Now that you’ve verified that all of your pages can be indexed, it’s time to search for branded keywords, which is the fourth step of our SEO audit checklist. That means you should look up phrases that include your brand name followed by your product or services. There are several files on your server — like .htaccess, robots.txt and sitemap.xml to name a few — that dictate how search engines access and index your content.
Step 3: Find (and fix) thin content
So in my opinion, even the most basic of housekeeping issues should be addressed. Using the Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console can give you insight into how your site is being crawled and any issues that may have been flagged by the Googlebot. For larger sites with SEO Anomaly millions of pages or sites that are often updated, crawl budget can be an issue.
Marketing Against the Grain
Still—whenever possible, you should make sure all your pages are as optimized as possible for keywords that will help them show up in organic search. Unless you’re auditing your own site, IA-based recommendations should hinge on the goals of project stakeholders. To which pages/parts of the site are they trying to push users? Your target audience and business goals will inform the way you define and organize content. This type of SEO audit will involve on-page efforts like image optimization but largely refers to performance metrics like site speed and security. A technical SEO audit will identify opportunities to fix, eliminate, or reorganize code, prevent spam, switch from HTTP to HTTPS, and more.
Luckily, Ahrefs’ Site Audit gives you a predefined priority rating for each issue. However, for someone looking to learn where to get started in order to successfully complete a technical SEO audit, this is a great place to begin. There are also a number of excellent speed testing tools available, including PageSpeed Insights from Google and my personal favorite, GTmetrix.
- A high bounce rate or a generally poor experience causes your site to lose relevance for Google.
- That’s why our SEO audit services prioritize recommendations by impact, so you can start capturing revenue from search sooner.
- The benefit of using WebSite Auditor to audit Core Web Vitals is that you perform a bulk check for all the pages at a time.
- So it’s recommended not to cross the fine line between refining content with useful links and overwhelming your audience.
Every indexable page on your site should have a title tag, meta description, and H1 tag. These basic on-page elements help Google understand your content and help you to win more clicks from your rankings. By finding and fixing those issues, you can often boost your rankings and get more organic traffic.