How to Do a Website Audit in 5 Steps + Checklist

If a page has been permanently removed, set up a 301 redirect to a related page to preserve link equity. Join over 3 million smart website owners who use AIOSEO to improve their website search rankings. Get the #1 most powerful WordPress SEO plugin today and join over 3 million smart website owners who SEO Anomaly use AIOSEO to improve their website search rankings.

Fortunately, at WebFX, we have a suite of services enabling off-page analysis and comparison. WebFX will identify these hard-to-spot factors and recommend a strategy that helps you build your reputation and increase your presence online. Unlock instant access to more than 29 years of experience with WebFX.

Broken pages occur when a resource on your website ceases to exist. Sometimes, these resources still have internal links pointing to them or have backlinks from other sites. If you’re not using either of those tools, try the Top Pages report in Ahrefs Site Explorer. This shows the pages on your website sorted by estimated search traffic they receive (from high to low). How your business chooses to utilize social media has SEO ramifications.

• I worked my way through the report until all the anchor text issues were fixed.
• In the world we now live, more individuals than ever before are continuously utilizing mobile devices.
• That’s why it’s essential to ensure that your navigation menu not only exists but also makes sense to visitors.
• Unfortunately, it is also one of the most important SEO factors that must be addressed successfully.
• Moz is a widely popular SEO tool among the SEO community and it offers a tool called Site Crawl which helps you with SEO site audits.

The on-page factors affecting your SEO

A love for business and competition is what fuels Robb to create dynamic marketing plans to help his clients grow exponentially. Let’s explore how to choose the best one for amazing results. “SEO Site Checkup runs through a fast audit of your site, checking for proper tags and surfacing any errors that might come up.” Utilize an SEO analyzer to monitor and analyze all the backlinks you have found or built for your website. Be the first to know when the links get lost and bring them back to life. Anyone can use SEOptimer free for 14 days by signing up above.

In this audit, you’ll need to analyze how traffic is coming to your website and where it’s coming from. A website audit is an examination of page performance prior to large-scale search engine optimization (SEO) or a website redesign. Auditing your website can determine whether or not it’s optimized to achieve your traffic goals and give you a sense of how you can improve it to reach those goals. In conclusion, staying ahead in the world of SEO is crucial for boosting your website’s online presence and search engine rankings in 2024. Schema markup and structured data offer search engines extra content information, improving search result accuracy and visibility.

Putting Your SEO Audit Into Action

Getting log files isn’t always easy, especially for big enterprise sites where server access might be restricted. You should also regularly review Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report to see how many pages Google crawls per day. Comparing crawled pages with total pages on your site helps you spot inefficiencies. By reading this article, you can apply these insights to save yourself and your SEO clients time, money, and frustration – in less than an hour. I’ve seen almost everything that can go right – and wrong – with websites of different types. After conducting more than 500 in-depth website audits in the past 12 years, I’ve noticed clear patterns about what works and doesn’t in SEO.

By refocusing your SEO strategy on more valuable keywords, you increase your ranking in search results for these keywords. For example, if you sell pellet stoves for mobile homes and RVs, the keyword, “mobile home pellet stove,” is probably valuable to your company. Your report also provides insight into the performance and usefulness of those keywords. For example, maybe you rank well for a keyword, but it drives almost no traffic to your website.

Test your website’s loading speed by using Google PageSpeed Insights or with Morningscore’s website speed test. If your site is slow, consider optimizing images by compressing file sizes and using formats like TinyPNG. Minimize HTTP requests, leverage browser caching, and use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve load times. It’s more important to focus on earning high-quality backlinks. 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. They rely heavily on generic anchor texts like “Read more” or “Learn more,” which tell search engines absolutely nothing about the linked page’s content.

If you don’t create this data for each of your pages, Google will improvise, which can end poorly. If it’s the latter, Google will be able to tell that you’re the original source. However, you must make sure that you use original content on each page of your site to avoid duplicate content. To test page speed, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for a free analysis.

In recent years, title tags have sparked a lot of debate in the SEO world. Google, it turns out, is likely to modify your title tag if it doesn’t like it. These include the number of resources on the website, as well as how valuable Google deems your indexable pages to be. The main thing here is to ensure that all of the important pages that you want to have indexed are within your sitemap and avoid including anything else. Also, by having pages in your sitemap that shouldn’t be there, such as broken pages, you can confuse crawlers and affect your crawl budget (more on that next). This breaks down all of the problems the crawler has found, how much of a priority they are to be fixed, and how to fix them.