The 18-Step SEO Audit Checklist for 2025 + Free Template

Screaming Frog’s core audit tool crawls websites, much like a spider. It takes snapshots of each page as it crawls, and then uses those snapshots to create a visual representation of a website. This representation includes a list of all broken links, in order of how many times they were found. It is also capable of generating a sitemap, finding duplicate content, and scanning for malware. A sitemap is a structured list of a website’s pages and content hierarchy for easy navigation.

Header Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)

seo audit

Screaming Frog is one of the most trusted names in this, but Sitebulb is another highly recommended one. The free version of Screaming Frog crawls 500 URLs, but you can upgrade if needed. We’re using Semrush for this step (the Backlink Analytics tool in particular). In fact, our study of 11.8 million search results found that the top result in Google has 3.8x more backlinks than pages in positions 2-10. Rendering is one of the stages of the overall process Google uses to analyze your page content.

  • For a full list of JavaScript SEO common errors and best practices, you can navigate to the JavaScript SEO guide for SEO pros and developers.
  • When potential customers search for products or services related to your business, SEO helps your website appear as high as possible in the search results.
  • You can also compare the search volume of different terms over time.
  • Second, Google started using their mobile-first indexing process a while ago.
  • Without this structure, you’ll be guessing and hoping your pages rank for terms that may not even match your content.

Each page should have a unique title that includes the topic (or keyword) that that page is meant to target. Performing an SEO audit regularly helps maintain your website’s health and search visibility. Systematically checking indexing, technical performance, on-page SEO, and backlinks, helps you to address any issues before they affect your rankings. Implementing  practices makes sure your site remains competitive and well-optimized for search engines.

seo audit

Meanwhile, fundamental aspects of SEO, such as strategic keyword targeting or on-page optimization, are completely missing since no tool can fully capture these nuances. A clear keyword map ensures every page has a defined role, which makes your entire SEO strategy more effective. While SEO clients often hesitate about changing visible content, they usually feel comfortable adding structured data because it’s invisible to website visitors. Schema Markup (or structured data) explicitly defines your content’s meaning, which helps Google easily understand the main topic and context of your pages. But for huge websites – especially those with millions of URLs or daily-changing content – crawl budget becomes critical (as Google confirms in its crawl budget documentation). No matter what you hear or read on the internet, most websites don’t need to stress about crawl budget at all.

Which is part of Google’s overall ranking systems, and was introduced in 2015. As long as the links are relevant and add value for the reader, they’re worth adding. Don’t just link to what you think are the most important pages. Ideally, every page should have SEO Anomaly at least one relevant internal link pointing to it. Internal linking is one of the most underrated SEO strategies on the planet. You probably don’t have time to optimize every page on your site.

If Google doesn’t crawl and index your pages, the site won’t just rank poorly — it’ll be absent from search results entirely. For searchers to find your website, it must stand out among the masses in this index. Each subsequent website review will build on the last and typically takes much less time to execute. Thousands of tiny variables like word count per page, number of sentences, keywords in sentences, and number of YouTube embeds can affect how your pages rank in search. Spyfu has features for SEO, PPC advertising, and more, but we mainly use it as a competitive analysis tool in our SEO audit services.

To perform an SEO audit, you can either use software tools or hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency. Of course, the results you get will vary based on which option you choose. (Here at Bruce Clay Inc., we spend up to 160 hours preparing, delivering, and following up on each audit.) SEO expertise is not a core competency of many businesses.

seo audit

Beautiful Reports In No Time

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 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.

seo audit

Google is smart enough to know whether or not you’re intentionally and maliciously duplicating content on your site to clog the SERP with your site’s URLs. A more likely scenario, if you have duplicate content, is that it’s happening unintentionally. Given the above section on types of SEO audits, we’ve compiled a checklist for a pretty well-rounded SEO audit that incorporates technical, off-page, and on-page SEO.

The tool does an initial check to see if your content falls into the YMYL category. The tool is evaluating your content based on Google’s own guidelines. Now, you will need to download the key files to create the tool in Claude.