2016-04-21





I’ll be the first one to admit it:  “SEO Audit” sounds brain-numbingly boring. Audits are the whole reason that people make jokes about accountants and IRS employees. And here you are reading an article on creating an SEO audit.

Let me just say it:  An SEO audit is anything but boring.

Sure, you might have to dive into some of the tech geekery of SEO, but the results that you produce are powerful, game-changing, revenue-impacting, and thoroughly actionable.

You think I overstate my case?

Quick example: I conducted an SEO audit for a large manufacturing firm selling multi-million dollar processing equipment with a 12-24 month sales cycle. Needless to say, a single click on their CTA is cause for a company-wide celebration.

One tech audit, and one month later, they were receiving dozens of inquiries per month.

The business impact? Millions of dollars in additional revenue.

From whence came such a bounty of money? From the humble yet powerful SEO audit.

An SEO audit is one of the most powerful tools. A thorough audit answers questions, solves problems, and produces an array of benefits that you may have never anticipated.

It’s my goal to show you exactly how to do an SEO audit.

First, we’re going to do some introduction stuff. Don’t skip it. Hopefully, it will set you up for the awesomeness of the audit that follows.

When you read the introduction, you’ll know the answers to all the critical questions that impact an SEO audit:

What is an SEO Audit?

Who needs one?

What’s it good for?

How smart do you need to be in order to run one of these?

What’s the goal of an SEO audit, anyway?

What’s the result of an SEO audit?

What are some of the challenges?

Introduction: Let’s figure out what an SEO audit is all about.

To set the stage, we’re going to ask a series of questions. By the end of this introduction, you’ll know exactly what we’re going to accomplish with an SEO audit.

Plus, you’ll be salivating to begin your own audit.

What is the definition of “SEO Audit?”

An SEO audit is a broad evaluation of a website’s search engine performance.

Holy cow, that’s a huge definition.

You could potentially spend two years creating a detailed audit based on that definition.

So, having dished up that amazon of a scope, I’m going to whittle it down.

The SEO audit I’m going to propose is not as detailed as it could be. The audit I’m tracing out below is comprehensive, but not exhaustive.

For example…

You don’t need to analyze every single freaking page of content on the website. You could, but you don’t have to. I’ve audited sites that have millions of pages.

It’s not necessary to produce a spreadsheet of every potentially harmful backlink pointing to the site. Again, if that’s your thing, go for it. But you don’t have to.

I’m not going to suggest that you measure the size of every image on the site to determine compression capabilities. Not a bad idea, but not necessary.

The audit you are going to learn to perform below is not a freebie whip-it-up-in-minutes approach, either. Google “free SEO audit,” and you’ll find a legion of tools that will “audit” your website.

“Audit” can mean anything you want it to, bit I’m showing you a method that free tools simply can’t provide.

There are all kinds of detailed audits that you could subject your website to. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to suggest an audit that gives you powerful results without draining your time and sucking your soul of its vitality and humanity.

Who needs an SEO audit?

At the risk of sounding cliche, every website does. I believe that every website could benefit from an SEO audit.

I’ll be totally transparent, though. I’ve looked at some websites, and thought, No. We’re not going to do an audit. First, we’re going to do a redesign.



You see what I mean? Some websites are so far gone that no amount of SEO auditing is going to bring them back.

Use your best judgment.

What is an SEO audit good for?

The basic answer is this:  It gives you an actionable plan for improving your site’s search engine performance and visibility.

There are two groups of people who will benefit from an SEO audit:

This audit is ideal for agencies who want to offer a great product.

Advertise it on your website, package it up, and start selling it. This thing is a killer product, and you can charge anywhere from $1k to $5k to run one, depending on the size of the client’s site, and the complexity of your audit.

Alternatively, you can provide the audit as a complementary product. An audit is essentially a roadmap of website improvements that you can offer at a cost.

This audit is also beneficial for any website seeking to improve its SEO.

It’s hard to simply “improve a website” without knowing where to start and what to do.

Your SEO audit shows you precisely what features you should focus on when seeking to enhance your website search performance.

What skill level should I have before running this audit?

I’d like to think that this audit is easy enough for my eight-year-old to run, provided she follows the instructions.

But, truth be told, there are a few technical terms and concepts that you should have in place before attempting this audit.

You should know the major SEO terms:  URL, meta description, ALT tag, image compression, robots.txt. If these terms are Greek to you, then this audit will be challenging.

It will be helpful if you’ve used some basic SEO tools. The more tools you’re familiar with, the faster and better you’ll be able to perform this audit. I’ll suggest some free and paid tools below. Some of the most helpful are Majestic, SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz, Screaming Frog, etc.

You should have some technical chops. I don’t consider myself a super-technical person. I studied mostly languages and literature in college, not a STEM field. However, once I found my groove in the marketing world, I developed some facility in technical activities. If tech just isn’t your thing, then this audit could be a lesson in suffering.

Don’t worry. If you’re an SEO newbie, never used an SEO tool in your life, and prefer playing Chopin on the piano to poring over sitemaps on your Macbook, don’t worry:  You can still do this.

What is the goal of an SEO audit?

The goal is simple:  To improve your website’s search engine performance.

This is an obvious point, but it brings up two important not-so-obvious points:

The audit itself is not going to change your website. The audit only shows you what you should change.

In order for the audit to be successful, it should provide a tactical list of things that need to be changed. It does no good to explain, “you have 289,189 backlinks.” Who cares?! The information in an audit should be tied to something actionable.

And the ultimate goal is even better:  More revenue for your business.

What is the result of an SEO audit?

A good audit will provide the following:

An SEO audit is an actionable plan. You instantly know what needs to be changed and how to do it.

An SEO audit is the big picture of a site. You can understand at a glance how competitive your website is from an SEO perspective.

An SEO audit displays your website’s weaknesses. And then, it shows how to improve upon them.

An SEO audit helps to set expectations. SEO audits are great at providing a competitive baseline for a website’s future improvements.

An SEO audit provides ongoing opportunities for improvement. You probably won’t be able to improve on everything on your SEO audit list right away. Instead, you have a variety of things to work on for several weeks or months.

What are some challenges of an SEO audit?

Getting bogged down in the weeds. I’m a fan of picking apart a website, line of code by line of code, javascript by javascript, h-tag by h-tag. I’ve got the tools. I’ve got the skills. If the client has the money, I have the time. But is this really valuable? Answer:  Probably not.

Not providing a helpful overview. Executives don’t really care about robots.txt optimization unless it impacts the bottom line. Rise above brushstroke detail, and create a panoramic landscape — the big picture overview.

Not providing actionable takeaways. I know I’m repeating it, but this is important. Listen up folks. The audit has to tell people what to do.

Not providing something of more value than an automated audit. I once did work for an agency where we provided complimentary SEO audits for every client who came on board. Those audits took me five minutes to complete. They were valuable, yes, but they didn’t provide the same sort of deep dive analysis that an SEO audit should provide. I’ve also done work for a (different) agency that conducted technical audits (tech only; no content, UI, nav, etc., auditing) that required as much as twenty hours of intensive work. They were expensive audits, but they were good.

How to Perform an SEO Audit

Ready to roll? Here’s how we’re going to do it.

Overview

There are three main areas of an audit, which cover the three main areas of SEO.

Technical – the nuts-and-bolts of a website. The best person for making improvements in this area is a web developer or designer. A website can’t succeed unless it has a strong technical foundation. This is where it all begins.

On-page — It’s all about content in this area. Having the right keywords, content silos, and information is critical. Local SEOs should analyze NAP presence in this phase.

Off-page — This area covers backlinks, brand mentions, social media, and external ranking factors. If a site has been impacted by algorithmic penalties, you’ll uncover why and how.

Source

This audit I explain below contains three main sections, corresponding to these three main SEO areas.

We’ll start off with the technical, move into on-page, and conclude with off-page.

Structure of This Guide

I’m assuming that you have some knowledge of SEO terms. Rather than complicate the article with definitions and descriptions, I’m going to simply give you the most valuable information to conduct the audit

What it is — What to analyze

How to do it — Tools or resources you can use

What results to look for — How to turn the information into actionable insights

At this point, don’t obsess over how to format your final document and present it to the client. Your goal is to gather all the information and dive into the nitty-gritty of getting the site audited.

Technical Audit

The goal of a technical audit is to find out how accessible the site is to search engines and robots. Indexation is the goal. In order for that to happen, you need to make sure that all the technical pieces are in place.

This is the most tedious and unsexy parts of the audit, but it’s foundational.

Ignoring a site’s technical capabilities and accessibility is like designing a vehicle, but forgetting to add an engine.

A site’s technical innards are that engine. Ensuring the engine is well-oiled and tuned-up is critical to having a functional vehicle.

Here’s how to tune up the engine on your or your client’s website.

DNS Settings

What It Is

Check to make sure that search bots aren’t getting errors when crawling the site.

How To Do It

Easy way:

Log in to Google Search Console,

Check “current status” on the dashboard.

If your DNS is all good, you’ll see a green check

Run a free test here: http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/. This is very thorough analysis.

What Results to Look For

The free test above will give you an all-clear sign, or an explanation of any problems that you should address.

Server Errors

How To Do It

Check the Google Search console dashboard, and look for the green check.

What Results to Look For

Drill down on any server issues, and find out exactly what’s going on.

You can go into detail on server errors in the Search console

Crawl

Crawl errors

Server connectivity

Robots.txt validation

How To Do It

Robots.txt fetch is one of the dashboard elements in Search Console, so you can see it at a glance.

You can use Google’s tool found here:  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robots-testing-tool

You can also access the tool in Search Console

Crawl

Robots.txt tester

What To Look For

As long as you’re getting good results (no errors), you should be fine. However, it’s important to make sure that there are no major sections of the website being blocked by the site’s robots.txt.

404 Handling and Errors

What It Is

Check for the volume and velocity of missing pages, which could signal site performance or server issues.

How To Do It

Google Search Console

Crawl

Crawl Errors

Not Found

What Results to Look For

Most sites have a few 404s. Don’t stress over it. If there are thousands of 404s, and it comprises a huge percentage of the site, then you should start to stress. Additionally, major spikes in 404s could signal problems, too.

If your report looks like this, make a note to dive deeper into why so many pages are 404ing.

Site Security (HTTPs)

What It Is

Google gives search preferences to secure sites. Ensuring that your site is secure will serve to reassure users and possible provide a small uptick in search rankings.

How To Do It

Is the URL http:// or is there an “s” — https://? The “s” signals that the site has security in place.

Most browsers display this information with a graphical feature, such as the green padlock in Chrome.

What Results to Look For

The search advantage of a secured site isn’t drastic but it’s important to consider in order to improve on user experience and trust.

It is especially important for any payment pages or on sections of the site that are requesting personal information.

HTML Validation

What It Is

It’s a good idea to run a free check up on the validation of the site’s HTML.

How To Do It

Use the free tool from the World Wide Web Consortium: https://validator.w3.org/

What Results to Look For

The validator is going to be super picky, so don’t despair if you find a lot of errors.

You may wish to hand a copy of the report to your developer, and let him or her make any relevant improvements.

Look especially for “fatal errors,” in order to focus on these issues first.

Indexation

What It Is

Make sure that Google is indexing all the pages that it should. The number of indexed pages that your site features in Google search should be roughly equivalent to the number of indexed pages you see in The Search console.

How To Do It

Search Google for “site:[yoursite]”, and identify the number of indexed pages.

Check Search Console:

Google Index

Index Status

What Results to Look For

The results should be equivalent, though they are rarely the same. Major discrepancies should be investigated.

Structured Data

How To Do It

Search console

Search appearance

Structured data

What Results to Look For

Google provides a comprehensive report. Structured data can be time-consuming to add to a site, but it does provide some advantage for search results.

XML Sitemap

What It Is

An XML sitemap is for bots only, not people. A site without an XML sitemap is a website with a missed SEO opportunity.

You can look at the sitemap of any website you choose, provided the site has one.

How To Do It

First, you want to make sure that the website has an XML sitemap. You can find out by checking Search Console.

Second, you want to ensure that the XML is simple, straightforward, and uncluttered. Adding optional tags and instructions can actually weaken the integrity of the XML sitemap, and create search bot confusion.

To perform a quick scan of your XML, you can use W3’s syntax checker:  http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_validator.asp

Malware Scan and Canonical Header Check

What It Is

Most search engines are adept at identifying malware. However, it is helpful to run a scan on your site to examine headers and take a close look at potential risk factors.

How To Do It

Use the tool found here:  https://aw-snap.info/file-viewer/

What Results to Look For

There are two elements to look for:

On the results, press CTRL+F, and search for “canonical.” The site should have a rel=canonical tag.

Make sure that the header codes are valid (i.e., not expired)

Site Speed

What It Is

Site speed is the biggest area of potential SEO improvements. Small changes in site speed can produce an enormous positive impact on indexability, user experience, and conversions.

Source

If you have to pick one element of a technical audit to conduct, it should be in the area of site speed. There is a 99% likelihood of finding something to fix. Then, there is a 100% likelihood of seeing measurable improvements in the website and its SEO performance.

How To Do It

I suggest using two tools for this section of the audit:  Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights:

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Google PageSpeed Insights

Each tool provides unique advantages and insights. Pingdom provides a comparative analysis and speed in raw seconds. Their waterfall analysis shows you exactly where the delays are happening.

The advantage of Google is the mobile analysis. Load time on mobile devices is essential for improving the quality of a site and its search traffic.

Keep in mind, you probably won’t get a perfect score. Even Google.com has several “should fix” errors in their own page speed analysis.

What Results to Look For

There are a lot of things that could slow down a website, but I want to point out a few of the big ones:

Code to text ratio — A lot of cruft can slow down a website quickly. For an extra measure of investigation into this number, check out http://www.whatsmyip.org/text-to-code-ratio/.

Page Size — This is the often considered a standard measurement of page speed analysis. Although analyzing page size alone is insufficient, you should still give some consideration to it. Pages bigger than 1.5MB are at risk of sluggish load times.

Image file size — Big images will kill your page speed. If images comprise more than 75% of the entire page’s file size, it could signal a problem. By all means, compress every image on the page to conserve space.

Caching — A simple cache installation can remove precious seconds from load times. Ensure that caching is installed, enabled, and optimized to include as many cacheable resources as possible.

Script minification, externalization, and combination — Getting carried away with codes is a leading cause of site speed slowdowns. A competent developer will be able to assess which codes can be removed, minified, or externalized to improve the site speed.

Google provides an easy-to-use report that provides a guide on how to improve site speed elements.

Follow the instructions this report (or hand it off to your developer) and you’ll instantly see a massive uptick in your site’s SEO.

Mobile-Friendly Test

How To Do It

Use the Google Developers Mobile-Friendly Test

What Results to Look For

You’re looking for a simple “Awesome” from Google. If you don’t get the awesome, you’ll need to address the listed issues.

Websites need to be mobile friendly in order to appear in Google mobile results. If the site lacks mobile compatibility, changes are in order.

On-page Audit (Content Audit)

A word about structure

A thoroughgoing content audit will produce a list of every single page of a website in a spreadsheet, with detailed notes and data on each page.

Should you be producing such a thorough audit? It all depends. If the site is hundreds of thousands of pages, probably not. I’ve conducted content audits of websites with 1.5 million pages. obviously, I did not look at every page.

If the site is a content-rich with a few dozen pages, sure. Go through every page with a fine-toothed comb. It all depends on the needs of the client, the cost of the audit, and your ultimate goal.

If you’re working with a massive website, you should audit the major content features (navigation, etc.) and then create a list of the pages with the highest amount of traffic. Using a benchmark of 25 or 50 pages, conduct your detailed audit on these pages.

Limiting your audit in this way will keep it from taking 15 years to complete, while at the same time giving your client the most immediate results.

A word about tools

The best tool I’ve used for conducting a content audit is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Although you can use a free version of the tool, I recommend purchasing a license.

Screaming Frog provides at-a-glance analysis for many of the issues that I explain below. It is particularly useful for page-by-page analysis, discussed in detail under “page-by-page analysis” in this section.

A word about variety

What about all the variety — e-commerce sites, content sites, blogs, B2B sites, lead generation sites, news sites?

This content audit is intended to be general enough for you to conduct it on any website, regardless of the nature, intent, audience, or size.

That being said, I recommend that you revise the “page-by-page analysis” section in order to align with your content audit goals and objectives.

Main Navigation

Navigation is critical to UX, which is critical to SEO as well. Put on your user experience hat, and assess the functionality and layout of the menu navigation.

Good SEO is a result of accurate and intuitive website design. Accurate and intuitive website design is the nexus of user experience, information architecture, design, and development. This is a lot of information to juggle, and a tall order to fill.

Is it comprehensive? Does it get you to the main sections of the website within one or two clicks with no CSS/mouseover confusion?

Is it simple? Navigation menus with seven or more main elements begin to tax the limits of the brain.

Is it logically arranged? Creative navigation is rarely a good design move. Conventional main navigation usually consists of a vertical bar at the top of the page, but there’s room for flexibility. As long as it “makes sense” you should be okay.

Is the navigation keyword-focused? Top-level navigation is a critical SEO factor. Make sure that main navigation elements have an obvious keyword focus. No, you shouldn’t stuff each navigation item with a massive long tail keyword, but you should make it obvious to the user what they’re going to see. There’s no need to overthink this. Some items are standard:  An “about us” page can be “About.” A “blog” is a “blog.” Industry-specific items, however, should include relevant keywords. For example, if you are analyzing an industrial carpet cleaning website, you should see the terms “carpet” and “cleaning” in some of the menu items.

Footer Navigation

If the site has navigation at the bottom of the site, you should analyze it for the following features:

Is it useful? Does it provide navigation to the most relevant pages of the site? Are there links to social profiles?

Is it logical? Does it follow the pattern of the top navigation?

Is it strategic? Most of the time, the footer is a good place to add the business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP).

The footer is one of the places where SEOs of yore went overboard in their optimization efforts. Here are some telltale signs of an over optimized website footer:

Lots of copy. The footer should not contain huge amounts of copy. I’ve seen footers with 1,000+ pages of raw keywords. This is a violation of user experience best practice and a flagrant abuse of SEO. It’s called keyword-stuffing, and it’s something that will compromise a site’s integrity in the search engines. Plus, there’s the duplicate content issue. Since a footer is repeated on every page of the website, you run the risk of over-optimized duplicate content.

Lots of links. The footer nav is not the place for a full sitemap. Keep your links to a minimum. Keep what’s important (top nav replication), and what’s necessary (terms of service or site disclosures).

Sitewide external links. A sitewide external link is a text or image hyperlinked to another outside website. Since a website’s footer is usually sitewide, such a link creates, in effect, thousands of links to the target website. I’ve witnessed entire sites penalized due to receiving sitewide links from an external website’s footer. It’s definitely not a good idea to link to other websites in your footer.

URL Analysis

URLs are a potent SEO force, and they need to be optimized from two angles:  Usability and indexation. Since the URL is the path that that the search engine follows, it’s crucial to include the right keywords.

At the same time, they URL should convey to the user what the page is about. These two features do not contradict each other.

Check URLs for the following:

Keyword presence. Use just enough keywords to make the page relevant and informative.

Concise. Don’t make your URLs too long.

No numbers or symbols. Except in the infrequent case of tracking URLs, parameterization, or landing pages, URLs should be clean and symbol-free

Capitalization. There’s no need to capitalize different words in the URLs. Doing so can create traffic deviancy and confusion. Consistency in capitalization is important, and the industry standard is no capitalization in URLs whatsoever.

Dashes and underscores. Separating words in the URL is generally done using dashes (as opposed to underscores). Whatever the site’s convention is, it should be followed consistently.

NAP Presence

Businesses with a local presence should have NAP presence across the entire website. NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number.

Ideally, the NAP should be present in the website header or footer, in order to achieve sitewide presence.

UpCity has the NAP in the footer.

In addition to a footer presence, the NAP should have a solid presence on an additional page such as the “about” page or a “location” page.

Check.

Integrating maps and any relevant local keywords (county name, city neighborhood name, etc.) is important to improving user experience and achieving keyword relevance for local queries.

The most important aspect of NAP presence is consistency. If the business has ever had a different name, address, or phone number, then it is at risk for NAP inconsistency, which can compromise local SEO potential.

As part of an audit, you should recommend scouring the web for occurrences of the business NAP, including directory listings, and make the relevant changes. The NAP must have consistency in all its online mentions, and occurrences.

To make sure that your NAP is consistent, you can use Yext. It’s a tool that will take most of the pain out of the challenge that is NAP consistency.

Important:  Although it falls outside of the scope of a strict SEO audit, you should make sure that the website’s Google My Business/Google+ profiles are aligned with the NAP on the website.

HTML Sitemap

One of the best ways to develop a strong site structure and full indexation of the site’s content is by means of an HTML sitemap.

The sitemap should be one click away from any page on the site. Thus, putting it in the footer is the best option.

The HTML sitemap should provide an accurate visual layout of the main pages or sections of the site. The sitemap URL should be /sitemap. For example, http://example.com/sitemap

Breadcrumbs

If the site contains breadcrumbs, conduct a quick check to ensure the relevancy and functionality of the breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are helpful for navigation, as long as they accurately convey the page’s position in the overall site structure. Breadcrumbs also provide an opportunity for schema markup.

Main Page Content

The most-visited page of a website needs the greatest amount of SEO content care. Here’s what you should look for on the main page content:

The correct keyword focus. Does the page target the correct longtail keywords for its industry and target audience?

The correct keyword presence. Does the page include sufficient saturation of the keyword? Are there enough semantic variations of the keyword?

Enough content. A glaring SEO shortcoming of many sites is the lack of optimized content. Image rich websites provide sufficient visual engagement, but the site needs written content in order to best capture the attention of users and search engines. A line of above-the-fold content is critical. A minimum of 400 words of content on the homepage is recommended.

Consistent and Continual Content Production

In order to stay competitive, a website should be producing content on a regular basis. You can easily identify how Google is indexing this content by performing a simple Google query: site:www.example.com, and then click “search tools,” → “anytime” → “past week” (or whatever time frame you prefer).

Sites updated weekly or more frequently are maintaining good content publication velocity, which will keep them actively indexed and ranked.

Page-by-page Analysis

It’s time to take a deep dive into each page of the website — or as many as you’ve chosen. To make this as simple as possible, create a checklist of things to look for on each page.

Here’s a sample checklist:

Page Title

Does the page have a title?

Is it within the optimal length of 30-55 characters? (Check here.)

Is it relevant?

Does it contain keywords?

Is there consistent standard of title creation? It helps to have a consistent convention for titling pages. For example, it may look something like this:  [This Page is About Keywords] | [Company Name]. Make sure that there is some consistency in how the title is arranged, and what symbol is used to separate elements. (The vertical bar — | — is the standard.)

Meta description

Does the page have a meta description?

Is it engaging for users?

Is it the correct length?

H1

Does the page have an H1?

Is it relevant and keyword-focused?

Keyword focus and representation

Generally speaking, each page should have a unique keyword focus. Does the page target a single keyword?

Does the keyword occur on the page with enough frequency and semantic variety?

Is the keyword represented in the title, the H1, and the body copy?

Copy

Does the page have sufficient copy?

Does the copy reflect the keyword focus of the page?

Visual and interactive content (the more, the better)

Does the page have engaging and relevant visual imagery?

Do the videos play?

Are there functional interactive elements?

Alt tags

Are images optimized with relevant filenames and tagged with appropriate keywords?

Internal linking

Does the page contain copy with relevant text links to other internal pages? A site with strong internal linking helps to create a site with strong internal architecture. Checking for at least one internal contextual link (apart from navigation links) is important.

Last updated

Frequently-changed pages will rank higher. Google’s fresh factor will value pages with significant revisions of major sections of content, improvements to the H1, and even new copy. Pages that have not been updated in one year or more should be revised.

Broken links

Make sure each page has no broken links.

Spelling, grammar, etc.

You may not have the resources to perform a full-on proofreading of every single page. However, it’s important to scan for accuracy and to eliminate any typos. A typo is a user experience issue, and therefore, it’s an SEO issue, too.

Authority

Are the pages authored by copywriter’s who possess authority and mastery of the content?

Are authors attributed in these content pages, and are there links to social profiles?

Unique content

Make sure that content is not unduly duplicated across pages. H1s, title tags, and body copy should be largely unique for nearly every page on the website.

Content that is duplicated on external sites is a warning sign, signaling scraped or copied content, and running the risk of duplicate content penalization.

Ads

Unless the purpose of the site is ad revenue, such ads can distract from the purpose of the site and reduce user experience.

Bounce rates

Analyze the bounce rates of main pages to ensure that they are neither too high nor too low. Note that low bounce rates are just as problematic as high bounce rates.

Layout and Readability

Ensure that content width, font face, font size, kerning, and font color are all contributing to enhanced readability and layout of the site.

Check for headers (e.g., H2, H3, etc.) with appropriate CSS or formatting.

Scan for readability with paragraphs, chunks of text, bullet points, etc.

Outbound links

Are there are appropriate outbound links to authoritative websites, in order to validate claims or statements in the copy? Linking out to strong and authoritative websites (e.g., a news site, a reference site, etc.) can improve the site’s co-citation and co-occurrence.

Source

Overall value

Central to the SEO question is “does this page provide value to the user?” The question is subjective, and the answer may be hard to come by. If the page serves a purpose, answers a question, or solves a problem, it’s obviously valuable. If it doesn’t, then the page should be revised or redirected to ensure that the website is streamlined, powerful, and clear.

Call to action

Every page should contribute to the overall business goal of the website. If further engagement or action is expected, the page should contain relevant CTAs to encourage the user to take the next logical step.

Off-page Audit

The final phase of the SEO audit is most likely the most significant in terms of SEO value. To be clear, the off-page audit is mostly about backlinks.

(Note for the sake of brevity, we’ve chosen not to include social media profiles in this discussion, except for a mere mention. Social media audits are an entity all their own.) </

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