However, new issues can surface if you add pages and products or do other work on your site. You’ll see suggested improvements, such as minimizing JavaScript execution, using browser caching, or deferring non-critical JavaScript. You can do a lot to improve your site speed, so once you have collected all the data, add it to your sheet with the rest of the tasks to tackle. This lightweight SEO audit still finds high-priority issues without the time commitment of a full review.
Step #6: Optimize for Featured Snippets
- This step of the audit contains a few sub steps which can be achieved from the results of the crawl.
- But it turns out that most of these were due to missing alt text (ergo zero anchor text) on images.
- Make sure to address the warning before you proceed further with an SEO audit checklist.
- Are response code errors popping up all over your website where there shouldn’t be any?
- With an SEO audit, you can discover what is wrong and what you need to improve.
Remember this alt text will also be the anchor text for your featured images. So I would recommend just using your “main” keyword for each of them. Which is Googler speak for “makes them rank higher for that keyword”. Take the time to make each title and meta description as “clickable” as possible. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly interested in grabbing search traffic for a privacy policy.
SEO Audit: How To Analyze Your Site And Boost Your Rankings (Step-By-Step)
To improve your score, seek external links from high-authority pages that outrank yours. Google recognizes the value of these pages, so the links lend credibility to your content quality. In 2023, mobile devices generated over half of all global website traffic. Google incorporated mobile indexing in 2019, and it’s been a crucial ranking criterion for content ever since.
Of all the actions we took I am convinced that the content audit was most effective. Every site is different and receives penalties for different reasons. But as Google’s updates constantly focus on content quality, I’d say this is the best place to start recovering from a penalty. We have only seen one SEO penalty over the years, on a site we had recently taken on. This site had a lot of over-optimized and repetitive blog articles, and a lot of spammy links. After discussing this with the developers, we found the website had been hacked.
SEO Audit: The Bottom Line
At this level, most of your competition has likely invested heavily in search engine marketing tactics like SEO and PPC for over a decade. An enterprise SEO audit should also consider how the website’s performance compares to competing sites in the SERPs SEO Anomaly (search engine results pages). Our SEO audit process begins with our team analyzing your website content, code, structure, and more to determine your strengths and weaknesses. We’ll also review your competitors to see what they are doing well and reverse engineer their strategies. Our SEO audit final report will include all findings along with recommendations and how to find the problems.
Your site’s backlink health and overall online presence are integral to your SEO success. By cleaning up bad links and recognizing areas to improve (like earning more quality links), you set the stage for sustainable rankings. On top of that, the majority of websites (around 80%) haven’t implemented schema markup for structured data , missing out on richer search results. 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.