As we created the audit, we realized that SEOs also want to check other traffic-impacting site issues that aren’t SEO Anomaly necessarily technical. Hence, we ended up with a more complete Technical SEO and beyond site audit — one that covers nearly every important SEO area with the potential to impact traffic and rankings. To assist, we’ve reviewed five top SEO audit tools to help you improve your website’s search performance. We hope this SEO audit checklist makes a great addition to your search engine optimization toolkit.
Yes, you can do SEO yourself, especially if you run a small to medium-sized website and have the time and willingness to learn. There are plenty of online resources, tools, and communities that can help you get started. However, DIY SEO requires a significant investment of time and usually a high level of frustration tolerance to learn the ropes and stay updated with trends and best practices. SEO can be complex and often raises many questions, especially for those new to digital marketing or looking to improve their website performance.
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These sitemaps are ideal for users, as they are just a page filled with links to all the pages they could need. An XML sitemap, on the other hand, is a piece of code that you submit to Google to help make it easier to crawl and index every page on your sitemap. If you notice an increase in “Crawled – currently not indexed” issues, evaluate the affected URLs and their quality. For Google, quality is paramount and a growing consideration in which URLs enter its index. Make your content helpful and original to increase the chances of Google indexing those pages.
But as Google’s updates constantly focus on content quality, I’d say this is the best place to start recovering from a penalty. We have only seen one SEO penalty over the years, on a site we had recently taken on. This site had a lot of over-optimized and repetitive blog articles, and a lot of spammy links. After discussing this with the developers, we found the website had been hacked. The hacker had inserted these links through an SQL injection, leading Google to interpret our content as spam.
Most people will start panicking at this point, thinking that Google has hit them with a penalty only to discover they have an accessibility issue or some other minor problem. When it comes to Google, accessibility and indexability go hand in hand. Both of them are necessary in order for your pages to be shown to end user.
- The above SEO audit checklist covers the technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO checks you need to make to improve your SEO.
- How your business chooses to utilize social media has SEO ramifications.
- If Google doesn’t crawl and index your pages, the site won’t just rank poorly — it’ll be absent from search results entirely.
- If your audit shows low authority scores, add a task to your roadmap for a detailed investigation and devise a plan to get high-quality backlinks.
- It is vital to ensure that all on-page SEO elements are well-optimized for the right keywords for your enterprise.
Luckily, most of the fixes to the issues discussed in this guide are self-explanatory. However, I will do my best to explain the more complex ones as we go. In this guide, I’m going to teach you how to perform a simple website audit to improve your SEO, usability, and maybe even your revenue. Enterprise SEO costs range from $5,000 – $25,000+ per month and will depend on the needs of your business and the competitiveness of your industry.
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Google Search Console is a tool that checks your site’s indexing status and how it appears on SERPs. It offers performance reports, your site’s indexing status, and insights into core web vitals like interactivity and loading performance. Use Google Search Console to perform an SEO audit and determine if you’re hitting target keywords. Remember to use structured data, which maintains a standardized format, to help Google crawl your site.
SEO Audit Tools You Should Be Using for Website Analysis
If you’re collaborating with an agency, it makes sense to ask if their SEO services include an audit. It looks at the quantity and quality of links pointing to your website. Many agencies that offer SEO audits also provide implementation services. Essentially, the agency provides its recommendations to you and then implements changes approved by your team.
While Semrush has a suite of paid SEO tools, it also has plenty of free features that can spy on your competitor. An SEO audit enables you to examine your site’s overall performance. While most SEO audit services are “one and done,” our iterative approach allows us to make shifts and changes as we progress toward the end goal of your website optimization. Keep in mind when we perform the SEO audits, we are often making iterative suggestions as we find the most problematic errors in our review.
Keep reading to learn why audits are beneficial and how best to conduct them. A comprehensive website audit can boost site performance, improve SEO, and enhance online visibility. That’s why we use Copyscape and Originality.ai as part of our SEO audit services; it’s a quick and easy way to detect potential plagiarism and duplication issues on your website. SurferSEO is a tool that helps us with many aspects of content analysis and strategic planning. If you have existing keyword targets, we can analyze your choices and your performance for each of them here; otherwise, we can help you generate a vision for the future. Trusted by over 5,000 clients and SEO agencies, our backlink-focused SEO services are the best in the business.