How to Do a Website Audit in 5 Steps + Checklist

While this is okay for users, search engines may consider them different websites. This means you may have problems with indexing, duplicate content issues, and loss of page rank. An SEO audit is the process of evaluating the SEO performance of a website. The main goal of an SEO audit is to identify issues and find new opportunities to help you achieve higher rankings in search engine results. It usually covers indexing, technical SEO, keyword research, on-page SEO, and competitor analysis. An SEO audit is one of the key actions of an SEO professional or website owner.

Now, I run a pretty tight ship with the blog, and this was admittedly only a minor issue. But I see many businesses, big and small, with more severe problems. Raven is by far the most superior and comprehensive toolset we found to date.

Google News Sitemaps

Across reports and the Embed tool you can customize Fonts, Colors, Display Layouts, Content, Checks and Sections, Report Text, Email Content. Our PDF reports run fast – the majority of pages can be fully audited, with PDF generated within 20 seconds. We look at a range of important factors that matter not just for SEO but for Usability and Accessibility. Whitelabel reports are a very good tool for getting leads as well as providing value to potential clients. Send PDF reports to prospects and use your report as a conversation guide or opener.

So you can fix them before these issues impact your website traffic and revenue. The tool sorts issues by category (like website security and duplicate content). We run a fresh site crawl, review top pages, and optimize them to keep our search rankings high. This analytical approach has helped us maintain top rankings and grow organic traffic by 20.50% year over year. Backlinko uses these tools for in-depth SEO audits every year.

However, in general, I think that every firm may benefit from using auditing tools. SEO audits are the best first step in creating an SEO strategy based on your specific website, niche, and business goals — no matter what stage the website is SEO Anomaly in. After analyzing and dealing with internal issues, we are prepared for keyword analysis. In the SEO world, keyword research and competitive analysis are almost synonymous. In a way, off-page ranking factors are the result of your work.

At the highest level, the comprehensive SEO audit covers everything. It includes elements from the previous levels and adds competitive analysis, backlink assessment, and an in-depth examination of your entire digital footprint. This level suits businesses committed to dominating their niche and outperforming competitors. In the end, all we create on the Internet is for other users. With that in mind, good website will constantly see an increase in traffic, more and better links, more social mentions, longer time on website and smaller bounce rates by the visitors.

Step 1. Crawl your website

When looking at the results of your website crawl, find any 404 pages that are linked from your content. Regardless of your business, industry or niche, a great process to have in your arsenal is mastering an SEO audit. Even if it’s a minimal, quick process or full-scale audit, the results are sure to pay off. Read on to learn more about how to perform an SEO audit in 9 steps. As a part of your SEO audit, verify search engines can crawl your website.

• It also lives on the root folder in most cases and can be found at domain.com/sitemap.xml.
• It’s normal for webmasters to concentrate on publishing new content, but you should take action to protect your existing rankings from dropping.
• In most cases, improvements to your site’s speed require your in-house or agency’s development team.

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. To determine whether it should be indexed and, if so, where it should rank. To help the algorithms understand which pages meet search intent.

They’re often more established and experienced, for example, which ensures you receive an actionable and in-depth audit report. The agency, for example, may increase its costs by a few hundred dollars. If you’re looking to maximize the performance of your website, as well as its impact on your bottom line, invest in an experienced agency. With an experienced agency, your company receives several perks. They know the standards and how to meet them, which provides your business with an actionable report that complies with SEO best practices. With the cost of SEO audits ranging from $650 to $14,000, it’s natural to wonder what decides the price of audits in 2024.