SEO audit — that’s the subject of this lesson. What an SEO audit is, how to audit a page or a website, what separates an on-site SEO audit from an on-page SEO audit or a technical SEO audit, what an SEO audit checklist is and how to build one, which are the best free SEO audit tools and plugins and how to use them… there’s a lot to get through.
As you’ll know, in our SEO Academy we cover every topic connected to ranking on search engines. If you’re new here, have a look at the earlier lessons — we’ve covered a number of things that will help you follow this article.
If this lesson interests you, it’s probably because you want to run a proper SEO audit to improve your site’s rankings and visibility, and you want to focus above all on the practical side of SEO audit analysis and the auditing techniques to follow.
So let’s not waste any more time — here we go!
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What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a systematic, documented and independent review of every area of a website that affects search engine rankings. Done properly, this SEO analysis identifies problems and opportunities and offers solutions for improving performance. The output of the auditing process is a document summarising all the relevant findings: the SEO audit report.
Why run an SEO audit?
Here’s why an SEO audit is well worth doing:
- To see where the site stands: an SEO audit gives you a quick overview of your website’s general health.
- To weigh the improvements that would bring more traffic and visibility: a site that isn’t properly optimized brings in less traffic and gives prospective customers fewer chances to reach you.
- To keep pace with algorithm changes: Google and the other search engines update their algorithms frequently in order to return results as close as possible to the user’s search intent. SEO strategy, tactics and content have to be adjusted as those changes arrive.
- To analyse the site against the ranking factors: search engine algorithms use more than 200 factors, or signals, to decide where a page or a whole site ranks.
- To gain a competitive edge: an SEO audit also assesses what your competitors are doing. Knowing their strategies and the solutions they’ve adopted matters enormously, because it lets you sharpen your own tactics and improve where your content ranks.
Types of SEO audit
A website can be analysed for SEO as a whole or area by area, which gives rise to different types of audit, each tied to the area under investigation. Beyond the SEO content audit, technical SEO audit, off-page SEO audit and SEO link audit we’ll cover at length below, there are:
- Local SEO audit: a review of how a website performs in the SERP for localised results
- Competitive site audit: a review aimed at finding growth opportunities, starting from the gaps between your site and your competitors’.
- Negative SEO audit: a review and analysis of the fall in certain metrics after a site has been attacked with negative SEO (black hat tactics aimed at damaging a site’s rankings).
- Red flag SEO audit: an analysis aimed at finding the problems that trigger Google Penguin penalties.
- SEO security audit: a review of the website’s vulnerabilities.
SEO audit tools, Chrome extensions and plugins
SEO audit tools and SEO checkers help the auditor speed up the process of analysing and optimizing a website. The main tools, plugins and Chrome extensions used or suggested in our worked SEO audit example are these.
SEO audit tools
- Google Analytics (go to site)
- Google Search Console (go to site)
- Google PageSpeed Insights (go to site)
- Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool (go to site)
- Ahrefs (go to site)
- Copyscape (go to site)
- Screaming Frog (go to site)
- Seomofo (go to site)
- Bright Lab SEO Word Counter (go to site)
Chrome extensions
SEO audit plugins
- BuiltWith
- WordPress SEO by Yoast
- WP Rocket
How to run an SEO audit
An SEO audit starts with planning, the stage where you define:
- the audit’s purpose, goals and scope;
- which SEO tools to use;
- the SEO audit checklist
Then comes the operational stage, in which the checklist drives an investigation of one or more broad areas of the site (performance, crawling & indexing, user experience, content and so on). For each, elements are examined in turn across the four main areas the audit process divides into:
- Technical
- On-page ranking factors
- Off-page ranking factors
- Competitor analysis
As for scheduling, good practice — depending on the size of the site — is a quick SEO audit monthly and a full one at least twice a year.
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Technical SEO audit
This is the review aimed at finding, in the HTML and other technical elements of a website, the problems that hurt its performance and its user experience (UX).
The main points of this audit are as follows.
Crawlability
If technical SEO problems stop search engine bots (crawlers, spiders) reaching and crawling your site’s pages, those pages don’t get indexed. The causes are mostly errors in the directives given to bots through robots.txt, or the presence of the noindex meta tag.
The robots.txt file
A “Disallow” rule may have been set accidentally, blocking spiders such as Googlebot from a particular page’s content.
Here’s an example of blocked content:
<head>
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /example/
</head>
To check that your page is reachable by crawlers you can use tools such as Google’s robots.txt Tester (here’s the link) or Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
The free version of Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 pages and works like this:
- download the program here
- open the tool and enter your page or domain URL
- click “start” to begin the crawl
- in the top bar click the “Response codes” tab
- select the “blocked by robots.txt” filter
- export the data as a CSV
Image of Screaming Frog
The robots meta tag
Inadvertently, or for a specific reason, the page carries the noindex tag, which tells the bot not to index its content and not to follow its links.
Here’s an example:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”, follow”/>
In both cases, to reach robots.txt and fix the error, go to your browser’s address bar, add “/robots.txt” to your domain (e.g. https://www.euwebagency.com/robots.txt) and load it.
Then check that the page is in the index with the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console (find it here). Alternatively the noindex tag can be corrected through a WordPress plugin, or one for whichever CMS you use.
Page/site indexing
Once you’ve established that crawlers can reach your pages, the next step is checking that they’re actually indexed. The simple way is a manual Google search using the “site:rootdomain” operator (e.g. site:euwebagency.com).
Image from Google.it
If that search returns significantly fewer (or more) indexed pages than you’d expect, it’s worth digging further.
Fewer than expected may mean a Google Penguin penalty; more than expected probably means duplicate content (or a situation caused by the accessibility problems described above).
To narrow the search, try Screaming Frog: click the “Directives” tab and select the “Noindex” filter.
Telling Google your preferred domain
Two other versions of your site can exist:
- the one with the http:// or https:// protocol –> http://yoursite.com / https://yoursite.com
- the www or non-www variant –> https://www.yoursite.com / https://yoursite.com
Make sure only one version (the one you’ve chosen) is reachable in the browser and that the others are properly forwarded to it with a 301 redirect.
Unless told otherwise, Google’s crawler (Googlebot) doesn’t distinguish between these versions and treats them as different sites. The preferred domain has to be specified both in the site’s settings and in Google Search Console (GSC).
Keeping the XML sitemap current
The XML sitemap is a file listing the URLs of your site’s pages. Submitting it to search engines makes crawling easier for the bots.
Keeping its content current and error-free is therefore essential.
To check a sitemap you can use Screaming Frog’s crawl analysis, look at the report and fix the errors following the tool’s suggestions. If you want to see how to audit a sitemap with Screaming Frog, click here.
If you rewrite the sitemap or create a new one with Screaming Frog or another tool, it then has to be submitted to Google through Search Console.
Worth remembering: Google Search Console itself lets you create and submit an XML sitemap (click here).
Using HTTPS
Running on HTTPS is the sign that a security certificate (SSL) has been installed on the site. A site without one is flagged by Chrome as “not secure”.
Google favours https over http and recommends it, going as far as declaring in 2014 that HTTPS is a ranking signal (read it here). To check that an SSL certificate is present and correctly installed, tools such as SSL Labs or SSL Shopper make it straightforward.
Image from Google.it
Setting up 301 redirects
After a site migration, when a page is moved or removed, or whenever a page’s URL changes for any other reason, a 301 redirect has to be set up. Otherwise the user lands on a 404 or 504 error page.
To avoid losing backlinks, leaving broken pages behind and giving visitors a poor UX, check:
- that a new sitemap has been submitted to Google
- that a 301 redirect is in place from the old URL to the new one
- that there aren’t multiple redirects pointing at the same page (redirect loops)
- the preferred version of the new domain (www vs non-www)
- that the URL change has been declared in GSC
- that there are no broken links
Image from semrush.com
Broken links
Links in your content pointing at pages that no longer exist (broken links) hurt rankings and user experience, and eat into your crawl budget.
So it’s important to check for and fix them regularly.
To find them, use the Chrome extension “Check My Links” on smaller sites, or Screaming Frog on larger ones:
- after crawling, click the “Response codes” tab
- apply the “Client (4xx)” filter
- click “In links” and export the data
If the link is needed, replace it with another relevant one; if it isn’t, remove it.
Image from Screaming Frog
SEO-friendly URLs
Although WordPress and the other CMSs configure URLs properly these days, it’s always worth checking that your site has none like this:
Image from rankwatch.com
“Dirty” URLs like the one above are hard to index, insecure, and say nothing about what’s on the page.
In those cases it’s worth rewriting the URLs. URL rewriting techniques differ by programming language (PHP and Apache, ASP.NET and IIS, Java), but if you’re not deeply technical, CMSs let you change the permalink easily.
To create SEO-friendly URLs, make sure they:
- are short and easy to remember
- contain the keyword
- use hyphens (-) rather than underscores (_)
Structured data
Adding structured data (featured snippets, rating scales, knowledge graph entries and so on) helps search engines better understand the context and content of your pages.
That lets them serve more accurate results and gives users a better UX. Schema markup helps different kinds of content on your site rank (articles, localised content, events, products and so on).
Your site’s schema markup can be checked with the Structured Data Testing Tool (find it here). It lets you spot errors and confirm your metadata is in line with Google’s guidelines. Google’s structured data markup helper (find it here) is a solid aid for marking up the elements of your page.
Image from Google
Duplicate content
Duplication of content, title tags and headings hurts rankings, so it has to be found and removed.
It happens that our pages cover similar subjects, which can leave parts of the content duplicated. These can be found and handled with tools such as Copyscape or with the site: operator. Specifically, add “&start=990” to your domain query (e.g. site:euwebagency.com&start=990) and read the message that appears at the bottom of the page.
Another option is handling duplicates within a single domain using the rel=“canonical” attribute. It lets you tell the search engine which URL to index (A). Pages with similar content that don’t matter to you (“B”, “C” and so on) are then pointed at the “main” page. To do that, put the canonical tag inside the <head> of pages “B”, “C” and the rest.
A responsive, mobile-friendly site
On 26 March 2018, in a post on the Webmaster Central Blog (here it is), Google announced that from that date its primary index would be mobile rather than desktop.
A 2018 study by ComScore found that 71% of the 2.3 hours Italians spend online is on mobile devices.
To check whether your site is mobile friendly, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test (here).
To improve speed, consider removing unnecessary JavaScript and using AMP.
SEO audit: on-page factors
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing the elements of a page in order to influence where it ranks in the search results.
The main factors to analyse in an SEO audit:
The title tag
The title tag, or SEO title, is the first thing users and crawlers see on reaching the page, and it helps both understand what the page is about.
Optimizing the title tag is among the SEO best practices, and during the audit you should check that:
- it runs to 60–70 characters: any longer and the search engine may cut important words out of the text and show an ellipsis (“…”) in their place. To find pages whose title is under or over 65 characters, use Screaming Frog (after crawling, click the “Page titles” tab and select the “Over 65 characters” filter);
Image from Screaming Frog
- it includes the focus keyword: including the keyword, particularly at the start of the title, definitely helps rankings;
- it’s capable of attracting clicks: the title tag is used in search engine results pages (SERPs), in browsers and on social networks. A title that catches visitors’ attention and makes them curious is more likely to be clicked. A higher click-through rate (CTR) means better rankings and more organic traffic.
Headings (H1, H2, H3…)
The H1 tag is the main heading tag. It should be present on every page, as should the subheadings (H2, H3…), and it should carry the focus keyword or its synonyms.
To find pages with no H1, turn to Screaming Frog again: after crawling, click the “H1” tab and select the “Missing” filter. The same way you can look for duplicates, or H1s over 70 characters, and trim them.
Image from Screaming Frog
The meta description tag
The meta description can affect rankings — not directly, but indirectly.
A meta description of the right length (160 characters max), containing the focus keyword and capturing the user’s search intent, can raise CTR — and CTR is a direct ranking factor.
To check that it’s present across your site’s pages, click Screaming Frog’s “Meta description” tab and select the “Missing” filter. The same way you can look for duplicates, or descriptions under 70 and over 155 characters.
Content & keyword placement
Content is the most important on-page SEO factor. Analysing it takes time, but it’s how you check whether your content strategy is working.
Plenty of tools are available for investigating a page’s content (Ahrefs, SEO Browser, Browseo, SEMrush and so on). The things to look into come down to these questions:
- Are there pages with thin content? Pages with very few words give users little value and are penalized by Google Panda. To check word counts, use a tool such as Bright Lab SEO Word Counter.
- Are the pages targeting the right keyword? Qualify and validate keywords against your competitor analysis and users’ search intent. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer helps with the validation.
- Does the target keyword have meaningful volume? Again with Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, check search volumes, allowing for your market sector.
- Has the keyword been used before? Sometimes several pages share the same target keyword (known as cannibalisation), which confuses both users and search engines. To avoid it, build a keyword index mapping keywords across your site.
- Is keyword density between 1% and 3%? Check that the target keyword isn’t repeated too often, or Google will penalize it. Generally 1–3% is treated as the ceiling for avoiding keyword stuffing.
- Are the pages more than six months old? Original, high-quality, up-to-date content is what moves rankings. Review your content at least once a year and keep it accurate and current.
- Does the page contain errors, and was it written using SEO copywriting techniques? Check that your pages are clear and error-free, that they include the target keyword along with its variants, synonyms and LSI keywords. Beyond the formal side, check that the content uses SEO copywriting techniques and creates engagement.
Site speed
Good page and site load speed (on mobile too) is today one of the most important factors tied to UX and to rankings.
Several tools measure it, among them Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom and GTmetrix. Some give useful metrics and also suggest fixes for the problems they find.
Site speed can be improved by working on:
- compressing images;
- removing or minifying JavaScript files;
- optimizing CSS delivery;
- cutting the number of redirects;
- reducing server response time;
- using a CDN.
Image from Google
Site architecture
A website’s architecture has to let Google crawl its pages and their content easily.
Check that important pages don’t sit deep in the site — that they’re no more than three clicks from the homepage — so that crawlers and users can reach them easily. This is a common problem on ecommerce sites and large ones.
Check carefully that the architecture lets pages link properly to one another and that the most important ones take precedence.
Image from markgrowth.com
Dwell time & bounce rate
Two important metrics worth watching closely. Dwell time measures how long a user stays on a page before leaving; bounce rate measures how often a user abandons the page within 30 seconds. Low dwell time and high bounce rate are both read by Google as signals of a low-quality page.
To improve the first, good practice is writing quality content of at least 1,000 words, engaging and using media in various formats (images, video, infographics and so on). To cut bounce rate, add internal links near the start of your content, encouraging the user to move on to other pages of your site.
Images & video
Images and video matter a great deal too, and belong in the SEO audit.
Images
They’re one of the elements to optimize when a site is loading slowly. The things to look into come down to these questions:
- Are the images the right size? Check that images were uploaded in the right format, avoiding oversized files that hurt site speed.
- Have the images been compressed? Compress images before uploading, with tools (compressor.io, optimizilla.com) or plugins (WP Smush, CW Image Optimizer). Prefer JPEG or PNG.
- Do the images have accurate descriptions? Bots can’t see images, so to tell them what an image shows, put descriptive text carrying the focus keyword in the ALT tag.
Video
Video is the main channel through which people consume content on the web, and its share keeps growing. The things to look into for this medium:
- Is the video unique to your brand? Creating your own video content builds engagement and brand awareness and increases leads and conversions. Make sure the quality is high and that it plays easily on mobile devices.
- Is the video hosted on the right platform? There are many video hosting platforms, but the most widely used and the most useful for SEO is YouTube. Video is steadily replacing text in users’ preferences, and its presence is read by Google as a signal of content quality.
- Has the video title been optimized? As with images, bots can’t watch video. So giving it a descriptive title carrying the target keyword is good SEO practice.
Internal links
Internal links raise relevance and help pages rank, build the site’s Domain Authority (DA), and serve both the bots and the user’s experience. Google Penguin penalizes excessive use of exact-match anchor text, but only on links coming from external sites (backlinks) — so internal links pose no problem.
Make sure your internal linking is done properly:
- use descriptive anchor text;
- check that the pages you want to rank have a reasonable number of internal links and are linked from your homepage;
- make sure you’ve added internal links from relevant pages to new content.
SEO audit: off-page factors
These are factors outside the page that webmasters can’t influence directly, and they belong in the SEO audit.
The main off-page factors are link building and link popularity. Creating and managing links is the central activity of off-page SEO and, like the on-page side, plays a significant role in where content ranks organically.
The aim of the SEO audit, then, is to investigate and find weaknesses and opportunities for improvement, mainly in relation to the factors we’ll cover below.
Link analysis
Let’s split this into two parts: the backlink profile and link popularity.
Backlink profile
Google favours content that receives quality links from authoritative external sites (backlinks) with high Domain Authority.
It matters, therefore, to analyse your link profile — your site’s backlinks — in order to identify low-quality links to remove and opportunities to earn new quality ones. The analysis takes time but can be partly automated with tools, chief among them Ahrefs, Majestic SEO (go to site) and LinkProfiler.
The questions your checklist should cover:
- Does your site receive quality backlinks from one or more sites? Having links from different domains matters. A high number of backlinks from a single domain often points to site-wide links (repeated in sidebars and footers) or to negative SEO. External site-wide links, used badly, can lead to penalties.
- Does your site have backlinks with redirect chains? This is tied to the grey-hat tactic of buying a site with a significant portfolio of relevant links and 301-redirecting them to your own. Check for an excessive number of these backlinks in Ahrefs’ backlink profile report.
- Has your site lost backlinks? Check whether your domain has lost backlinks in Ahrefs’ backlink profile report, or with the “lost & found” filter in SEMrush’s backlink report.
- Does your site have broken backlinks? Check for broken links — backlinks pointing at a 404 page on your site. Use the broken link checker inside Ahrefs’ Site Explorer report.
- Does your site have questionable backlinks? Examine where backlinks come from and whether those sites really are authoritative. They don’t all have to be, but most should be.
Link popularity
As we’ve seen, the more links your site receives, the better your chances of competing for the top positions in a SERP. A site’s popularity is an important parameter to watch when preparing an SEO audit.
Link popularity can be estimated with several metrics — Moz’s Domain Authority (DA), link popularity, net popularity, IP popularity — and assessed with these few simple questions:
- Has your site’s web traffic grown? A rise or fall can be treated, indirectly, as an indicator of popularity, credibility and the trust you generate in users.
- How does your site’s popularity compare with similar sites? The simple way is to look at DA through the MozBar Chrome extension and compare the figures with your competitors’.
- Are you receiving backlinks from popular sites? MozRank, though unofficial, gives an indication of your site’s popularity.
Social signals
Social signals means all the signals (retweets, likes, pins, shares and so on) that come out of interactions between a brand and users on social media.
There’s no consensus on whether these signals improve rankings, but the positive effects of sharing relevant content (whitepapers, ebooks, infographics) that creates engagement within communities are beyond doubt.
Check how many social signals your individual pieces of content receive with tools such as Followerwonk and Buffer, and work on increasing shares of your pages and articles (WordPress has several plugins for it).
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered the SEO audit. You now have what you need to understand exactly what it is and how it’s structured, along with a list for conducting a professional SEO analysis of a website.
But is that enough to rank your content first on Google? Sadly not…
Once the audit is done, you need the right skills and judgement to make the right decisions, define the right SEO strategy and implement the changes properly. Bad decisions can hurt rankings, and with them a company’s or brand’s visibility.
So tread carefully, stay up to date and keep following us. In the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
If you need help with an SEO audit, or with SEO in general, or if you want to sharpen your own SEO knowledge — get in touch!
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