How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit in 14 Steps

A technical SEO audit is an imperative part of site maintenance to analyze the technical aspects of your website. Now, for larger sites, manually checking all pages for such issues isn’t possible. In that case, it makes sense to prioritize the reviewing of your most important pages instead. There are no images, no subheaders; it’s just a big wall of text.

You can compare your website to your competitors.

seo audit

It checks your website’s loading time for desktop and mobile devices and generates real-time reports on overall page speed. These evaluations help identify problems that slow down a site’s performance so you can adjust content, layout, or other hidden hindrances accordingly and improve page load times. SEO is crucial to any marketing strategy because it generates organic traffic, which comes from visitors who land on your page from unpaid search results. High visibility and search rankings promote business, cultivate customer connections, and establish your site’s authority in your industry. Our actionable SEO audit services address key ranking elements, from meta tags and keyword rich content to link growth and structured data. Broken links are common throughout the Internet, and any time you see an error message saying “404,” it’s because a link no longer connects to a page.

seo audit

Quick Links

seo audit

An SEO audit is important because it reveals problems with any site’s SEO so you can address them and start ranking where you belong. An SEO audit will reveal problems with any site’s SEO so you can address them and start ranking where you belong. An SEO audit tool (like Seobility) can help you find those issues quickly. To illustrate, I also ran Noob Norm through some other SEO audit tools (after the fixes). Duplicate content refers to duplicate “main” content and pages, like duplicate blog posts, product pages etc. This can cause various SEO issues if not dealt with correctly and is therefore an important part of any audit.

  • SEO is crucial to any marketing strategy because it generates organic traffic, which comes from visitors who land on your page from unpaid search results.
  • However, the content section in the Seobility audit offers a great starting point.
  • Google will not acknowledge various pages, only the strongest one.
  • While reading through a blog to find the issue, I hovered the cursor over each sentence to keep my attention focused.

To make things easier, break them down into manageable chunks based on how quickly you can implement them. Once you get rid of the junk content, check how other pieces are performing. To find out what the best next steps are, you need to look at the data. These elements can determine whether someone clicks through to your content—or scrolls past it.

Keep in mind that there may be some carry-over from the three assessments above — website performance, SEO, and conversion rate. The technical evaluation, however, addresses all three to maximize the user experience (UX). How is the website design working for visitors and customers? Some software have heatmaps showing what parts of a site design draw the most attention. This type of analysis helps communicate how the overall design and user experience impact visitors.

Having that in mind, your website needs to be mobile friendly so that the visitor can have all the options which they would otherwise have on a desktop computer. First and foremost, if a person is unable to browse freely, he will quickly bounce from your website. In that regard, it is important to improve your website speed. First thing that you have to determine is whether your website is working properly. Before anything else, you need to create a viable strategy that will help you establish your goals.

Naturally, BHS Links if you’re creating a new piece of content, it’ll be easier to make sure you fully optimize all these elements. If you’re updating old pages, you just have to do the best you can. It wouldn’t necessarily make sense, for instance, to change a URL simply to optimize for a new keyword. Still—whenever possible, you should make sure all your pages are as optimized as possible for keywords that will help them show up in organic search.

Content Strategy

It is a paid tool, but you can run an audit of 500 URLs for free. We’ll discuss a few of these areas in more detail throughout this guide. But performing a site crawl is a quick way to assess lots of aspects at once. Running a website crawl is the most efficient way to gather lots of useful data about every page of your website.

Looking to invest more in your SEO marketing strategy but don’t know where to start? Check out our guide on how to adjust your SEO strategy as you grow. Improve site performance and user experiences with effective site migration. Discover best practices for domain changes, server upgrades, and replatforming.

seo audit

You can label almost anything – products, articles, reviews, events – to clearly explain relationships and context. This clarity helps search engines understand why your content is relevant for a given query. After auditing over 500 websites, I’ve rarely seen Core Web Vitals alone significantly improve rankings. Typically, I recommend tackling technical and indexation issues first (because if Google can’t properly crawl/index, other optimizations won’t fully matter). Next, address any severe content issues (like thin content or duplicate pages that might be hurting you). Then move to enhancements and optimizations that can boost performance.

SEO audit: a complete guide to the basics

An enterprise SEO audit aims to determine how a business can best utilize SEO as a marketing channel. It should help determine what a successful SEO campaign would look like for the current website and outline the scope of the resources needed. An enterprise SEO audit must also consider the overall competitiveness of the industry. The audit should identify all strengths and weaknesses of the website that affect organic visibility.

For custom sites, work with a developer to implement responsive design principles. I’ve seen this issue most often on newly launched websites that haven’t standardized their URL structure. But if you find a page that should be indexed but isn’t, fix the issue by following Google’s guidelines. Open the tool and head to the “Pages” report from the sidebar. Here are the steps I follow when performing a thorough SEO audit.

seo audit

Technical errors like ones related to performance, SEO, mobile, and security, can negatively impact a customers‘ experience on your website. If I notice visitors aren’t staying on a site for long, or I see a lot of abandoned shopping carts — a website audit is a great way to find out why. I’d start with a website auditing tool to help analyze how my site is performing.

seo audit

This includes reviewing all of your website’s keyword rankings, featured snippets in Google, and more. For some businesses, simply outranking competitors in search engines like Google is enough to claim a dominant market share. In 2022, where a business ranks on Google can make or break the company. After conducting an enterprise SEO audit, you will gain an understanding of what types of enterprise SEO services make the most sense for your organization. However, a timely audit allows you to spot and fix those bugs before they cause serious damage. Such clean-ups contribute to boosting your website’s visibility in search engines, growing traffic, and generating more leads.

To wrap up, let’s conclude with key takeaways and the bigger picture of why all this matters. By now, we’ve covered technical, on-page, off-page, and advanced audit components. The final step is to put it all together and plan solutions – effectively turning the audit findings into an actionable roadmap. If you do have schema, make sure it’s correct and up-to-date. An audit might reveal errors, such as missing fields or outdated information (e.g., event dates in the past). Structured data is an area where details matter – a small syntax error can mean Google ignores it.

seo audit

An Inside Look at WebFX SEO Audit Pricing

It’s also helpful to see if they can customize their services to your business, like WebFX. We tailor all our services, from SEO audits to SEO strategies, to every client’s company, products, and industry. What an agency’s services include also determines the price of an SEO audit. For instance, an agency that provides the bare-minimum technical audit may charge lower rates than an agency that provides a comprehensive technical audit. However, you may pay more or less than this range depending on your unique business.

In other words, an on-page SEO audit focuses on optimizing elements within your website that impact your site’s SERP rankings. Both metadata and structured data have become increasingly complex in SEO. Here we include 8 quick checks to ensure maximum visibility in all types of search results. One cool thing about this audit checklist is that you can perform it almost entirely 100% for free, or using free versions of SEO tools. This is important for SEO starting out on a budget, or small business owners who want to learn to audit a small site on their own. While GSC provides insights into your site’s performance on Google, it lacks certain functionalities.

We’re also a fan of Dana Dana DiTomaso’s Technical SEO course on LinkedIn. The tool gives you a customised step-by-step road BHS Links map on exactly what you need to do to improve your content. Your new powerful AI Search Quality Rater Tool will audit your content and provide very specific recommendations on what needs to be changed to improve your content.

seo audit

Design editor meet dynamic content

  • SEO tools provide valuable insights into your site’s health, help identify issues, track rankings, and optimize content.
  • In our case, this returned 1,128 images which were missing alt text.
  • You can then take the necessary actions, such as contacting the web admin or reporting the site to gain back your traffic.
  • This tool compares your website to your competitors in several ways, including by keywords, organic traffic, and more.

In summary, don’t neglect the external side of SEO in your audit. Your site’s backlink health and overall online presence are integral to your SEO success. By cleaning up bad links and recognizing areas to improve (like earning more quality links), you set the stage for sustainable rankings. On top of that, the majority of websites (around 80%) haven’t implemented schema markup for structured data , missing out on richer search results. These issues quietly undermine your SEO performance every day. Browse various agency websites, and you’ll notice they promote different features of their audit.

seo audit

To do this, in Google Search Console, submit the updated URL (or several URLs) to the URL Inspection tool and click Request indexing. With a list of affected pages, you can also check how Google renders a certain page in Google Search Console. Check Language Versions to see what language versions your website has. Additionally, review Pages with hreflang elements to get a list of URLs with those elements. If any of your pages have issues, check the platform recommendations and take relevant measures. Check the Mobile Friendliness and Page Speed section to identify actionable suggestions for optimizing performance.

Meta Tags SEO Guide: How To Use Meta Tags Effectively 2025

On-page search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of digital marketing techniques that help your site appear higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves optimizing the content on your web pages to improve their visibility in search results. One of the main tactics is incorporating keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for into specific areas on your webpage. Both elements need to be short, engaging, and contain your keyword to ensure a solid ranking and encourage users to click through to your page. Before making changes to your website, it’s important to understand the kind of searches you’re aiming for.

on-page seo

A well-crafted URL BHS Links structure helps your on-page SEO — it’s like giving your web pages a good road map. Think of it as a friendly address that guides search engines and invites users to explore your content. Creating SEO-friendly URLs makes it easier for humans and search engines to understand what your page is all about.

Write or update your content

on-page seo

In the past, on-page SEO has been synonymous with keyword use — and specifically, including a high-value keyword in several key locations on a website. Have you ever wondered why some websites appear at the first of SERPs? It’s all about page SEO, it’s an important ingredient for online visibility.

What Is the Difference Between On-Page SEO and Technical SEO?

  • For many, it is just a necessary evil, but knowing the fundamentals is actually not that difficult.
  • If you focus on building a ton of links but have no quality content, then you can’t expect others to link back to you.
  • The goal is to improve its visibility and keyword ranking on search engine results pages.
  • This can be achieved by adopting a hierarchical site structure, often visualized like a tree with the homepage at the root and branching into categories and subpages.

If one of your KPIs for measuring your SEO success is keyword rankings (which it probably should be), you’ll need to set up a rank tracker. Page load speeds are another high-priority ranking factor, and for a good reason. You need to ensure that your page loads under the Google recommendation of two seconds by implementing features such as page caching and lazy loading. Think of on-page SEO as the digital equivalent of ensuring your store is accurately listed in the reference guide and Google as the help kiosk clerk giving recommendations. With the right information, they can lead to additional traffic and sales for your business—without extra marketing spend. They assist search engines in interpreting the subject and relevance of your content.

on-page seo

A dedicated content optimization tool like SEOBoost brings all features, from research and ideation to creation and optimization, into one place. For a complete list of the best on-page SEO tools, read our article. Regular monitoring, at least once a month, using a tool like Google’s free PageSpeed Insights, helps identify and fix technical errors that affect page speed. It should be noted that Google does not always show the custom meta description, but they often use an automated description if they believe it is more useful for the searcher. It’s your opportunity to advertise your page and convince users to click your link and visit your website rather than selecting one of the other links. This metric tells you how effective the site content is at keeping visitors on your site.

on-page seo

29 Strategies to Improve Organic Search Rankings on Google

Listing images from any external source may be a waste of the search engine’s processing budget. Google now supports structured data for an image’s licensing information. Adding this gives credit to the license holder and also makes it easy for users to learn how to license the image. Illyes said this was more of a nice to have than a requirement for ranking. Only when appropriate, use a relevant keyword you’re targeting to describe the image.

improve google ranking

For this reason, it’s necessary to audit your backlink profile regularly. So, if we take the keyword “YouTube tags” as an example, you’ll notice that it previously held the top position but has now shifted down one spot to the second position in the SERPs. As you can see, we have more keywords in positions than we do in the top 3 positions. It’s also helpful to compare different ranking positions to assess your overall performance. As you can see, we also left the “SERP Features” option on, represented by the green bars. This allows me to track when we first gained SERP features for these keywords, beginning in April 2023.

Google SEO: Best Practices to Help with Search Ranking

improve google ranking

Poor quality content will obviously lead to poor quality rankings. If your content is inaccurate, shallow, or directly copied from somewhere else, it won’t rank in the SERPs. It’s worth noting that the Position Changes tab will only display keywords that have changed positions. So, it won’t show you all the keywords your domain is ranking for. Here, you can use the filters to see keywords ranking in certain positions as well as any new, lost, improved and declined keyword positions.

Use email marketing, social shares, and other off-page SEO techniques

This button generates custom HTML code you can copy and paste into a custom WordPress element. Consider embedding a Google Map of your business location onto your website’s Contact Us page or, in some cases, the homepage. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, which can be showcased on your business website (which is connected to your GBP). Use a tool like DataPins to automate review requests through SMS and email reminders.

  • Technical SEO is the backbone of effective search engine optimization.
  • This allows search engines to find our content easily and improve its indexability.
  • Additionally, local links from trustworthy directories make your site even more authoritative and visible.
  • One of the best ways to attract natural backlinks is by creating compelling and shareable content.
  • For “content creation”, it’s likely a “2” because you can make content without a tool, but you can do it even better with one.

The easier you make it for Google, the more likely you’ll rank in AI Overviews. Dive deeper into points to ensure you’re covering each section comprehensively. My advice is to create a sub-heading flow that takes the reader from beginner to expert by the time they get to the end.

improve google ranking

You can use Semrush and analyze your website’s technical aspects to see which needs to be improved. Keyword research is a mandatory feature of almost all SEO tools in the world. You can optimize your website as much as you want but if the base isn’t there, it’s all in vain.

You already know the importance of quality backlinks to improve Google rankings. You may even have an effective backlink strategy and are getting links from several high authority sites. To further amplify your efforts, you could look for opportunities to get more backlinks through site mentions. And we all know just how big of an impact traffic can have to improve Google rankings.

Google’s mobile-first indexing means your site’s mobile version is the primary factor for rankings. Additionally, staying updated with Google’s algorithm changes and conducting competitor analysis using tools like SEMrush or BHS Links Ahrefs can provide valuable insights into market dynamics. For agencies seeking to optimize their local SEO strategies further, SERPs.com offers coaching services that guide you through effective schema implementation. This support can help streamline your efforts and maximize your online presence across various locations. To see and examine entries related to your company, use tools such as Google’s Business Profile Manager.

improve google ranking

It provides detailed reports on impressions and clicks, showing how your site performs in search engine results. Monitoring search queries, impressions, and clicks helps identify top-performing content and areas needing improvement. Regularly reviewing your Google Search Console, data will also allow you to spot outdated content and make necessary adjustments based on tracked metrics. A great user experience ensures visitors can navigate your site intuitively and efficiently. Implementing these navigation strategies creates a user-friendly environment that keeps visitors engaged and satisfied, ultimately boosting search engine rankings.