How to perform an SEO audit with checklist
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. Are there excessive page sizes or long page load and server response times? Site speed can be SEO Anomaly impacted when image files are too large or HTML and CSS needs to be cleaned up.
- As the snippet is what users will see first, it greatly affects the organic click-through rate.
- These are the pages you’ll want to link from (the top pages on your site related to that keyword, according to Google).
- With an SEO audit, your team can get an in-depth assessment of your SEO status.
- Conducting the audit is only part of the battle – now you need to translate findings into action.
By analyzing their keyword targeting, backlink profile, content quality, and technical SEO (such as site speed and mobile optimization). Mobile devices are accounting for a significant portion of internet traffic (62% in Feb 2025), so it’s essential to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Responsive design, touch-friendly buttons, and properly scaled images all contribute to a better mobile experience, improving your rankings and user satisfaction. Page speed is a crucial ranking factor that directly affects user experience.
It’s normal for webmasters to concentrate on publishing new content, but you should take action to protect your existing rankings from dropping. Reach out to websites with relevant content and suggest where your content could add value to their users and what you can give them back in return. You can check your incoming links using a backlink checker tool or the Google Search console’s ‘Links to your site’ report.
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A higher ranking in search results can have a ripple effect on your company. The average timeline for an SEO audit also depends on the size of your website. If your site features 10 to 15 pages, it may take only a week to audit it. But, if your website features more than 100 pages, your audit could require more than 45 days.
Tools like KeywordsFX, LSI graph, or even related searches and Google autosuggest are great for helping you come up with related keywords. You should be looking for keywords in the title tag and meta description during your SEO audit, as well. These show up in the search results and can give users and search engine crawlers context to what your page contains.
On-page SEO involves reviewing elements on individual pages to ensure they’re easy for search engines to understand and provide a good user experience. During an audit, the focus isn’t on making fixes but on assessing page-specific issues that need attention. The findings from this step are compiled into a roadmap or task tracker for later action.
Technical Assessment
“Best prep schools in ma” will yield some nice resource lists that may or may not already feature your client, and that represent good opportunities to reach out for external links. The thing is, there are so many facets to SEO that this process can become overwhelming, fast. We’ve simplified the SEO audit into 10 core steps in this post, but if you have a large website, you might also consider separating out your SEO audits into categories. The journey of a thousand optimizations typically begins with a single step – the SEO audit.
This involves targeting specific markets and increasing visibility in local searches. Google is smart enough to know whether or not you’re intentionally and maliciously duplicating content on your site to clog the SERP with your site’s URLs. A more likely scenario, if you have duplicate content, is that it’s happening unintentionally. Given the above section on types of SEO audits, we’ve compiled a checklist for a pretty well-rounded SEO audit that incorporates technical, off-page, and on-page SEO.
With a stronger site, as well as SEO strategy, you can start ranking for highly competitive keywords in your industry. If your website’s slow, it’ll struggle to rank on page one of search results. It’ll also have a difficult time keeping users on your site, as more than 80 percent of users expect a website to load in three seconds or less — otherwise, they leave. Appear on the first page of search results for that keyword, and you’ll start to drive valuable traffic to your website. One, you’re targeting high-value keywords relevant to your business and your audience, and two, you’re maximizing your online visibility by appearing on the first page of results.
