Well-written and informative pages tend to attract more backlinks, reduce bounce rates, and improve time on site, which contributes to better visibility in search results and long-term SEO performance. Evaluating site speed improves SEO because page speed is an official ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, with faster websites receiving preferential treatment in search results. In addition to direct ranking benefits, improved site speed reduces bounce rates, increases pages per session, and increases conversion rates across all types of sites. Setting up a website property in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools (and sometimes Yandex) can provide a wealth of information about how these search engines crawl your site. Many of the additional steps in this checklist are vastly easier with access to these tools. Additionally, these tools often give you direct access to specific tools and settings which assist your site with rankings and visibility, such as sitemap submission or international targeting.
Review keyword placement and density to confirm that the content targets relevant search terms without overuse. Use Google Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights to audit mobile usability and identify issues like layout shifts, tap target sizes, font readability, and responsive design errors. Test across multiple real devices with different screen sizes, operating systems (iOS, Android), and browsers to guarantee consistent performance. Measure page load speed with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix, focusing on mobile-specific metrics. Verify proper viewport configuration by checking if your site automatically adjusts to different screen sizes without requiring horizontal scrolling or zooming.
Yes, with our paid plans, you can easily set up automated website crawls. “Seobility is an easy to use SEO tool that explains in great detail which areas of my website need attention and how to fix any issues.” Set up automated crawls to regularly monitor your site and quickly discover new errors as they appear.
If you want to do an audit of your own, Jennifer Slegg has a great piece on the Semrush blog, covering how to get started with doing SEO competitive analysis. One of the outputs of a competitor SEO audit is usually some form of benchmarking which can be used to monitor performance against going forward. Business competitors – It’s likely that most businesses will have a good idea of who their main competitors are (or at least think they do). These will tend to be very similar to their businesses and be in obvious, direct competition. This is another audit that often tends to be merged with other work, but sometimes done as a standalone piece. If you’re looking for step-by-step guidance, then this guide from Jamie Pitman on ‘How to Conduct a Local SEO Audit‘ is a good place to start.
Finding and repairing quality problems is an arduous and challenging task unless you have our audit at the ready. With an SEO audit, you too can ensure your website always stays in compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, regardless of the kind of site you have. How to find out critical SSL errors and how they are impacting your site.
Taking Charge of Your Indexability: How to Optimize and Prioritize Your Technical Work
- Managing SEO at scale requires more than just research and optimization tools.
- Captions provide supplementary context for images, aiding both users and search engines in understanding the content and context of the images.
- The Search Atlas Site Auditor Tool helps you optimize core web vitals by providing insights into the bottlenecks affecting performance.
- If the cost of a business or website is based even partially on performance driven by search engines, then it’s prudent to understand how it is being achieved, along with any potential risks to it.
- Next, make sure it’s easy for search engines to effectively navigate your site structure.
- So if you are new to auditing, I’d suggest focusing on the steps below rather than trying to fix all the issues one by one.
Much of your SEO performance depends on the meta data you include throughout your site, including the page titles and descriptions you provide for your individual pages. If these are missing, you’ll get a notification so you can include the missing text. You could analyze one of your competitor’s websites to see where they’re getting their backlinks from. For an entry-level tool, it’s great for keyword research and finding backlink opportunities. You could update outdated information, include missing keywords, or improve depth, and hopefully, you’ll see the traffic grow once again.
Discover Frequently-Searched Keywords
To evaluate how you stack up against competitors, use Semrush’s Domain Overview tool. If you’re seeing unexplained traffic drops, it might be useful to check for manual actions. If you notice your traffic suddenly dropping right when these major updates roll out, you’ll need to research what the update targeted and fix those aspects of your SEO Anomaly site. If you find any problematic links, work to remove them by contacting site owners.
SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush will also crawl and audit your website. We’ll provide you with a detailed SEO audit proposal, outlining your websites biggest SEO challenges and solutions to fix them. When selecting an SEO agency to perform an SEO audit, we recommend asking for relevant client testimonials and case studies. To get the most from an SEO audit, the agency must understand your business, products/services, and customers. Test out some of the tools in this guide to see what works for you.
Experienced SEOs can often tell at a glance if content is spammy or if it deserves a shot at ranking. As part of the audit process, it’s a good idea to make sure the page meets minimum quality of standards in that it doesn’t violate Google’s Quality Guidelines. While it’s not uncommon to find your content duplicated across the web, it’s typically not a problem, unless those sites outrank you. Even better, you can ask the offending sites to link to you as the source of the original content or add a cross-domain canonical. While it’s important that search engines can index your URL, you also want to make sure that they can index your actual content.
However, it’s not unusual to see them grouped together, or completely bespoke pieces of work put together to meet specific needs. There are no hard and fast rules about all the different types of SEO audit, but they typically either cover different elements of SEO, or serve different scenarios. Different people have different names for the same thing, and sometimes names are used loosely and interchangeably. For more details about GBP optimization, check out this Google Business Optimization Checklist.