The 15-Step SEO Audit Checklist

Does the topic of this post shock you? Or does it make you wonder and ask why? You are not wrong if that is happening you right now! You already have a fabulous SEO campaign in place, it is drawing good amount of traffic and you are fetching excellent results from it too. That means the SEO strategy is working well. Then why under the soon would you want to have an SEO audit? There are several reason behind this and each meaningfully describes why you should. This post explains that and also shares a 15-step SEO audit checklist.

But before that, let’s address your first query. An audit is a type of inspection and here in this case, by saying SEO audit check, you are performing an inspection of the ongoing initiatives you or SEO agency is taking up in the process of your online marketing campaign. To understand it broadly, an SEO audit is a comprehensive evaluation of how SEO is performing for your website and an analysis of the elements that influence its visibility in search engines. This audit also includes check based on different facets of your website from the SWOT perspective of SEO.

Now the point is which aspects must be taken into consideration while performing the SEO audit? This article throws light on this issue and updates you will all the significant aspects of this.

#1: Check to See If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly

A lot has been said and written on this topic and it is still not enough. Your website’s mobile will always be looked at and it does not need one common sense to tell why! The world is already stuffed with smartphone users and the number is growing almost every minute. This increasing number is a clear hint a lot, millions to be precise, browse internet through their mobile devices and surf websites from their mobiles.

Obviously, a lot of your website’s viewership and traffic depend on whether it is solely meant for the PC or laptop users or is easily accessible from mobile phones too. Any SEO expert in Mumbai will not advise you an SEO strategy or approach an SEO campaign for you without checking your site’s mobile friendliness. Next, the SEO expert will initiate necessary changes and make your website compatible for mobile users too. From this perspective, this is the first SEO audit checklist.

#2: Make Sure Google Indexes One Version of Your Website

Unless it is really important, better stick to just one version of your website to get indexed in Google. While having multiple versions may be viable in some circumstances, you must know the experts’ opinion about why having one version is better.

Multiple versions of your website would lead to the issue of duplicate content and may confuse the search engines as they find similar content across different URLs. Eventually, your page ranking may badly suffer. Keyword cannibalization may be yet another likely adversity when multiple versions of your website get ranked. Keyword cannibalization simply mean similar keywords put to compete with each other.

It is also more time consuming and you require extra bit of effort in managing more than one version of your website. Therefore, it is better to have professional help at hand by involving a good SEO expert in India and make sure that just one version of your website is indexed in Google.

#3: Speed Up Your Site

Your website’s ranking in the search engine largely rests on its loading speed and this has been officially declared by Google as it sees this as a ranking factor. If your website has a loading hassle, this may be for multiple reasons.

Google page speed insights is a handy help from this standpoint. It helps you spot the areas which are interrupting the website loading speed and get rid of them to optimize it. For this, an experienced SEO agency can be extremely helpful.

#4: Find and Delete “Zombie Pages”

The heading itself has hint for you. Sometimes, you might be just ignorant about the pages which though exist on your website yet have no particular meaning or value. These pages can be easily considered ‘obsolete’ for various reasons, for example they have outdated content, they don’t carry any external links or have zero traffic.

Having found zombie pages as part your SEO audit checklist, you can spot and delete them and prevent their impact on your SEO efforts.

#5: Find and Fix Indexing Problems

Unindexed pages is another intrusion to SEO project and this needs to be looked into too. Google search console comes to your rescue here as it shows you an index coverage report which has pages that cannot be indexed. It also has reasons why the aforesaid pages cannot be indexed. You shouldn’t be shocked if one of your high performing pages is included in the list and it is badly affecting on SERP.

Among the most usual indexing error, you will find 404 and 401, and also broken links. Once spotted, it becomes easier for you to correct them and eliminate indexing problem.

#6: Check Your Organic Traffic

How many times have you heard this term “organic” in SEO? Countless number of times right? It is not by surprise because Google loves organic traffic ‘only’. This in other words means genuine traffic and that any counterfeit methods used to direct traffic to your website must be simply avoided or it may severely impact your website’s ranking in Google.

To find out whether all the traffic your website is getting is organic or not, you have Google analytics tool. You already use this tool for a variety of other purposes so include this aspect too in the 15-step SEO audit checklist.

#7: Improve Your On-Page SEO

There are different elements which contribute to On-page SEO of the pages on your website. These include page titles, page URLs, image alt-text, headers, Meta descriptions, visual content and keyword research. Among all, there is a special mention of keyword placement on the web pages. You should do this with the help of an SEO expert or someone who knows what on-page SEO is and how to check and correct keyword placement on web pages.

Keyword placement is not just important in the content but also HTML title tags and the metadata. While doing this, an SEO professional will not forget analysing the keywords getting ranked and study for changes if any. Another prominent aspect here is optimization of every web page, particularly those webpages which are extremely important for the website.

#8: Set Up Keyword Rank Tracking

Keyword rank tracking is the system of monitoring the positions of specific keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs), and then evaluating them. Again, this aids SEO professionals to assess the efficiency of their SEO initiatives, track keyword performance and also take data-driven informed decisions to earn better search engine rank.

Some key factors of keyword rank tracking are keyword choice, tracking tools, competitor analysis, location-specific and device-specific tracking, algorithm update, etc. Get an SEO expert in Mumbai to do this and you won’t have to worry about it.

#9: Analyse Your Backlinks

Just as above, analysing the backlinks is no less important. While you may be happy to notice that the traffic on your website is getting triggered from a lot of backlinks, it is important to check the authenticity of those backlinks.

Not only that; it is equally sensible to analyse which backlinks are bringing the maximum traffic and which are bringing the least.

#10: Fix Broken Links

While checking for the indexing problems, you already check for the broken links. As find some, which is also much likely, take another step and fix them immediately.

#11: Competitor Analysis

Many website owners make this mistake of not including this factor in their SEO audit checklist. You are in a business and you certainly have competition. Finding out how their website is performing in terms of SEO and how you can supersede with timely initiatives proves largely beneficial in this respect.

#12: Make Your Content 10x Better

Okay, you got the content written by a professional writer and that it is relevant to your business. But content is a thing which you can never call as complete. There is always scope for improvisation according the SEO expert in Mumbai. So, now is the time to improve the website content. If you could not read the in the past content for some reason, read it now.

#13: Optimize For UX Signals

You cannot stress more on that. Are your visitors returning happy from your website or they fret when they go back? Do you know how users at your online website interact or behave? Many website owners just ignore this aspect while this is one of the most significant ones.

UX stands for user experience and there are some definite signals which help you find out the level of user experience. A good user experience means Google is ready to reward you in the form of an excellent rank among the top 10 or 5. UX is based on signals like search intent, page speed, mobile compatibility, and a few others.

#14: Flatten Your Website Architecture

Websites which have a complex architecture present a lot of trouble for the visitors. Interruptions of this sort result in visitors leaving the webpage sooner thus reducing user experience, engagement time and performance. That’s why experts advise website owners to flatten their website architecture.

#15: Launch a Skyscraper Post

It is true that short content split in small paragraphs is interesting to read. But when discussing SEO audit checklist, you must consider some long contents between 1000 to 1500 words. These are called skyscraper posts and they generate a lot of backlinks and draw quality traffic to your website.