Google’s goal is to improve user experience because, let’s face it, no one likes a slow website. In today’s society, the need for instant gratification encourages site visitors to leave before they finish what they intend to do. Linking to credible sources makes your own website more credible to both visitors and search engines. This is because you show that your information is backed up with sound research. These are SEO Anomaly problematic because they waste “link equity” and provide users with a negative experience.
You may also want to figure out whether or not your robots.txt file contains glaring coding mistakes. While its core components may be executed correctly, the coding may not be. As a result, it could cost you more than it’s worth if you’re not careful; make sure you’re investing wisely when moving forward with a potential audit. Too much work with an SEO audit at once can overwhelm even the best professionals. It is better to break them into small chunks and do one thing at a time before moving onto another task. Without this systematic approach, it’s easy to get in over your head.
- If you spend $10 per month on hosting, don’t expect fast loading times.
- You should find out when the penalty was imposed and why your website was penalized.
- See this example where different pages for the same keywords rank.
- Optimize your website, monitor your rankings, track backlinks, and more.
Take Your Site’s SEO to the Next Level
Input your business details, and you’ll get data on the quality of your company’s data online. Equipped with this intel, you can optimize your online presence by adding details or photos to your Google Business Profile or updating directories with your store hours. While your ranking may not drastically decrease, you may lose potential customers who find the other website instead of yours. You can then take the necessary actions, such as contacting the web admin or reporting the site to gain back your traffic.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the best SEO audit tools for desktops. The site crawler is designed to quickly audit web pages for technical and on-site SEO issues. The platform works great for crawling up to 1,000,000 pages per month and 20,000 pages with the separate content audit tool (Business plan limits). At the highest level, the comprehensive SEO audit covers everything. It includes elements from the previous levels and adds competitive analysis, backlink assessment, and an in-depth examination of your entire digital footprint.
The 18-Step SEO Audit Checklist
Intuitive experiences also signal to search engines that your site is valuable to users. An SEO audit is a process of analyzing a website and related entities on the web like content and links for issues and opportunities related to improving visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Siteliner offers free SEO audit tools by the creators of Copyscape that let you explore a website to reveal key issues that affect your site’s quality and SEO rankings. Semrush is a leading digital marketing platform with tools for managing online visibility, including SEO audits, rank tracking, competitor research, PPC, and social media.
SEO Gets Alternative: Google Search Console
At a page level, if you want search engines to index a URL, it generally needs to return a 200 HTTP response status code. A 3xx redirect code is less lethal, but it typically means the URL you’re auditing isn’t the one that’s going to rank. If you’re auditing only a single page, nearly everything on this checklist can be audited manually by hand, using various tools and an hour or two of your time.