to find and index new pages in the search results. Creating internal and external links allows search engine crawlers to discover new content on your website and boost rankings easily.

Internal links are links from other pages on the same website. They help your readers navigate your website and find sources for stats and other information.

You can use a tool like AIOSEO’s Link Assistant feature to discover any pages that need more internal links. It even shows orphaned posts, which are pages with no internal links at all.

The Link Assistant will provide linking suggestions, including anchor text, that you can add to your content in 1-click. This makes link-building super easy.

External links or outbound links are links to other websites. They help your readers find sources for stats and other information.

Information architecture is a crucial aspect of website organization, and it's all about the way information is ordered and structured. IA is what makes your website intuitive and user-friendly.

To improve site architecture, you need to redistribute internal linking structures to pass equity to the pages that need it. This means working closely with developers and designers to develop solutions that won't compromise user experience.

Increasing the number of blog posts per page is a great way to bring older posts closer to the homepage, where the most equity lies. This can be done by changing the blog index to list more pages at a time.

Overlapping links, such as "related posts" and "popular posts" sections, can be a problem. These duplicate links can be replaced with links to other pages to which you want to pass equity.

To fully maximize link space, you should check for and eliminate duplicate links. This will allow you to direct users to the pages that are most important to your business goals.

Here are some tips to help you improve your website's architecture:

Removing Zombie Pages can be a game-changer for your website's performance. These are pages that might have had value at one point in time but now don't drive traffic or help users.

Google has indexed many more pages than expected, with some sites having 50-75% more indexed pages than they'd think. Zombie Pages use up your crawl budget and make the rest of your SEO audit more complicated.

Deleting Zombie Pages makes the process much easier, with fewer pages to deal with. These pages often include irrelevant archive pages, empty category and tag pages, search result pages, old press releases, and thin content.

Here are the most common types of Zombie Pages:

You can find these Zombie Pages by checking your Google Search Console and looking for the "Pages" report under "Indexing." This report will show you pages that Google isn't indexing, and you can click into each reason to see a list of affected pages.

By removing Zombie Pages, you'll free up your crawl budget and make it easier to focus on the pages that matter most.