To underscore the importance of performance, Google BHS Links launched the Core Web Vitals. These metrics help site owners gain insights into how their sites perform in real life and get tips on improving those scores. The metrics focus on loading times, interactivity and stability. Together, these determine how enjoyable users find your site. It’s easy to run a test, and you’ll get quality feedback about your site. Schema markup helps make your site more understandable for search engines.
Pages with a lot of internal links
That’s why a site with 100 pages will pay more for an audit than a website with 50 pages. On average, SEO audits cost $50 – $2,500 per audit on average (76% of businesses). This helps you tackle high-impact quick wins immediately, while planning for bigger projects. After completing your website audit, you’ll likely have a long list of potential fixes. A content audit will uncover pages you need to update if you want to boost their traffic. To improve your LCP, compress bulky resources like hero images or animations.
You may also want to prioritize the reviewing of pages that show signs of being low-quality. You can do that in Ahrefs’ Site Audit; just head to the Content Quality report. You should always aim to use subheaders to break up your content and make it more appealing. In HTML, you can use H1-H6 subheaders to provide some structure and hierarchy to your pages. If you have a relatively small site (fewer than twenty pages), you can check all of the above manually with ease. The issue with PageSpeed Insights is that you can only check one page at a time.
Conversion Rate Optimization
If these pages have backlinks, they are effectively wasted because they point to nothing. Mobile-friendliness has been a Google ranking factor since 2019, so it makes sense to check if your website is mobile-friendly. Google can’t index pages with this warning, so it’s worth checking they’re not pages you want indexed.
- Yoast SEO drastically simplifies adding schema for WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify users.
- That allows your company to start driving measurable results from your SEO.
- If it’s not a manual action, you may need to check further for Google algorithm updates, as they can significantly affect your site’s organic traffic.
- This is the entry-level audit suitable for beginners or those with limited resources.
- Your company has decided that SEO is worth pursuing and needs to determine the initial investment necessary to begin the discovery phase.
Pay attention to errors like “Submitted URL not found (404)”, “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”, or “Alternate page with proper canonical tag”. These clues tell you if Google is encountering duplicate content and choosing another URL as canonical, or if pages you intended to have indexed aren’t being indexed. After you hit “Compare,” the tool will compare the sets of keywords the analyzed domains are ranking for. In the next two steps, we’ll take a look at how to get the most out of your competitors’ keywords and backlink data. For this step, I recommend using a dedicated SEO crawling tool. Semrush’s Site Audit tool is my personal favorite, as it checks for over 140 technical issues—making it one of the most comprehensive solutions in the industry.
Google Search Console is a tool provided for free by Google to allow site owners to monitor traffic from Google to their website. It also allows you to check for some basics like; website speed, crawling and indexing errors, top linking sites, and even notifies you if your site has been hacked. In the second step of your SEO audit, you will be able to see what are the top performing pages of your website and the top search queries for each page. With this information, you can check the page to ensure that you are sufficiently targeting that query and topic on the page and satisfying the search’s intent in the best possible way.
If you can’t use a plugin, you can create an XML sitemap online. While backlinks are only rarely included in a technical SEO audit, a lack of relevant backlinks is often the number one reason good, relevant content struggles to rank. While this doesn’t represent a complete link audit, we recommend a few quick link checks to make sure you aren’t leaving rankings behind. Content isn’t often considered “technical” SEO, but many technical issues with the content itself can impact indexing and rankings.
We’re also a fan of Dana Dana DiTomaso’s Technical SEO course on LinkedIn. The tool gives you a customised step-by-step road map on exactly what you need to do to improve your content. Your new powerful AI Search Quality Rater Tool will audit your content and provide very specific recommendations on what needs to be changed to improve your content.
Crawling your site is easy; simply download and install Screaming Frog. Once the scan is complete, export the data into a CSV file for further sorting and prioritization. The first step is crawling your website with crawler software. This helps find technical SEO issues that otherwise wouldn’t be so visible. Screaming Frog is one of the most trusted names in this, but Sitebulb is another highly recommended one.
Once you have an XML sitemap, you can submit it to Google Search Console so it can be crawled. It can get a little technical, so it might be best to partner with an SEO expert if you don’t have a lot of experience with XML sitemaps. Now that we’ve covered the on-page SEO portion of the SEO audit, let’s take a look at what you need for an off-page SEO audit. Admittedly, we’re big fans of a lot of good SEO audit checklists out there, including Annielytics Site Audit Checklist, Andy Drinkwater’s Checklist, and the audits available at SEOSLY.
