Complete SEO Audit Checklist PDF & Excel Template for Websites

In addition, you may consider auditing your SEO on a quarterly basis. If you partner with a digital marketing agency like WebFX, your SEO plan may already include monthly reporting and optimization. When you create content, you don’t want to SEO Anomaly duplicate your content.

If your site is slow, people are going to go to one of those faster sites, increasing your bounce rate and hurting your rankings in search results. For example, backlinks — or links to your site from other sites — are a key component of off-page SEO. When a site with a good reputation online includes a link to your site on one of their pages, they pass on some of the value of their site to yours. Your pages gain more value, and you have the potential for people to click the link on the other page and land on your website.

• It involves checking various aspects of your website to measure how well it is conforming to organic search best practices.
• This is one area where Google simply won’t “figure it out” without solid, technical SEO.
• It wouldn’t necessarily make sense, for instance, to change a URL simply to optimize for a new keyword.
• An audit helps you identify where there are points of weakness in your campaign and how those points hurt your site’s performance.
• You can add or remove different factors covered in this audit to tailor it to your own situation.

Key insights were placed prominently to meet user expectations immediately. Outdated and irrelevant articles were removed to eliminate clutter and improve the overall site quality. For content with potential, we updated facts, statistics, and examples to ensure relevance and accuracy. This helped align the content with both user needs and search engine requirements. The first step we took was a thorough backlink audit to identify the toxic links that triggered the penalty. Using Ahrefs and Search Console data combined, we compiled a list of several thousand domains.

SEO report

Keep in mind quality content should appeal to the interests, needs, and problems of your buyer personas. Always aim to leave the reader with immediately actionable next steps such as calls-to-action or links to resources. In the first part of your website audit, I’d focus on how users navigate your website — from your homepage to blog posts, to landing pages, and any related content in between.

Review CTAs and forms to confirm they are accessible and functional on mobile devices, especially ensuring buttons are easy to tap and forms are simple to fill out. Document any issues you find so they can be addressed during your site updates. SEO audit tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush can audit your backlink profile. The results show a list of spammy backlinks and links from irrelevant websites with low authority. If spammy websites link to you, there’s an option in Google Search Console to disavow these links.

Launched a global multi-website strategy to dominate Google search results.

For the other SERP features, the exact optimization techniques change based on which SERP feature you’re targeting. Once you know which SERP features you’re missing out on, you can start thinking about how to optimize for them. This will send the selected prospects to the Link Building tool, where you can set up a new project for your domain.

SEO for Startups

The PagesMeter SEO checker is a tool that scans any web page for technical errors and SEO issues that can have a negative impact on search engine rankings. Use it to get a comprehensive list of errors found on your web page and find out where you still have to improve your website. Similarly, for the garden center, Cadence ensured that every page adhered to SEO best practices by fixing meta tags and headers and adding internal links to key pages. These steps improved SEO performance and the overall user experience. Site migrations can lead to significant headaches if not handled carefully.

For example, you can pull keyword rankings and backlink data from Semrush. Then combine it with Google Search Console data to highlight clicks and impressions. “We wanted to democratize the depth and quality of professional SEO audits, typically costing over £1,000, by making them accessible to every business, absolutely free.” A sitemap.xml is essentially a list of all pages on your website that you want search engines to discover, crawl and index.