More engagement leads to better SEO and a higher search engine results page (SERP) placement, but higher SEO leads to more visibility and higher user interaction. Website audits are necessary to ensure your site is getting traffic. Here’s how to perform a complete SEO audit to check your site’s health. When the team makes fixes and adjustments, they prioritize the essential tasks specified in your audit that are most likely holding you back in your rankings.

How to Do an SEO Audit: The Ultimate Checklist

Having multiple versions of your website accessible to search engines can seriously dilute your SEO efforts. With a reputation for client satisfaction, WebFX provides proven — and trusted — SEO audits and implementations. Our team SEO Anomaly of award-winning SEO specialists features some of the industry’s best, which offers your company a unique advantage. With 75 percent of users sticking to the first page of search results, you can direct a tremendous amount of valuable traffic to your website. Because that traffic includes users from your target audience, it has a higher chance of converting, whether by purchasing your product or joining your newsletter. It’s also critical that your company invests in an SEO audit at the beginning of a new digital marketing or SEO strategy.

Conclusion: Make SEO Auditing a Habit

Utilize the tools mentioned above to assess your site’s performance, identifying areas that require immediate attention. After auditing hundreds of websites, the biggest pattern I notice isn’t complex technical SEO issues, though they do matter. Too often, I see sites start building backlinks simply because their SEO isn’t progressing, hoping more links will magically help. For example, if you have a page with strong external backlinks, linking internally from that high-authority page to weaker ones can pass authority and help those pages rank better. While log files offer the most detailed view of search engine interactions, even a quick check in Crawl Stats helps you spot issues you might otherwise miss. Google handles JavaScript in three steps (crawling, rendering, and indexing) using an evergreen Chromium browser.

• Comparing crawled pages with total pages on your site helps you spot inefficiencies.
• Once you’ve found these areas, adjust your CTAs, page design, or content to reduce friction.
• Google will go nuts on them, and a site with 1,000 actual pages can quickly end up with tens of thousands of near-duplicate pages indexed.
• And if you see any lonely grey nodes hanging around, those are your orphan pages.

You might notice that at the top of a browser, next to the URL, there’s a message that says either secure or not secure. If your website isn’t secure, anyone who inputs their information into the site is at risk of having it stolen. A technical SEO audit takes a deeper dive into the mechanics behind your site. You can audit many, MANY other technical SEO elements other than the ones I’ll talk about, but focusing on these things can help you get started.

Of course, more advanced issues may need further investigation that involves other tools, such as Google Search Console. But our audit tool does a great job at highlighting key issues, especially for beginner SEOs. Unless you have a very small, simple business site that was perfectly built by an expert SEO, you’re likely going to run into some technical issues along the way. An audit will check if a site is optimized properly for the various search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Broken pages occur when a resource on your website ceases to exist. Sometimes, these resources still have internal links pointing to them or have backlinks from other sites.

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.