How to Do an SEO Audit: The Ultimate Checklist is brought to you by SEA located in New York City

The foundation of good SEO is a strong on-page and technical foundation. If you don’t have that, then you’re going to be in some trouble. And if you don’t know what’s wrong with your site, an SEO audit can help paint a picture of where your site needs some work.

The audit I’m talking about is the SEO audit. In it, you’ll look at your site’s on-page and technical health and make a few key suggestions to boost the optimization of the site.

You can do an inline SEO audit by visiting your site’s Google Webmaster Tools account, but I prefer doing an offline SEO audit by searching through the site yourself. 

Get started on optimizing your website with the ultimate point website optimization checklist below. If you need professional help you can hire a full-time SEO consultant, SEA can Help.

At SEA, we work hard to help our customers succeed. We are one of the top SEO agencies in NYC that can help you boost site rankings and traffic. With our services, we will help improve rankings and increase traffic similar to a website’s competitors.

For more information on how we can help improve your site’s search engine optimization, contact us today! You can also get a free quote by clicking the link below.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a process of analyzing your website’s health, including on-page and technical properties. This evaluation will provide you with a list of things you can do to improve your rankings. The key is finding out what can be improved upon and then create an actionable plan based on all this information.

In addition to the SEO audit, you should also perform an on-page optimization audit to get a better understanding of your website’s technical functionality. A full-scale website analysis will provide you with a brief report that includes all of your site’s errors in XML sitemap and HTML markup.

An SEO audit will provide you with preventive suggestions for improving your site’s rankings and traffic on search engines.

Why is an SEO audit important?

If you want to get the most out of your website, then a full audit is a must. It will allow you to discover any errors that are currently present on your site, as well as provide you with solutions to fix them.

Remember, making just one change can have a dramatic effect on your rankings and traffic. By performing an SEO audit, you will be able to identify changes that don’t require any previous technical knowledge. This means that your maintenance team can make these changes on their own and boost your rankings.

How do you perform an SEO audit?

You need to customize this SEO audit based on the goals of your business. For example, if your main goal is to obtain a higher ranking for one of your target keywords, then you should focus on that specific keyword.

Furthermore, you need to decide whether you’re going to perform an online audit or an offline audit. In this case, it’s going to be online because you can get more data related to a site’s optimization by using the Google Webmaster Tools account. After that, you’ll need to determine how deep of an analysis you want to perform. The more comprehensive the SEO audit is, the better.

How do you check if a site is an SEO optimized?

The first thing you need to do is start by checking your site’s technical information in order to identify any errors that are currently present. This can be done by searching the database and identifying what’s getting the search engine crawlers stuck or slow down.

As I mentioned above, you’ll find this information on the Google Webmaster Tools page, but if you have access to your own web server, then you can also run some basic checks with the tools on there.

3 Tools to quickly check website SEO

Once you have a list of things that need to be fixed, you can see your site’s on-page optimization score. It’s a good idea to figure out how your competitors rank in the SERPs and then use this data to create a list of actionable steps to improve your site’s rankings.

Seositecheckup

This tool is a powerful web crawler that analyzes your website’s various elements and provides you with a list of actionable recommendations. It’s one of the most complete tools for performing an SEO audit because it gives you a detailed report about what you need to fix and improve.

SEO Powersuite

This is one of the best SEO tools for analyzing the site’s health, including on-page and technical elements. The tool provides them with a full set of recommendations to enhance your website’s performance on search engines.

Semrush

Another SEO toolbar that can be used to perform an on-page SEO audit and provide recommendations for actionable steps. The tool lets you know if there are errors in the site’s code, HTML, or content.

How to create a list of actionable steps to improve website SEO

Once you have your list of problems, it’s time to create an action plan that will improve your site’s ranking and traffic. The following ultimate SEO audit checklist will help: 

Common SEO Issues

1. Meta Title: The meta title tag is not working correctly. It is the first thing that gets crawled by search engines. To fix this issue, use your keywords in the right format and ensure that they are properly optimized.

2. Meta Description: This element gets crawled by search engines before the title tag as well and acts as a description of the page. As such, you should optimize this element in order to make it appealing to users.

3. Most Common Keywords: There is likely no optimal keyword density. However, it is important to know what your most common keywords are to make sure content is optimized.

4. Content Quality: The quality of your content is critical for attracting and engaging users. Besides that, the more in-depth content you have, the better. This can be done by solving customer queries through content and providing detailed information about the product or service on offer.

5. Keywords Usage: There is no need to over-optimize your keywords. However, it is important to be strategic when using them. Knowing the most common search terms used by people visiting your site will help you craft a better content creation strategy on your website.

7. Site Speed: The higher the loading speed of your site, the faster and more responsive users will find it. Therefore, make sure you analyze how fast your site responds and check if there are any problems related to that. You can check your website speed through online tools such as GTmetrix, Google page speed insights, or Pingdom.

8. Attackable URLs: It’s always a good idea to avoid URLs that can be exploited by hackers and other cybercriminals. For example, you should add in your site’s SSL encryption over the web and make sure your site has an error-free URL structure.

9. Heading Tags: Headings tags are one of the most important SEO elements. If you haven’t already done so, it’s time to create them and make sure they are correctly formatted.

10. Robots.txt Test: Check if your robots.txt file is in order and whether it is locked by any unknown IP addresses. It’s also a good idea to make sure there are no broken links on your website, as this can lead to bad search rankings.

11. XML Sitemaps: Check if your XML sitemap is working in order to ensure that search engines always have up-to-date information about your site’s structure. Once that is done, you can take advantage of Google Page Rank and Bing Webmaster Tools to boost your site’s visibility.

12. Broken Links: Check your site’s broken links and fix them. You can also use a free online tool like Check My Links to help you with this task.

13. Notifications: If you want to appear in Google search results, you will need to set up a Google Webmaster tools account and Bing Site Promoter tool. Notifications are an essential part of the website optimization process, so don’t forget about them!

14. Image Alt Tag: The “Alt tag” is used to provide alternate text to images on the site. If you aren’t using it, it’s a good idea to create one and improve it so that search engines can crawl information from your image files in order to rank them.

15. Open Graph Protocol: If you have decided that you need users to take action on social media networks when visiting your website, then you must use the Open Graph protocol. It’s the standard for sharing content across third-party sites and includes support for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

16. Inline CSS Test: Ensure that the CSS files are working and the code is clean. This will allow you to optimize your website’s performance and overall user experience.

17. JS Error Test: You need to make sure that your JavaScript files are working correctly. There are many tools and techniques you can use to perform this task. One great example is JS-Cucumber, which works with all major browsers and has a test execution mechanism.

18. Broken HTML Validation: It’s important to have proper HTML validation on your website and have it alert you if there are any issues with the code generated by the tools. You can do this by using W3C Validator for testing.

19. Deprecated HTML Tags: HTML standard evolves rapidly, so it’s important to make sure you don’t use any deprecated HTML tags.

20. Linking Errors: Check your links and find out which ones are broken or redirect to a different site. If that happens, you will need to replace them with a new link that leads to the same page or implement 301 redirects where needed.

21. Google Analytics Test: Check your Google Analytics account, make sure it is set up properly and enable tracking. You can then access your site’s data to analyze traffic and discover any anomalies that might be affecting the performance of your site.

22. UTF-8 Test: Ensure that you are correctly using the UTF-8 encoding in all places where it is needed.

Speed optimizations

23. HTML Page Size: Check if the HTML content is well optimized as most of them tend to be large. If it’s not, use tools that analyze and compress your HTML.

24. HTML Compression: HTML compression is used to reduce the size of your HTML code in order to improve website performance. You can try out tools like HTML Compressor and make sure you set your website address correctly.

25. Page JS Compression: The goal of JavaScript compression is to reduce the file size of JavaScript files, which allows search engine crawlers and web browsers to load them faster. Take advantage of tools like YUI Compressor, JSMin, and PackerScripts toolkit in order to compress your JavaScript files.

26. URL Redirects: It’s always a good idea to check if your website has a redirect loop, which prevents Google from accessing the content and indexing it properly. 301 redirects are best for redirecting old URLs to a new location.

27. CSS Compression: CSS compression allows you to reduce the size of your website’s CSS files by removing unnecessary data and making it more efficient. You can use CSScrimper or lessphp tools to do this easily.

28. Server Response Codes: There are many HTTP codes that can be used on websites and each of them is used to make sure a website visitor receives the desired response. For example, if your server receives a 404 error code, it means that the requested resource could not be found on the server.

29. CDN Usage: The most popular way to improve website performance is by implementing a CDN, which stands for content delivery network. There are many CDNs available on the market and each of them offers different features.

30. Page Cache: PageCache is a service that can speed up your website by caching resource requests and reducing the number of round-trips to the server. You can also use PageCache with a minification process in order to compress and optimize your website’s resources.

Server and security

31. URL Canonicalization: URL canonicalization is a process that gets rid of top-level domain names like www, m., and hf in your URL when it’s not required. It’s usually done to avoid HTTP redirects and can be used with 301, 307, or 308 redirects.

32. Referrer Logging: It’s important to have a good referrer logging solution and to set it up properly so that the quantity of information you get from the logs isn’t too much.

33. HTTP over HTTPS: By default, your site works with HTTP protocol, and all requests are sent to the server through the same port. This is a potential security problem and needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

34. Secure Connection: If you’re using HTTPS, you will get an encrypted connection, which makes it much more difficult for a hacker to brute-force their way into your system.

Mobile usability

35. Meta Viewport: The meta viewport tag is used to define the minimum height and width of your website on mobile devices.

36. Mobile-Friendly: You need to make sure that your website is accessible regardless of device type, which can be done by using a responsive design. It allows users to view your site in a variety of screen sizes and retain the same content and layout.

37. Mobile Responsive: Using responsive design, you can create a website that automatically adjusts itself to the screen size of the device that’s accessing it. It makes your website ready for mobile devices and eliminates the need for complex programming.

Advanced SEO

38. Structured Data: Search engines are able to extract more information from your website if you add properly structured data to your HTML code. Using Schema.org, Google will be able to display a rich snippet next to your website’s listing in the SERPs and make it easier for users to understand what they’re viewing.

39. Custom 404 Error Page: It’s important to have a custom 404 error page, which will point traffic to the most appropriate content. You can provide your users with a better experience and optimize your website at the same time by fixing this issue.

40. Geo-Location: The new Google algorithm makes geo-location very important for SEO purposes and it can help you rank higher in maps search results for locations that are relevant and specific to your business.

41. Noindex Tag: This directive determines which pages can be indexed by Google, Bing or other search engines. If a page is marked with this tag, it means that it won’t be included in the index of search engines and won’t be displayed in search results.

42. Nofollow Tag: This attribute tells search engine crawlers not to follow links on a specific page, which is useful for preventing spam tools from passing PageRank. Pages containing this attribute have less value than the others and therefore will rank lower in the SERPs.

SEO isn’t a once-a-year project but should be part of your ongoing marketing plan. You can use the above SEO audit checklist and Google toolbox to achieve high-performing sites that boost your organic traffic for the entire year and help you rank in top positions for organic searches.

SEO Audit Checklist: Routine Checking

To check the status of your SEO, it’s important to set up a routine SEO check that regularly checks on the following:

Google Analytics data – The data tells you where your website visitors are coming from. If a significant portion of your visitors is from search engines, this is a good sign that you need to work on improving your SEO.

Google Search Console – This is where you can enter your website and verify that any SEO problems have been fixed. It’s important to check your site periodically to make sure that anything that was broken is fixed and any improvements have been made.

Complete your website’s SEO Audit checklist with SEA

This basic SEO Audit checklist is a good start to improving your SEO. However, if you really want to see a big improvement in your website’s performance, you need to complete this checklist with SEO experts. 

SEA offers a full-service digital marketing solution including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), Paid Social Ads, Email Marketing, and Website Design.

Our SEO solutions are used by more than 60+ Fortune 500 clients as well as thousands of smaller businesses worldwide. In addition, our solutions are integrated with hundreds of digital advertising networks including AdWords, Facebook, and Bing Ads.

Request a free quote online today or call us at (704) 856 9058 to start using an SEO audit for your website!