10-Step Website Audit Checklist

Set a Realistic Strategy

One of the most common issues that website owners face is attempting to do too much. The best strategy is to keep it as simple as possible, especially during your first website audit.

Start by establishing the specific goals and objectives of the SEO audit. Once the site audit is complete, what do you hope to gain?

• Greater organic traffic?
• Heightened conversion rates?
• Higher SERP rankings for a group of keywords or phrases?

Setting realistic goals makes it easier to ultimately reach and attain them than aiming for vague or unclear outcomes. If you audit checklist is too extensive, then you may apply all your effort to the website audit and not have time to make improvements.

Determine what you want to achieve and focus your efforts accordingly. By clearly defining your goals, you can align your SEO audit efforts with specific outcomes, enabling you to prioritize tasks and measure success effectively.

Perform Thorough Keyword Research and Analysis

If you don’t currently have one, make a list of relevant keywords and key phrases that are essential for your website’s niche. Identify where you currently rank for them in Google’s search results and how your important pages perform in Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Within your website audit use some time to evaluate your current keyword targeting strategy for targeting those keywords. A site audit tool often helps your assess each keyword’s overall competitiveness to determine if they’re realistic for your website to target. Don’t target phrases that are too competitive for your website to rank.

Instead, find keywords you’re not currently targeting. If there are any content gaps on your website that aren’t targeting keywords relevant to your industry, you’re missing out on traffic you could otherwise capture.

After analyzing your current target keywords and researching additional keywords, you can begin to make necessary adjustments to improve your organic search rankings. Adding competitive keywords to your page title and thin content will help. You should consider writing blog posts on the most relevant terms.

Analyze On-Page Elements

Evaluate the on-page SEO elements during your website audit, including title tags, meta descriptions, headings, URL structure, and content quality. Ensure these elements are optimized for search engines and aligned with your targeted keywords.

To improve on-page SEO, ensure that all pages across your site have optimized page titles and meta descriptions. Not only can these improve search rankings but also user experience, as they help the reader understand what your page will be about before clicking on the page.

Verify your website URL structure is optimized to make it easier for readers and search engine crawlers to navigate your website. URLs should be concise, use relevant keywords, and reflect the hierarchy of your website.

Important pages indexed incorrectly will hinder how much organic traffic you earn. Consider creating parent pages that act as top-level categories, and organizing related subpages under them. a series of blog pages that link to the most relevant pages for your users to help increase SEO performance.

Finally, make sure that the content on your site uses relevant headings and incorporates keywords throughout the copy. All of your content should be helpful, informative, and relevant to what the searcher is looking for.

Additionally, make sure to look for internal broken links. Your internal links should improve user navigation and make it easier for crawlers to navigate around your site. Broken links can hinder that progress and make it difficult to go from one page to another on your website.

Technical SEO Audit

Performing a technical SEO audit involves assessing the technical aspects of your website, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, indexability, URL structure, XML sitemaps, and robots.txt files.

This phase of a website auditing can be complex for beginners. If you are not familiar with technical SEO then you may want to move onto the next steps in your website audit checklist.

Page speed helps users, especially mobile users, navigate your site. Exceptional large files and web hosting can affect page speed. A quick way to estimate overall user experience is by checking bounce rates. Your target audience will click off your site and go to a competitor’s if your website takes too long to load.

Technical SEO audit tools like GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights analyze various metrics, including page load times, file sizes, and resource optimization, helping you identify areas for improvement.

Additionally, because the majority of internet searches are now made on mobile devices, your website must be optimized for mobile-friendliness. Doing so can decrease the bounce rate and help your readers stay on your web pages for longer periods of time.

Identify and fix any technical issues that may hinder search engine crawling and indexing. Find any non-indexed pages to ensure they can be appropriately indexed and therefore begin to rank and support your site in search engines.

Analyze Backlink Profile

External backlinks are a signal to Google that your website is trusted by other websites. This can increase your domain authority, making it easier for your site to rank for its target keywords.

However, too many spammy links can actually have the opposite effect and hurt your search engine rankings.

Analyze the quality and relevance of your inbound links. This audit helps you find potentially harmful links and opportunities for acquiring high-quality backlinks.

Compare the number of inbound links to that of your competitors. What websites are linking to them, but not to you?

With this information, you can devise a strategy to improve your inbound links.

Audit Existing Content

Essential to any website audit checklist is reviewing the existing content on your website. Information changes so you don’t want old content to become irrelevant or lack target keywords. You shouldn’t have shallow, empty content on your website just to check a box.

Instead, your content should be informative, engaging, and tailored to meet the needs of your target audience.

Additionally, identify any content gaps and opportunities to create new, engaging content. A complete and comprehensive content strategy involves creating content for all keywords relevant to your industry.

For example, you can create a blog post, article, guide, case study, infographic, video, or relevant content in any other format that aligns with your audience’s preferences and the nature of your industry.

Auditing your existing content for relevance, keyword usage and optimization, quality, and readability can help you identify areas for improvement and ensure that your site’s content aligns with your SEO goals.

Evaluate the User Experience

It’s easy to forget about improving your website’s user experience as you begin to incorporate SEO elements across your website, but ultimately, it is crucial to prioritize user experience alongside SEO efforts.

When performing a full website audit, take the time to analyze how visitors interact with your site and identify areas for improvement. Take a look at click-through-rates, bounce rates, and other metrics that reflect how your audience navigates around your site.

Start your user experience website audit by evaluating the overall navigation and structure of your website. Ensure that it is intuitive and easy for users to find the information they need. Consider implementing clear and concise menus, breadcrumbs, and a search function to enhance navigation.

Additionally, as we’ve touched on, mobile-friendliness and website speed should both be optimized in order to keep your audience on your website.

Make the necessary adjustments and record your progress to find what areas were improved, and find other areas that could use additional edits.

Perform a Competitor Analysis

Your competitors are likely incorporating many similar SEO strategies to improve their online visibility and attract more organic traffic. To stay competitive, make sure to perform a competitor analysis.

When you have competitors, you’re constantly battling each other for a proverbial piece of the pie. Performing a competitor analysis allows you to recapture some of the organic traffic they’re taking from you.

Begin by analyzing the SEO strategies and performance of your main competitors. Identify their strengths and weaknesses, take a look at their keyword targeting strategies, and monitor backlink profiles.

Find the keywords they’re using and the websites that are linking to their sites. Then, create content that targets those keywords and is relevant to the pages they’re gaining backlinks to.

This will help you increase your visibility for those keywords and attract backlinks from similar authoritative sources.

Competitor analyses can help you refine your own SEO strategy and gain a competitive advantage over those within your industry.

Analyze Local SEO Efforts

If your company offers services in a specific area, analyzing your local SEO strategies is crucial in capturing relevant local traffic.

Google Analytics is a great SEO tool that can help you narrow traffic down to a specific location, helping you see how much local organic traffic you’re capturing.

To improve your local SEO efforts, be sure to optimize your Google My Business listing, add your website to local citations, and respond to reviews. Ensure consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) information across directories.

By analyzing and optimizing your local SEO strategies, you can increase your visibility in local search results, attract more relevant traffic, and ultimately drive more customers to your business.

Record and Report Findings

Once you have completed the SEO website audit, record and report your findings. Compile all the findings and recommendations from the audit into a comprehensive report.

Prioritize the identified issues and outline a plan of action to address them. Provide clear and actionable recommendations for improving your website’s SEO performance.

After you’ve acted on your recommendations, be sure to give your website some time to reflect your edits. You won’t see progress overnight, so don’t be concerned if you don’t see immediate progress.

Instead, check back in about a month. You should begin to see progress from your website audit around that time.

Continue to monitor your progress over time. This will allow you to make informed decisions and additional adjustments as needed.