An SEO audit checklist is a list that represents the fields of improving your website. When you’re running a site, traffic is the priority to keep your site alive. But, disobeying the SEO audit checklist can’t bring your desired reach, and downgrade your site.
The significance of an SEO audit checklist starts with keeping your SEO strategy up to date. You can’t keep pace with the search engine race if you don’t follow the updated checklist.
Importance of SEO audit
An SEO audit report is important to ensure desired traffic to your site. SEO audit helps in keeping your SEO strategy up to date. It’s observed that search engines change their algorithms to ensure better search results. Without an SEO audit, you can’t cope with the changes and get the desired rank for your site.
Websites with broken links are also detected by performing SEO audits. It’ll help in recovering lost traffic, and getting back your golden revenue days. Besides, an SEO audit is significant for determining outdated content, improper titles, and others.
Dynamic webmaster tools are hard to monitor without performing SEO audits. According to Woorank, an SEO audit is the best method of tracking the progress of keyword rank. Furthermore, it’s the easiest path to find SEO weaknesses.
SEO audit checklist
Before understanding how to do an seo audit, you should keep an idea of the SEO audit checklist. SEO audit checklist doesn’t primarily have any divination. But, experts have classified them into three core segments: on-page SEO audit, off-page SEO audit, and technical SEO audit.
On page SEO audit
First, of all, get introduced to On page SEO. This SEO audit is the practice of optimizing each page of your website. The process helps to monitor organic search for keyword searches related to the topic of that page. It’s also known as “on-site” SEO.
The operation is dedicated to optimizing different parts of your website. It directly affects your search engine rankings. However, an on-page SEO audit directly helps in growing blog traffic. Ahrefs blog depicted that- following the SEO checklist helped them grow their blog traffic to over 640,000 monthly search visits.
There are several factors that help in growing on page SEO audit.
Managing title tags
The title tag is the core factor in attracting readers. Proper keyword research and placement is mandatory here. Try to use the most unique title tag often. Along with maintaining the optimum length, ensure your title tag isn’t over-optimized. Stuffing keywords may nip your website in the bud.
Maintaining proper heading
Heading, also known as header tags, is important to make it SEO friendly. For website audit checklists, maintaining a proper header tag is highly significant. According to search engine journal, header tags help Google to understand your content precisely.
Good URL structure
An ideal URL structure must be simply designed. developers.google.com provided a guideline that suggests keeping the URL structure simple. They encourage you to drop localized words in the URL for better results. Follow these two rules of thumb for ensuring a good URL structure.
- Bring the main keyword in the URL
- Never repeat the keyword
Keyword research
The most important thing for SEO audit is keyword research. It is impossible to rank in SERP with wrong keywords even if you do everything else perfect. But you can rank with good keywords without making everything else perfect. Make sure you check the keyword and the keywords are good enough for you to compete with your competitors.
Get more information about Keyword research
Product/service information
No matter you are selling information, service, or product on your website, the information has to be well-written, well-optimized, and helpful to the users. If users do not find it helpful, google will find it same and thus you cannot rank.
Improved meta description
The meta description isn’t directly responsible for influencing your Google ranking. But, it can bring you more clicks. Try to make it unique and devoid of unnecessary words.
Reviewing website copy
Are you sure your website is satisfying the visitors with their main search intention? If you’re not sure, the checklist for seo audit may help you then. Along with this, reviewing website copy includes incorporating relevant keywords. Google search console may help you in understanding search traffic as well as performance.
Canonicalization
The term sounds hard, but its concept is simple- your pages load with one URL format. It happens when your site loads with both the www and without www format.
Image optimization
Optimizing images is necessary for on page SEO checklists. Using proper keywords in alt tags is the prime concern here. The image file name also must be relevant to the keyword.
Maintaining site load speed
Simply think from your side- you’re visiting a site with a low loading speed, waiting for minutes. Will you feel free to visit the site again? Absolutely not. That’s why maintaining load speed for your site is significant. Here is a tool to make your way easy. (Website speed checker)
For better understanding, check this on-page SEO audit report sample. (Add link)
Off page SEO audit
According to MOZ, actions taken outside of your own website impact your rankings within search engine results pages. This statement is broadly known as off-page SEO.
Search algorithms and ranking factors are changing every day. So, you can’t deny the importance of this audit besides the on page SEO.
Here’s a quick view of the off-page SEO audit checklist.
Analyzing your backlink profile
Backlinks are the most important off-page ranking factor. Without its proper analysis, you can’t build page rank authority. It indicates to search engines how much your profile is loved by visitors. Using natural links is the most organic way to ensure an off-page SEO audit.
Conducting link-building outreach
This strategy included conducting several things. The first one is finding and fixing the broken links. You can use any of the following tools to find broken links. (Broken links finder)
You can write guest blogs, pitch shareable content along with offering expert suggestions.
Giving some importance to social media
Google takes it positively if you have traffic from different sources. Then why don’t you consider your social media marketing as a part of your larger off-page SEO strategy?
Research from Google said in 2014 that social signals like likes and follows do not directly influence your rankings. Engaging social media influences website traffic and improves engagement data.
Optimizing local SEO
Google analytics could be helpful here for optimizing local SEO. You can use reviews from local third parties for better output. By optimizing local SEO, you enable content audit SEO analysis also.
Technical SEO audit
A Technical SEO audit is a detailed process of checking various technical parts of a website. The operation makes sure they are following best practices for search optimization.
Technical seo audit checklist isn’t fixed. It included determining and fixing technical parts- that’s all. However, mobile first algorithm isn’t related here like on and off-page SEO audit.
Broken Links
You might have some broken links in your site that can lead to search engine and users a deep frustration. Check whether you have any broken links or not. If yes, change the links.
Website design
The website design is vital since it is a showcase of your website and it creates the first impression to the users. Make the design user-friendly and eye-catchy so the users do not get back.
Speed
Website speed is also important. Your audiences do not have long time to wait to lead a page. They will click back and visit other pages but yours. This leads to de-rank your website.
Mobile-friendliness
Most of the users are now mobile users. So your website has to be mobile-friendly. Use search console and see whether it is mobile-friendly or not. If not, do it as soon as possible.
Any 404 or 303 error
A 404 or 303 redirect or broken link to your website can also de-rank your website. Use any tools such as Ahref, Semrush, or others to find those errors and solve them quickly
Conclusion
Now you have a clear idea of the SEO audit checklist and its implementation. This strategy is fruitful and helps thousands of site owners to boost their traffic. Even, those site owners are getting more traffic than their expectation by following multiple plans.
You don’t need to be an expert to execute these plans. At least, you can do an on-page SEO audit for making your site ranking better. Otherwise, search engines will detect your site as the old one, keeping it in the low search result.
One more important thing is never to try an off-page SEO audit without an on-page SEO audit. On-page SEO audit is the key to the improvement of a site. So, from titles to meta descriptions- make everything gorgeous.
