There are a few high-quality website crawlers that work well for this purpose, but the one we have found to be the most useful is Screaming Frog. Website crawlers mimic the way Google might crawl your website following the sitemap.xml or by crawling from link to find and analyze each page on your website. Since SEO is an ongoing process, it’s important to establish yourself and track your progress (which many tools do via SEO scores).
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But it’s still important to check you’re not dead in the water before you even start. The audit can identify over 100+ issues, which can be overwhelming for beginners. 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.
It covers technical aspects, content quality, backlinks, and user experience. Search engine algorithms prioritize well-optimized websites that provide a seamless user experience. By identifying technical, content, and backlink issues, an SEO audit helps maintain a website’s relevance and authority. Regular audits allow businesses to stay competitive in search rankings, adapt to algorithm updates, and improve their digital presence. In the expansive realm of digital marketing, an SEO website audit emerges as a comprehensive examination that provides an in-depth analysis of a website’s visibility in search engines. SEOmator provides you with invaluable insights based on Google Search Console SEO Anomaly data, including detailed analysis of your most popular landing pages.
Google Search Console is a tool provided for free by Google to allow site owners to monitor traffic from Google to their website. It also allows you to check for some basics like; website speed, crawling and indexing errors, top linking sites, and even notifies you if your site has been hacked. In the second step of your SEO audit, you will be able to see what are the top performing pages of your website and the top search queries for each page. With this information, you can check the page to ensure that you are sufficiently targeting that query and topic on the page and satisfying the search’s intent in the best possible way.
Lesson #11: SEO Tools Alone Can’t Replace Manual SEO Checks
You should also regularly review Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report to see how many pages Google crawls per day. Comparing crawled pages with total pages on your site helps you spot inefficiencies. By reading this article, you can apply these insights to save yourself and your SEO clients time, money, and frustration – in less than an hour.
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. • Duplicates – if multiple pages share the same title or meta description, rewrite them to be distinct.
This involves targeting specific markets and increasing visibility in local searches. Google is smart enough to know whether or not you’re intentionally and maliciously duplicating content on your site to clog the SERP with your site’s URLs. A more likely scenario, if you have duplicate content, is that it’s happening unintentionally. Given the above section on types of SEO audits, we’ve compiled a checklist for a pretty well-rounded SEO audit that incorporates technical, off-page, and on-page SEO.
Technical SEO Factors
- Connect with him on LinkedIn or through the BruceClay.com website.
- You can do a lot to improve your site speed, so once you have collected all the data, add it to your sheet with the rest of the tasks to tackle.
- For example, the core update in August 2018 appeared to largely affect health, fitness, and medical sites that failed to demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-A-T).
- It also has the same number of pages with an empty or missing meta description and thousands with a missing or empty H1 tag.
In conclusion, staying ahead in the world of SEO is crucial for boosting your website’s online presence and search engine rankings in 2024. Schema markup and structured data offer search engines extra content information, improving search result accuracy and visibility. Before we delve into the actual checklist, let’s talk about the SEO audit tools you’re going to need to successfully conduct it. If your site has pages that can’t be crawled by search engines, your website may not be indexed correctly, if at all.
An audit helps you identify where there are points of weakness in your campaign and how those points hurt your site’s performance. An SEO audit is a review of your SEO campaign and strategies. With an assessment, you have the opportunity to identify what you’re doing well and uncover areas of improvement. Regardless, if you find broken links, replace or remove them as quickly as you can.
You’ll see all the keywords your competitors’ domains rank for, but your domain doesn’t. You can also find broken URLs with backlinks in Site Explorer. 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. Check your backlinks and their value, see competitors’ backlinks and new & lost links.