An SEO audit analyzes all aspects of a website’s ability to rank in organic search engines like Google. A comprehensive enterprise SEO audit requires diving deep into on-site and off-site SEO factors, including technical performance, backlink profile, plus competitor performance. 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.

These issues quietly undermine your SEO performance every day. Browse various agency websites, and you’ll notice they promote different features of their audit. For example, some emphasize the technical audit while others note the link audit included with their SEO audit services.

Just watch for patterns that suggest manipulative link building or potential spam that SEO Anomaly could trigger a Google penalty. A healthy profile should have mostly branded and generic anchors, which shows that the links have been acquired naturally. If you see an excessive number of keyword-rich anchors, that’s a red flag that could trigger Google penalties.

Internal Linking Structure

This can prove invaluable for ranking sure you appear in “Local Pack” results and boost your visibility throughout other Google products such as Maps. You can start to attract more local customers and increase their visibility in local search results by ensuring all of the following factors are in place. See this related guide on how to optimize content for SEO which includes tips on making the page more SEO-friendly, link-worthy, and shareable. Manual actions are the official name Google gives to the penalties it doles out for violating its search engine guidelines. While these strategies take time to pay off, the long-term rewards are exponential.

You probably don’t have time to optimize every page on your site. It is a paid tool, but you can run an audit of 500 URLs for free. We’ll discuss a few of these areas in more detail throughout this guide. But performing a site crawl is a quick way to assess lots of aspects at once.

• If you see a lot of pages in this report you might want to look into your internal linking.
• One study by Search Engine Land noted a 20-30% increase in CTR for pages with structured data generating rich results (like review stars).
• While GSC provides insights into your site’s performance on Google, it lacks certain functionalities.
• Next to each URL, there should be the main keyword that the page should target, plus a few related synonyms or variations.

What does an SEO audit include?

You can label almost anything – products, articles, reviews, events – to clearly explain relationships and context. This clarity helps search engines understand why your content is relevant for a given query. After auditing over 500 websites, I’ve rarely seen Core Web Vitals alone significantly improve rankings. Typically, I recommend tackling technical and indexation issues first (because if Google can’t properly crawl/index, other optimizations won’t fully matter). Next, address any severe content issues (like thin content or duplicate pages that might be hurting you). Then move to enhancements and optimizations that can boost performance.

As search engine algorithms and Google Search Essentials continually change, we’ll ensure your website meets the latest requirements and standards. A “push-the-easy-button audit” is simply not going to get you top-three rankings. Do not be surprised by the results you did not get for the work you did not do.

Step 2: Identify site structure improvements

Head over to Site Audit and select your project to get an overview of your site’s health. So this kind of audit can get REAL results for your business. Your navigation menu structure should be intuitive, and your site architecture should be logical.

Sometimes, you don’t have the time but still feel the need to work on your site. In this case, you could do a simpler, quicker health check and evaluate specific regions of your site to see if these perform well. Such a minimal SEO audit is a streamlined version of a full website audit to find and fix critical performance issues. You need to collect the right information about your website using SEO audit tools, understand how to diagnose issues and prioritize fixes. By tracking your keywords rankings, you can monitor whether the changes you make based on this SEO audit are working. Whether or not Google uses user experience (UX) signals (like clicks) in its rankings algorithms has long been a topic of discussion in the world of SEO.

To assist, we’ve reviewed five top SEO audit tools to help you improve your website’s search performance. We hope this SEO audit checklist makes a great addition to your search engine optimization toolkit. Subheader tags, also known as H2-H6 tags, are used to provide proper structure in the content for the subtopics to make it more readable for users and search engine crawlers. Your website’s robots.txt file tells search crawlers which sections of the site should be crawled and which ones should be ignored. A misconfigured robots.txt file is a common issue for on-site search engine optimization which is a highly important SEO audit template item to analyze during the auditing process. Connect with him on LinkedIn or through the BruceClay.com website.