Once your ownership is verified, it is a good idea to check the Site Audit settings before running your first crawl. If you have a bigger site, it is always best to increase the crawl speed before you start. It is also a good idea to perform an SEO audit when you notice that your rankings are stagnant or declining. After years of working with clients, especially as the head of tech SEO for a U.K. Agency, I’ve found technical SEO audits to be a near-daily occurrence.
Doing an audit helps website owners create a plan for improvement, supporting long-term success in organic search results. Given you’re optimizing for search engines, it’s key to understand how much organic traffic you’re driving through them. Use Google’s Rich Results Test tool (free online) on a few pages to see if any schema is detected and if there are errors. Also in Google Search Console, check the Enhancements section – it will list any detected schema types (like FAQ, Breadcrumbs, Products) and if there are errors or warnings in them. If you find that none of your pages have structured data, that’s a strong recommendation to implement relevant schema.
Follow the guidelines from the Coalition For Better Ads to make sure your ads are user-friendly and you’ll be golden. I recommend testing your site’s speed in both Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and GTmetrix. But if you see any errors, then check out our guides to and HTTP to HTTPS migration for details on how to configure your redirects. Before diving into the technical audit, there are a number of manual checks I recommend performing on any site.
Add Competitors
- In addition to salaries, you’ll also need to budget for tools, software, and ongoing education.
- The first step in our SEO audit checklist is to run an in-depth site scan to gather all website pages and resources like CSS, images, videos, JavaScript, and PDFs.
- The Semrush/Ahrefs site audit should have given you many pointers.
- Broken links are like dead ends – they direct users to URLs that are inaccessible or no longer exist.
If users click away from your slow pages, Google will notice and dock your rankings. Google often shows meta descriptions in the search results, so you should try to write an enticing one for every important page. Missing H1 tags, on the other hand, usually point to bigger issues like an improperly coded theme.
Ready to Choose Your SEO Reporting Tool?
It’s a handy free SEO tool for marketers looking for related keyword suggestions. In addition, KeywordsFX provides you with questions related to the topic of your target keyword and modified versions of keyword phrases. The free version shows you the top 100 backlinks with details like the domain rating.
Think of this as the headline act—it must grab attention immediately. Make sure the colors match your branding and are easy to read. Look at contrast, as this is especially important for buttons and links. Make CTAs (like “Buy now” or “Learn more”) stand out visually. Check the top-performing landing pages in Google BHS Links Analytics and their engagement rates. Pages with low engagement rates may have poor content or a disconnect between user expectations and page design.
Each page on your site should have a unique title and meta description. We’re going to have to run through all the problematic title tags found by Seobility and fix/rewrite them. If pages on your site are returning 404 errors, server (5xx) errors, or are timing out, they’ll show up in this report.
So it’s worth checking your external links periodically for issues…. In this section, I’ll walk you through a general technical SEO audit using the Seobility website audit and a number of other tools. You can add or remove different factors covered in this audit to tailor it to your own situation. There are many different types of SEO audits, ranging from basic auto-generated reports to huge documents that take SEOs weeks of full-time work to produce.
Tools like heatmaps and user surveys can show you what people really want. Then, invest in creating high-quality, helpful content that people can use. I have helped a client recover from an SEO penalty, and one thing I learned was that it requires patience and a lot of it. From the penalty that appeared in Google Search Console and until it was lifted we waited 8 months. They’re usually quite specific about what the penalty is about, and you have to prioritize to fix it immediately.
The Site Audit tool from Ubersuggest crawls up to 100 pages for free. But if you want to crawl more than 100 pages, you should go for their premium plans which are listed below. You can click on each one of those crawled pages links to rectify issues within your site for better crawlability. The main areas for improvement for this site would be performance and security. The robots.txt file, on the other hand, is a text file that allows you to specify how you would like your site to be crawled.