A website SEO audit is likely going to be the first step in your when you start working with an SEO company, but it doesn’t stop there. Good SEO takes a lot of on-going work, which makes regular SEO audits a necessity. An SEO audit is crucial to ensure that your website is in good working order and highlights areas where you need to improve. SEO algorithms are also constantly changing, so you need to make sure your website is being updated to reflect this.
Follow this checklist for a comprehensive SEO audit.
Crawl Your Website
The first step in your SEO audit checklist should be to make sure search engines can crawl your website properly. If you have technical issues on your website, you could be having problems with this and not realize it. Crawling is essential in getting your site indexed properly so that you show up in the search results. A coherent sitemap is crucial to getting your website crawled and indexed appropriately. Broken internal links and duplicate content can also make it difficult to crawl your website effectively.
Ensure Your Website is Loading Correctly
In your SEO audit, you need to check to see if you’re having any trouble loading your website. Even a slight delay can hurt you, so this isn’t something you want to overlook by mistake. You can find out if you need to improve your website’s loading time by running a speed test and seeing what changes need to be made if you have any problems.
Track Your Keywords
Reviewing the keywords you already use and getting insights on how they’re working for you can help going forward. If you aren’t getting the results you want for the keywords you’re trying to target, it could be time to change your strategy. This could be the time for you to start going after new keywords that you have a better chance of ranking for.
Improve On-Page SEO
While much of an SEO audit involves technical SEO, your on-page SEO is still extremely important, so you can’t forget about this. This includes going through your content and ensuring it’s all still up to date and valuable. Are all of your pages fully SEO-optimized? This is especially important for your more popular pages that bring in the most traffic. Go through your top pages manually to see if there’s any work you have to do there.
Analyze Your Competitors
You always need to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. A competitor analysis should be a part of every SEO audit. This is one of the best ways of finding areas where you might fall short, but your competitors are successful so that you can implement what they’re doing right. You might find that they’re targeting relevant keywords that you’re missing, or they could be creating content that you’ve been missing.
Review Your Backlinks
You need to find out what other websites currently link to your pages. You don’t just want people linking to your pages – you want only high-quality websites with authority doing this. Going over the backlinks you’ve already earned can also help you find ways to improve it going forward. If you already have good websites linking to your pages, reach out to them to keep up this relationship. See which pages are the ones getting links most often, and figure out what you’re doing right on these pages to carry that over to ones that don’t get much attention.