SEO Audit

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a process for evaluating the search engine friendliness of a website in a number of areas. The main goal of an SEO audit is to help you optimize a website so that it can achieve higher rankings in the search engine results. While A SITE AUDIT is needed for your own Internet resource.

SEO Audit Checklist

• Step 1: check for google penalties
• Step 2: check domain search appearance
• Step 3: perform a technical seo audit
• Step 4: perform an on-page seo audit
• Step 5: perform an off-page seo audit
• Step 6: perform a social media audit

Step 1: Check for Google Penalties

The first step is to check whether your website is penalized by Google.

If your website is under a manual or algorithmic penalty, your rankings will be negatively affected.

You should find out when the penalty was imposed, why your website was penalized, and create an action plan to correct the issues and remove the penalty.

How to check?

First, log in to Google search console and then select ‘Manual Actions’ from the left menu. If there is a manual action imposed on your website, you can see the reason(s) here.

Manual Actions Report – Google Search Console

What to do if you are under a Google penalty?

If the above test indicates that you are indeed in trouble, then the best approach is to find out as many details as possible about the Google updates and adjust your SEO audit accordingly.

For example, if a site is penalized by Google because of thin content (very popular these days), then in the on-page SEO audit section, you should check the quality of your content and either improve, redirect or remove pages that don’t meet the quality standards.

Step 2: Check Domain Search Appearance

The second step is to search for your brand name in Google and review the results.

This is how it looks when I search for ‘reliablesoft’ on Google:

Brand Search Appearance in Google Results

Things to check:

• Does your homepage come up first in the results?
• Does Google show sitelinks along with your listing?
• Are the descriptions below your homepage and other pages accurate?
• Does Google show a knowledge graph entry (Google My Business Listing) on the right panel for your brand?
• Is the name and other information on your GMB page correct?
• Are the rest of the pages listed on the first page of Google results relevant to your brand?

Scroll down to the bottom of the results and in particular, the section “searches related to”.

Brand Related Searches

Things to check:

• Are the ‘related searches’ relevant to your brand?
• Do you see any related searches you can utilize by creating dedicated pages? Typical examples are ‘brand name reviews.’

What to do if you don’t get the expected results?

If you don’t get a nice listing as explained above then this means that there are a number of issues with your website.

The best approach is to fix these issues before proceeding any further by:

• Reviewing and optimizing your site structure
• Review your homepage SEO
• Claim your Google My Business page and make sure that all information is accurate and correct

Step 3: Perform a Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO comes first because you need to make sure that search engines can access and index your pages without any issues.

Technical SEO Checklist

Here is your technical SEO checklist. If any of the tasks are difficult to understand, use the links provided to get more information.

Is your website registered with Google search console and Bing webmaster tools?

If not, then this is a top priority.

Google search console is a free tool provided by Google which gives information to webmasters about their websites. Everything that Google knows about your website is available in the various tool options and reports.

Things like:

• How many pages are submitted to Google and how many pages are actually indexed.
• For which keywords your website is ranking.
• Which keywords generated Google traffic.
• Security or other indexing issues related to your website
• Mobile usability issues
• And many more.

Did you specify a preferred domain in Google Search Console?

Google considers websites starting with www in front of the domain i.e. https://www.example.com and with no www in front of the domain i.e https://example.com as two different websites. To avoid any duplicate content issues, you should specify your preferred domain by setting your canonical URLs correctly.

Is your robots.txt file optimized?

All websites have a robots.txt and it is used to control which pages should be accessible by search engine crawlers. A mistake in robots.txt can cause serious indexing issues, so robots.txt optimization should be high on your list.

Do you have SEO Friendly URLs?

It’s always a good practice to review your URL structure and make sure that you have SEO friendly URLs. You should check that the URLs for each page are unique and properly formatted. 

For example:

This is a non-optimized URL: http://www.example.com/12/badformattedurl/121358898

This is a good URL: http://www.example.com/good-formatted-url

Good URLs include keywords (but they are not keyword-stuffed), include hyphens (‘-‘) to separate the keywords, are unique for each page, and are less than 255 characters (including the domain name).

Breadcrumb menu activated?

The breadcrumb menu is usually shown at the top of a page and it helps users navigate back to the homepage by following the menu links.

Google always recommends having a breadcrumb menu as it makes site navigation easier for users. Check and make sure that your breadcrumb menu is properly configured.

Do you have structured data enabled?

With the addition of structured data markup to a page, you help Google understand the context and meaning of your content and this creates additional ranking benefits.

Google uses structured data to enhance the presentation of a website in search results and for voice searches (think Google Assistant Questions).

As part of the SEO Audit you should check that you have structured data enabled for:

• Your homepage (Logo, Website, and Company)
• Your breadcrumb menus
• Your articles
• Your products (see also Product Page SEO)

Do you have a canonical URL set for all your pages?

A canonical URL helps Google identify the most important pages of a website and webmasters can use it to deal with duplicate content issues. Best SEO practices indicate that each and every page of your website should have a canonical URL.

Is your 404 Page Optimized?

A 404 page is the page shown to users when they reach a page that is not found on your website. A properly optimized 404 page is good for a smooth user experience and it’s very easy to optimize.

Is your XML Sitemap optimized?

An XML sitemap is a list of all your website pages that Google needs to know about.

The XML sitemap is generated by your CMS and it is submitted to Google via Google Search Console. The XML sitemap should not contain all your website pages but only the ones that are important for your website.

Is your website HTTPS?

Https is a known ranking signal. This means that websites that have a secure certificate installed and their URLs start with HTTPS, have an advantage over non-secure websites.

If your website is not HTTPS yet, this is a task to add to the top of your list.

Is your website fast enough?

From my experience talking to clients, handling website page speed is one of the most difficult tasks at least for non-technical users.

Unfortunately, it is also one of the most important SEO factors and HAS to be addressed successfully.

Your website should load fast and preferably faster than your competitors.

There are tools by Google that can give you recommendations about page speed but in general, what you can do is the following:

• Compress all your website images using tools like optimizilla or squoosh (by Google). These tools can dramatically reduce the size of an image without sacrificing quality.
• If you have a lot of images, consider using a CDN
• Minimize HTTP calls by using sprites and browser caching
• Minify your CSS and HTML to make their size smaller
• Use a caching plugin or page speed service to serve cached pages to users.
• Remove unnecessary JavaScript from pages
• Update to the latest version of PHP.
• Update your website and software to the latest versions.

If the above list does not make much sense to you, you better hire a developer or SEO expert to do the work for you.

It will not cost you a lot and it is something you have to do if you want to improve your rankings.

Is your website mobile friendly?

With the increasing use of mobile devices, this sounds like an unnecessary question. There are websites not yet optimized for mobile and this translates to a loss of traffic and rankings.

With the introduction of the Google Mobile First Index, websites that are not optimized for mobiles are ‘excluded’ from mobile searches.

Your starting point is to check your website with the Google Mobile friendly test tool and follow their recommendations.

Is your website available in more than one language?

Websites that are available in more than one language should have the necessary SEO settings defined in the HTML code otherwise Google may consider translated content as duplicate content.

Is your website structure optimized?

Regardless of the type of website, there are certain elements common to all, necessary for SEO purposes and good user experience.

What I usually check is the following:

• Does the website have a clear content structure? Is the content grouped into relevant categories and pages?
• Does it have a contact, privacy policy, disclaimer, and about page?
• Are important pages linked to from the webpage?

Step 4: Perform an On-Page SEO Audit

On-Page SEO is the most important part of the SEO Audit. In fact, many audits cover this part only but our approach, as explained above, is for checking other areas as well.

The main goal of on-site SEO is to help search engines understand the meaning of your content.

On-Page SEO Audit Checklist

As a website owner, your job is to provide search engine crawlers with the right signals through the use of keywords and other on-page SEO elements.

Check and Optimize your titles and descriptions

Are the titles and descriptions unique for each page and within the specified size?

Can the user tell from the title what the page is all about and is the description an advertisement of what the page has to offer?

Check your headings and text formatting

Make sure that you don’t just have plain text on your pages.

Any text should be properly formatted using H1 (for the main title) and H2 (for the main headings), bold and italics for the important parts, lists where necessary, etc.

Check your Content SEO

The content of your website has to be unique. You can use Copyscape to check all your pages for uniqueness and if you find duplicate content you have to remove or de-index these pages.

Use Google Analytics to find the most popular pages (both landing pages and with the most visits) and make sure that these have high-quality content (free of spelling and grammar errors, properly formatted, properly promoted in social media, etc.).

• check the content length and content freshness.
• If you have pages with little or no content or pages with similar content, you need to merge them together using 301 redirects.
• If your content is old or out-of-date, create a publishing plan, and make sure that your website is updated on a frequent basis.
• You don’t have to post daily but you need to maintain a steady posting scheduling.

Check your Internal link structure

Linking your pages together is useful to both search engines and users.

Check and make sure that you are indeed linking related pages together by considering these 4 factors:

1. That you are not only using keyword anchor text for the internal links but you use both the full page title and non-keyword anchor text.
2. The pages you want to rank better in search have a greater number of internal links.
3. The pages you want to rank better in search are linked from your home page.
4. You have between 2 – 10 internal links per page.

Check Image SEO

Images are useful for making a web page easier to read and more attractive to social media (especially Pinterest and Instagram) but they can work against your SEO efforts if they increase the loading time of a page.

In general, you need to check 3 things when it comes to images:

1. Image filenames are descriptive of what the image is about. You can use keywords in the filename but do not overdo it.
2. All images need to have an SEO Optimized ALT text defined
3. All images are compressed to minimize their size. If you are using a lot of images in your pages you may need to consider using a content delivery network (CDN).

Check for broken links

Broken links are bad for the user experience and thus not good from an SEO perspective.

There are 2 ways to check for broken links:

Use a tool like Xenu for checking all your external links. The tool is free and can give you a report of all broken links. You can then fix them by either removing them completely from your website or redirecting them to a valid URL.

Use the ‘Crawl errors’ report in your Google Search Console to find broken links within your website. You can also fix them by correcting the links or doing 301 redirects to a valid URL.

Crawl Errors Report – Google Search Console.

Check for proper use of banner ads

A few years ago, Google started penalizing websites that have too many ads above the fold.

While they are not specifying exactly what do they mean by ‘too many ads’ you can use this guide from AdSense to get an idea of what is allowed and what is not.

If your ad implementation is not according to standards you have to remove or change the position of the ads.

Check for User-friendliness

Although it is difficult to judge what is a user-friendly web site and what is not, as this depends on the type of website and how it is designed, there are a few checks you can make:

1. What happens when a user types a wrong URL? Is the 404-page friendly?
2. Can the users find what they want in less than 3 clicks?
3. Does it have a clearly defined main menu?
4. Can you distinguish between Site content and ads?
5. Does it have a consistent interface across all pages?
6. Does it have a user sitemap?

Step 5: Perform an Off-Page SEO Audit

Off-Page SEO refers to methods and techniques you can use to promote your website on the Internet. It is usually referred to as link building.

SEO Backlinks are considered by the Google algorithm as ‘votes of trust’ and websites with good quality backlinks tend to rank higher in Google results.

Off-site SEO is important but if you are not careful of what you are doing and if you don’t know exactly what you are allowed to do and what not, it is also very risky.

Low-quality incoming links can be a very good reason for Google to penalize your website

Off-Site SEO checklist

Although there are only 3 items in the checklist, you need to do a bit of analysis before having a clear picture of your off-site SEO current state.

Evaluate your incoming links and identify toxic links

You can find out about your incoming links either by using a tool like SEMRUSH or by using the ‘Links to your site’ report from the Google Search console.

Backlinks Audit Report – SEMRUSH

While reviewing your incoming links report, answer the following questions:

• How many unique domains are linking to you?
• Which of these domains are considered trusted domains?
• How many links are pointing to your home page and how many links to your internal pages?
• Which of your pages have the most incoming links?
• What percentage of the links is keyword based?
• What is the ‘toxic score’ of each link?

Depending on the answers, you may have to take some corrective actions so make sure that these are included in your action plan.

If you don’t have links from trusted domains you need to get in touch with the leaders in your niche and let them know that you exist (it’s easier said than done but if you get noticed by the big fish you have more chances of surviving in the pot).

If all the links are pointing to your homepage, you need to ensure that links are pointing to your internal pages as well. You can do this by either removing links from the home page or by building more links to the internal pages.

If all the incoming links are keyword-based (and Google did not penalize you yet) you need to urgently change them by making them more natural by using your domain name only, your full post title, and things like ‘click here’,’ link’ etc.

Unlike on-site SEO, off-site SEO is not a straightforward task and that’s why you need to know exactly what you are doing.

Links are important if you want high rankings but you really don’t have to go out and build links like crazy.

Instead, you should concentrate your efforts on building good websites (with good content) and links will flow in naturally.

Step 6: Perform a Social Media Audit

Social media affects your SEO efforts both directly (in the form of links) and indirectly (more exposure which may create more natural links and direct visits), so it is a factor that can influence your efforts to have a properly optimized website.

Basically, what you have to check in this section is whether you have a proper presence in the most important social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest), whether it’s easy for people to find and follow you in those channels.

Manual VS Automated SEO Audits

What to expect from a manual SEO Audit?

From what you have read above, it’s easy to understand the value of a manual audit VS an automated audit performed by a tool.

A tool is running an audit based on a number of predefined rules and does not have the experience and expertise of an SEO specialist.

The cost of a manual audit is reasonable and recommendations are specific to your website and are not generic like those produced using a tool.

You should expect 3 things:

1. A description of the current state of your website – This is a detailed analysis of how your website is performing in search, social media, number of internal/external links, and any other information related to your website’s existing state.
2. A list of actions based on an SEO audit checklist together with explanations for each and every item on the list.
3. A report describing a complete Internet marketing strategy for taking advantage of all available sources of traffic and opportunities on the Internet and not just SEO.