Perform an SEO audit 16 steps checklist to better rankings

Then, you should create an action plan to correct the issues and remove the penalty. I recommend doing regular SEO audits (at least twice a year) to ensure your website is up-to-date with the latest developments. Perform your technical SEO audit at the end of your strategy. Improve internal linking to your other articles to increase topic relevance and site structure. Perform a complete content audit of the blog and remove or update your content. After removing these SQL-injected links, we reindexed the website.

For example, a technical SEO audit helped BetterVet, a mobile veterinary service, fix critical site errors affecting the crawling and indexing of their content. With a technical site audit, you can check how easily search engines can access, crawl, and index your pages. So basically SEO audits help you assess your website’s ability to appear in search engine results pages. It ultimately shows you how well your site is optimized for search engines like Google and whether there are any issues with your site. Finally, a website audit finds issues that are hurting your SEO and conversions such as broken links, hidden content, and long page load speed times.

How to build internal links

These elements also present problems from a usability perspective. Visitors are often looking for a very specific piece of information when visiting your site. If they have to sit through a 10-second visual introduction before they can find your hours of SEO Anomaly operation, you’re going to have a pretty frustrated visitor on your hands. Are response code errors popping up all over your website where there shouldn’t be any?

Tools like TinyJPG can optimize your images before they’re added to your site. The hreflang tag is imperative for sites in multiple languages. One of the biggest reasons Google rewrites title tags is that they are simply too long. In recent years, title tags have sparked a lot of debate in the SEO world.

Issues with title tags

If there are any alerts (like status code errors, stale content, ecommerce issues), you’ll see them here. So you can fix them before these issues impact your website traffic and revenue. The tool sorts issues by category (like website security and duplicate content). We run a fresh site crawl, review top pages, and optimize them to keep our search rankings high. This analytical approach has helped us maintain top rankings and grow organic traffic by 20.50% year over year. Backlinko uses these tools for in-depth SEO audits every year.

Title Tags

For example, this shows us that our article on the top 100 most visited websites has declined massively over the last six months. For example, our list of top Google searches declined massively in 2021. It also has the same number of pages with an empty or missing meta description and thousands with a missing or empty H1 tag. For example, the core update in August 2018 appeared to largely affect health, fitness, and medical sites that failed to demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-A-T).

Overusing exact match keywords or a lack of diversity in anchor text can trigger red flags for search engines and negatively affect your search rankings. Google Search Console is a tool provided for free by Google to allow site owners to monitor traffic from Google to their website. It also allows you to check for some basics like; website speed, crawling and indexing errors, top linking sites, and even notifies you if your site has been hacked. In the second step of your SEO audit, you will be able to see what are the top performing pages of your website and the top search queries for each page. With this information, you can check the page to ensure that you are sufficiently targeting that query and topic on the page and satisfying the search’s intent in the best possible way. An SEO audit checks how well optimized your website is for search engines.

• To quickly check a web page’s load time, download MozBar, a toolbar by Moz that you can attach to your browser for simple page analysis every time you visit a website.
• You’ll see all the keywords your competitors’ domains rank for, but your domain doesn’t.
• Link audits consider the URL source, domain, and anchor text to see if value and equity (called “link juice”) are being passed on to your page.
• It also tells you if it’s too long and likely to be truncated in the search results.

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.