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Technical SEO Audit Checklist

SEO Audit Checklist

No matter what niche you are in, SEO audits are an integral part of any business strategy. In fact, many successful businesses owe much of their success to good SEO audits. As the importance of Google and other search engines continue to increase, so does the need for businesses to stay on top of their SEO audit game. If you’re looking to improve your SEO rankings, consider this ultimate SEO audit checklist as your guide.

What Does SEO Audit Entail?

SEO Audits are a formalized way of performing SEO evaluations. These are mandatory processes and should be done every year or so to determine how well your site is performing. You can use this SEO Audit Checklist to start with, but it’s definitely worth it to hire an external company or expert to perform an audit as well. The biggest benefit to having someone else do it is that they will provide you with a detailed report that you can then use to improve your SEO efforts moving forward.

What Are The Different Types Of Website SEO Audit Checklist?

There are various types of SEO Audits. They include;

1. SEO Content Audit

This means going through each page of your website and making sure that it has all of the necessary SEO elements. For example, is there a title tag?

  • Does the page include an H1 tag?
  • Is there sufficient content on every page?
  • Are there any instances of duplicated content?

All of these things are crucial to ensure that your site ranks well in search engines. The same goes for pages that are not technically part of your websites, such as guest posts and press releases. Make sure you’re including all relevant SEO elements when posting them online.

2. On-page SEO Audit

This type of SEO audit involves checking each individual page to make sure it meets certain requirements. For example, you’ll want to check your titles and meta descriptions to make sure they are both well written and optimized for search engines. You’ll also want to check your keyword density (i.e., how many times a particular keyword appears on a page) and compare it with that of competing websites in your industry.

3. Off-page SEO Audit

This SEO audit checks all of your external factors, such as links and citations. You’ll want to make sure that you have a certain number of links pointing to your website from high-authority websites in your industry. For example, if you are an SEO company, you’ll want to make sure that all of your client sites have relevant links back to yours.

4. Technical SEO Audit

This type of SEO audit involves checking your website to make sure it meets certain requirements. For example, you’ll want to check that your website is coded properly and isn’t giving search engines any trouble. You’ll also want to check that each page on your site has a title tag, meta description tag, and is correctly linked. These are just a few examples of what you might look at when performing a technical SEO audit on your site.

5. Local SEO audit

A local SEO audit involves checking to make sure that your website is optimized to show up in local search results. For example, if you own a restaurant in Toronto, you’ll want to ensure that Google knows about it when someone searches for restaurants in Toronto. You can do so by including certain keywords and phrases on your site (such as restaurant Toronto) and linking back to your site from relevant online directories.

SEO Audit Tools

To perform SEO Audits smoothly, you’ll require specific types of tools. Some of them include:

1. SEO Software

SEO Software plays an integral role in SEO audit. It helps you in analyzing and auditing your website’s on-page optimization. These tools are very easy to use and can save a lot of time. Basically, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, and SEMrush are some of them. They provide you with a list of backlinks pointing to your site as well as keywords that are ranking higher than yours and also those who have lower rankings than yours. You should make sure that these backlinks are relevant and quality ones so that they don’t harm your SEO rankings.

2. Google Search Console

Google search console is another SEO tool that is used by SEO experts while performing SEO audits on their websites or client websites. It helps you in getting a detailed report of your website’s backlinks, indexing status, crawl errors, and much more. It also provides you with an opportunity to remove spammy links from your site as well as disavow low-quality links pointing to your site.

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most widely used SEO tools which helps you in analyzing all aspects of your website such as traffic sources, bounce rate, average time spent on pages, and much more. It also provides you with a list of keywords ranking higher than yours and those who have lower rankings than yours. You can use these keywords to improve your SEO strategy.

4. Page Speed Tools

It is another essential SEO tool that helps you in improving your website’s performance. You can also test your website’s speed using some of these tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and WebPageTest. These tools will help you in identifying SEO issues related to page load time on your site. If there are any issues with your site’s loading time, then it might negatively affect your SEO rankings as well as user experience. Make sure that you fix all such issues before publishing a new post on your site so that it doesn’t affect user experience and ultimately doesn’t harm SEO rankings either.

SEO Audit Checklist

1. Look For Link Building Opportunities (Both Internal And External Link Building)

The initial thing you’ll need is to do is look at your site and see what link-building opportunities are available. These could be links from other relevant sites or internal links from pages on your own site. You want to look at both of these types of opportunities because they can help with both SEO and conversion rates.

How To Create Internal Links

You can start developing internal links by looking at your sitemap and seeing what pages are missing. If you don’t have a sitemap, you should create one immediately.

Once you’ve created a sitemap, look at your site and see if any pages would be relevant to link to from other pages on your site. For example, if you have an About Us page, it might make sense to link from that page to another page on your site about your team or company history.

How To Create External Links

Getting links from other sites is a bit more complicated than creating internal links.

First, you’ll need to find relevant sites that would be willing to link to your site. You can do that by using a tool like BuzzSumo or Ahrefs. Both of these tools let you search for content on a specific topic and see which pages are getting shared on social media.

2. Find Out The Site Structure Improvements

Site structure is critical when it comes to SEO. In addition to SEO, many site structure decisions also have a big impact on your user experience. It’s important that you make these decisions based on data and not just gut feeling.

How To Improve Site Structure

You can start by redistributing the internal linking structure. If you have a lot of pages that are all linked to just one page, you should consider moving some of those links to other relevant pages. You can also consider reaching out to the designers and developers who will be working on your site to see if they would be willing to implement any SEO best practices during development.

3. Search (And Fix) Thin Content

Thin content is a big problem on many sites. You must take steps to fix it as soon as possible because Google has announced plans to begin penalizing sites with thin content

How Do I Find Thin Content?

Choose pages. In Google Search Console, you can use their Search Analytics tool to see which pages are getting searched for most often. If you find that a lot of your content is being searched for but isn’t very valuable, then it’s probably thin content.

Check your PageRank distribution. If you have too many high-PageRank links and not enough low-PageRank links, then it could be an indication that some of your content is thin.

4. Find (And Fix) Duplicate/Plagiarized Content

Sometimes you can use a tool like Copyscape to find duplicate content that doesn’t include links. That way, you can focus on fixing just duplicate content that’s already published and avoid spending time finding problems with new pages.

5. Consider Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization plays a major role in search engine rankings. You may find that you’re missing opportunities to rank if you’re not finding ways to optimize your keywords and content around them.

How Do I Optimize My Site?

Start by identifying high-volume, low-competition keywords. Using tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SEMrush, you can see which keywords are getting searched for most often. If any words on your site would be relevant to those searches but aren’t being optimized for those words, then it’s time to get started optimizing.

6. Optimize Meta Tags

Meta tags are HTML codes that identify information about your web pages. Meta tags help search engines and users better understand your content and determine how it should be indexed. Optimizing meta tags is easy, but you can run into problems if you don’t do it correctly.

How To Optimize Meta Tags

You can optimize your meta tags by following these steps:

1. Choose a title and description for your page. The title of your page is what appears in search results, so it’s important to choose a descriptive title that will help users find your content when they search.

2. Write meta descriptions for each page on your site. A meta description is an HTML tag that contains a short description of your web page that will be displayed in search results if you don’t include a title for each page.

7. Update The Page

Update your page with relevant keywords, a clear description of your business, and clear navigational links. If you’re unsure what to include on your page, think about what people are searching for when they come across your site. This will help you determine what information is most important to include.

8. Run Page Speed Analytics

While you’re at it, check your site’s page speed. The faster your pages load, the more likely visitors are to stick around. There are plenty of tools that can help with that, like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom. And if you want a little extra guidance on how to improve your site’s performance, there are also services like WebPageTest that will analyze every aspect of your site for free. (Just make sure you understand what they’re telling you!)

9. Scan For Errors

Because search engines are programmed to look for specific elements in a webpage, it’s important to make sure your SEO audit checklist includes scanning for common errors that could damage your rankings. This includes things like incorrect meta descriptions and unresponsive code. If you don’t know how to do these checks, you can ask professionals for help.

10. Change From HTTP To HTTPS

If you haven’t already, it’s a good idea to change your site from HTTP to HTTPS. HTTPS encrypts traffic between visitors and your website, and for many websites, there are additional benefits—such as increased customer trust in website security, better search engine rankings, and higher click-through rates on ads.

Final Word

Although there are several SEO audit checklists floating around out there, your business must be prepared for any changes that could be coming down from Google at any time. The latest version of this SEO audit checklist will help you identify and remedy any potential issues with your site. The checklist can also futureproof it against any unexpected algorithm updates or new ranking factors.

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