Perform an SEO audit 16 steps checklist to better rankings

SEO tools provide valuable insights into your site’s health, help identify issues, track rankings, and optimize content. Backlinks are links from an external website linking to your website. Getting links from authoritative and relevant websites will significantly boost your rankings. Focus on earning high-quality links through guest blogging, digital PR, outreach campaigns, and high-value content creation. The final check of your title tag is to make sure that it’s not duplicated across your site.

SEO audit

Optimizing content for Large Language Models (LLMs) has become more and more important. Making content easy to understand for LLMs increases visibility. If you’re facing any of these issues and haven’t performed an SEO audit in the last six months, it’s a good time to run one. 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.

SEO audit

With our SEO checker, you can learn your site’s index status, plus if it follows best practices for robots.txt files and XML sitemaps. Clearscope’s primary purpose is to analyze the copy on a webpage and provide AI-assisted suggestions on improving its searchability. Loading up blog content like the AI-generated one in the image above, you can see metrics like how long the post should be, text readability, relevant keywords you can add to the copy, and keyword density.

SEO audit

SEO content audit

  • When a site with a good reputation online includes a link to your site on one of their pages, they pass on some of the value of their site to yours.
  • Read on and discover how SEO audits save time, money, and effort while driving your website to success.
  • Clearscope’s primary purpose is to analyze the copy on a webpage and provide AI-assisted suggestions on improving its searchability.
  • An SEO audit is a comprehensive evaluation of a site’s technical setup, on-page elements, and off-page factors to identify issues that may hinder its visibility in search engine results.
  • I check this part of the tool every single day, because SEO Gets makes it so easy to spot trending keywords.

This provides an opportunity to recover visibility while the remainder of the audit is carried out. While SEO audits may vary slightly, each one should analyze basic technical SEO “table stakes” such as sitemaps, server errors, and metadata. At a high level, an audit should cover off on accessibility, indexation, and optimization.

Check Your Topic Cluster Performance

Use appropriate formats, such as JPEG for photographs and PNG for images with transparency, to enhance website performance without sacrificing visual appeal. General SEO reports, specific SEO reports, and even white label SEO reports are easily generated for your clients in one convenient place. Not only is the report beautiful, but it shows all of the pertinent information required for a SEO site audit, and then some. This report pointed out some metrics and server vulnerabilities that other audit companies (WooRank, SEO Powersuite, iBusines Promoter) just did not mention. The web interface for the reporting is great, simple and easy to use.

Speaking of content…your pages aren’t going to get any respect in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) if they’re thin. Panda, a 2011 Google algorithm update that cracked down on sites with thin content, made sure of that. In broad terms, information gain refers to the additional value you add to the overall search results with your content.

SEO audit

If you have a better SEO profile overall, you’ll be more likely to outrank them for your target keywords. Benchmarking allows you to see exactly where you stand when compared to your competitors and identify opportunities for improvement. Most of these updates are minor, but occasionally there are major updates that can significantly impact rankings. And Google will announce these major updates on their Search Central Blog.

SEO audit

A fitness blog should have links from health and wellness sites, not gambling or loan websites. First, check the referring domains graph to see your link growth over time. Google’s algorithms have evolved to better understand whether content actually provides what users are looking for. Having multiple versions of your website accessible to search engines can seriously dilute your SEO efforts. SEOptimer is a Website SEO Checker which reviews these and more to help identify problems that could be holding your site back from it’s potential. During the SEO audit, delve into the demographics of your website’s traffic.

Google Search Console also tracks featured snippets such as sitelinks, breadcrumbs, AMP, video snippets, and more. Did you know we have a YouTube page with how-to videos for all of our free SEO tools? Below you can watch a recording of a HOTH campaign manager going through the SEO Audit Tool. But beyond that, you can add specialized tools to your tech stack as needed. Serpstat is an affordable all-in-one SEO tool with more data compared to Mangools. You’d type a broad keyword like “best soup recipes” into KWFinder.

9/10 SEO audits miss out comprehensive information that really will identify what’s required to rank in Google. Our audits get to the bottom of every identifiable ranking factor. BHS Links Check on-page SEO factors such as meta-analysis, user experience, keyword data, page load speed, and much more. Contrary to popular opinion, broken links don’t result in site penalties. As content cycles in and out, and your site’s structure changes over time, 404s occur naturally.