But more than just looking at indexing, our SEO audit will help explain why you are not ranking well compared to the competition. We have provided SEO audit services to some of the most well-respected online brands as well as thousands of small and medium-sized companies. Our process is scalable, regardless of the size of your website content. The first step of any good SEO campaign is ensuring that you understand your site’s deficiencies by running a multivariate SEO audit. Yes, you can do SEO yourself, especially if you run a small to medium-sized website and have the time and willingness to learn.
You should also regularly review Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report to see how many pages Google crawls per day. Comparing crawled pages with total pages on your site helps you spot inefficiencies. By reading this article, you can apply these insights to save yourself and your SEO clients time, money, and frustration – in less than an hour. I’ve seen almost everything that can go right – and wrong – with websites of different types. After conducting more than 500 in-depth website audits in the past 12 years, I’ve noticed clear patterns about what works and doesn’t in SEO.
- Auditing your website on an ongoing basis is key, regardless of how long you have been doing SEO on your website.
- It helps search engines understand which version of a webpage serves users based on their language and location preferences.
- The task list of SEO improvements will show you which issues are the most important ones as eliminating them will have a noticeable impact on your SEO performance.
- Collectively, these metrics can help us understand where your website currently stands in speed and performance – and how to fix it, if necessary.
Competitors
The bottom line here is that you should always base your decision to optimize Core Web Vitals on your specific audience’s needs and real user data – not just industry trends. If your users live in urban areas with reliable high-speed internet, Core Web Vitals won’t affect them much. But if they’re rural users on slower connections or older devices, site speed and visual stability become critical. In this case, you need to ensure that Google prioritizes SEO Anomaly and crawls important pages frequently without wasting resources on pages that should never be crawled or indexed. 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.
Auditing internal links involves analyzing link structure for proper navigation, user experience, and link equity distribution. Screaming Frog is a powerful and widely-used SEO tool that crawls and analyzes websites to provide insights into various aspects of on-page and technical SEO. Again, this issue refers to both internal and external links and essentially means a page has no links from it at all. This means the page is a “dead end” for your site visitors and search engines.
External links are hyperlinks within your pages that link to another domain. That means all of your backlinks—the links to your website from another one—are someone else’s external links. When most people think of “links” for SEO, they think about backlinks. You can find out if any meta descriptions are missing, as well as if they are too long or too short. In general, it is good practice to ensure all of your pages have title tags, none of which are longer than 60 characters. If you and a competitor have sites that stand shoulder to shoulder on the SERP, then even the most basic of issues could be the catalyst that determines who ranks at the top.
Free SEO Audit: An SEO Pro’s Guide to Identifying & Fixing Site Issues
Given you’re optimizing for search engines, it’s key to understand how much organic traffic you’re driving through them. Use Google’s Rich Results Test tool (free online) on a few pages to see if any schema is detected and if there are errors. Also in Google Search Console, check the Enhancements section – it will list any detected schema types (like FAQ, Breadcrumbs, Products) and if there are errors or warnings in them. If you find that none of your pages have structured data, that’s a strong recommendation to implement relevant schema.
Usability and user experience audit
Read on below for the step-by-step process, but here is an SEO audit checklist that will help you get started quickly. It also tells you what kinds of websites already link to the kind of content you might want to create. For example, you can see that many of our links come from blogs and news sites that write about digital marketing and SEO. Broken links are bad for user experience… which CAN hurt your SEO. While there’s no hard number of internal links to include, aiming for 5+ per page is a good start. Covering site performance issues, internal linking optimization, and even international SEO.