Perform an SEO audit 16 steps checklist to better rankings

The dashboard offers instant access to reports, monitors, and analysis tools. Run a website crawler to get a technical SEO audit whether you are launching a site, moving your website, or looking for ways to improve search performance. It contributes to your site’s ranking and sends a signal to the user that they can trust your site.

Off-page SEO, primarily your backlink profile, is the next critical area. Think of backlinks as “votes of confidence” from other sites – they remain one of the strongest ranking factors. But quality matters far more than quantity, and bad backlinks can actually hurt you. This tool compares your website to your competitors in several ways, including by keywords, organic traffic, and more. It also provides data-driven recommendations for moving past your competition. With an SEO audit, your business can start improving your online visibility in search results.

• By refocusing your SEO strategy on more valuable keywords, you increase your ranking in search results for these keywords.
• A Local SEO audit will focus on things like your Google Business profile, placement on Google Maps, and external links and citations.
• Track keyword rankings, analyze competitors, and improve your site’s SEO health with the tool.
• Local SEO involves the set of practices to help your business rank in local search.
• To get the most from an SEO audit, the agency must understand your business, products/services, and customers.
• You can go beyond just Semrush data by connecting 20+ other marketing data sources to further enhance your reports.

Features

Across reports and the Embed tool you can customize Fonts, Colors, Display Layouts, Content, Checks and Sections, Report Text, Email Content. Our PDF reports run fast – the majority of pages can be fully audited, with PDF generated within 20 seconds. We look at a range of important factors that matter not just for SEO but for Usability and Accessibility. Whitelabel reports are a very good tool for getting leads as well as providing value to potential clients. Send PDF reports to prospects and use your report as a conversation guide or opener. Broken links (or “dead links”) are common whenever you fully delete a page from your site without using a redirect.

This invaluable information enables you to make informed decisions, refine your SEO strategy, and improve your website’s overall performance. In all honesty, this is just scratching the surface when it comes to performing a technical SEO audit. Each of the points above can easily have an entire blog post about it and additional, more advanced issues like paginations, log file analysis, and advanced site architecture. Google’s goal is to improve user experience because, let’s face it, no one likes a slow website. In today’s society, the need for instant gratification encourages site visitors to leave before they finish what they intend to do. Site speed has become quite a hot topic among the SEO community in recent times, especially after Google announced that mobile speed is indeed a ranking factor.

What you need to know about website audits to improve SEO

We’ve simplified the SEO audit into 10 core steps in this post, but if you have a large website, you might also consider separating out your SEO audits into categories. The journey of a thousand optimizations typically begins with a single step – the SEO audit. And to help you discover and fix some of the most common SEO issues.

For example, the markup should not describe the content that is hidden from users (i.e. which is not located in the HTML of the page). Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to specify the language and geographical targeting of webpages in multilingual websites. It helps search engines understand which version of a webpage serves users based on their language and location preferences. An XML sitemap is a technical file that lists all pages, images, videos, and other resources on your site, as well as the relationships between them. This file is crucial for SEO as it tells search engines how to crawl your site more efficiently. A technical SEO audit is a checkup of your website’s digital health.

Check the Google Search Console “Search results” SEO Anomaly report from the sidebar to see your total clicks and traffic trends over time. Organic traffic represents visits to your site from organic (unpaid) search results. Next, look at the anchor text distribution of your backlinks.

Lighthouse is an effective tool for identifying a range of improvements related to mobile usability, which is a critical aspect of the page experience. For Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures loading performance, ensure that the largest content piece on your page loads within 2.5 seconds. If it takes longer, you might need to optimize your server, use a content delivery network, or optimize your images and file formats. Core Web Vitals is a set of specific metrics that Google considers essential in a webpage’s overall user experience.

It was a challenging yet rewarding experience that honed my technical SEO and problem-solving skills. The site had very few internal links, especially to two important geo-landing pages. We reworked the internal links to help Google understand where the most important content was to be found.