On-page SEO audit

This type of SEO refers to making sure the backend elements of a page are optimized for search crawlers. An on-page SEO audit would include checking meta descriptions, meta titles, image alt text and compression, and more.

Technical SEO audit

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.

SEO audit tools

In order to do the SEO audit we’ll be covering in this guide, you’re going to need some tools. These include:

• SEO software: Any SEO software worth its mettle. Ahrefs, Moz Pro, SEMrush will have a site audit or site crawl tool that allows you to crawl your website and determine not just general search health, but common inefficiencies that are dragging down your site’s organic performance. They’re also replete with other tools—keyword research tools, backlink profiling tools, etc. I would recommend procuring at least the free trial version of one of these tools before attempting a complete SEO audit of your site.
• Google Search Console: There are many ways to use Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) for SEO auditing with respect to keywords, organic CTR, technical fixes, Core Web Vitals, and submitting any pages for reindexing that you have reoptimized as a result of your audit.
• Google Analytics: The whole point of an SEO audit is to improve traffic to your site, and as such, you’ll need Google Analytics to measure the impact of your actions. This will also help you to prioritize your action items based on which pages get the most traffic or have had significant drops in traffic.
• Page speed tools:Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix are both reliable and free tools.

Step 1: Identify link building opportunities

Building links is a vital part of accruing website authority, and no SEO audit is complete without recommendations for building site-specific internal and external links.

How to build internal links

Internal links pass link equity within your own pages, and as such, are vital to forming authoritative hierarchies within your site. A straightforward and time-honored way to build internal links: when you create a new piece of content, do a site search for older, related content which, ideally, has built up some equity; then find anchor text within the old content to link to the new content. So, if you’ve created a new resource on Facebook ads:

These are the pages you’ll want to link from (the top pages on your site related to that keyword, according to Google).

A chrome extension like MozBar will give you this view. You’ll want to link from the page with the greatest page authority (PA). Page Authority and Domain Authority (DA) are not “official” SEO metrics. Google doesn’t use them to index pages. They were created by SEO software companies to provide estimates of a page’s or a domain’s authority. That said, they’re still pretty accurate; and they’re useful when determining which sites or pages to link from.

You also want to keep in mind user experience and information architecture (IA) when creating internal links. Linking from credible pages isn’t everything. Where would be a genuinely useful place to send a site visitor from a given page? What would bring them closer to purchasing your product or service? We’ll discuss this more in Step 2, but these are good questions to ask yourself when building internal links.

How to build external links

Earning links from a diverse set of authoritative domains is the essence of increasing Domain Authority. One straightforward way to build external links is to search for resource lists that could realistically feature your content and link to you. So, if you’re running an SEO audit for a private school in Massachusetts, and you want to make recommendations for external link building:

“Best prep schools in ma” will yield some nice resource lists that may or may not already feature your client, and that represent good opportunities to reach out for external links.

An easier way to build external links—and a way that yields higher return—is to search for unlinked mentions. Any good SEO tool will have a content explorer tool that allows you to search for places on the web where your brand has been mentioned:

After sorting by Domain Authority and assuring your target has not already linked to you, you can reach out to content managers via Twitter, email, condor, what have you; ask for links back to your homepage; and offer to share their article on your social accounts in return.

Step 3: Find (and fix) thin content

Speaking of content…your pages aren’t going to get any respect in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) if they’re thin. Panda, a 2011 Google algorithm update that cracked down on sites with thin content, made sure of that.

“Thin” content is content that fails to meet user needs. A 300-word blog post explaining a complex concept would be considered thin. That said, it’s not realistic to put 1000-2000 words on every page of your site. Pages closer to your homepage are going to be dominated by design work—hero images, icons, call-to-action buttons—and product-centric copy.

So, what content should you be looking at?

• Select pages. Maybe you’ve identified pages that have dropped in performance or rank. Or, if you are an SEO service, your client has given you a deck of all the pages they’d like audited.
• Top pages. Export your top 25, 50, 100 pages by traffic—depending on site size—and make sure each is sufficiently beefed up.
• All of it. Most site audit tools within the above SEO software I mentioned will, after crawling your site, offer a broad report on content length and quality.

You can then export pages with little to no content and identify page-level action items on how to fix each one.

The two big benefits of long-form content:

• More opportunities to link internally.
• More opportunities to squeeze in target, ancillary, and LSI keywords that will help that page get found (see Step 5).

Step 5: Scan for keyword optimization

As with beefing up thin content, there are certain pages on your site where it’s not going to be feasible to fully optimize for target and ancillary keywords. Say you are an employee scheduling software company. You’ve squeezed “employee scheduling software” onto your homepage in multiple places. The highest volume, lowest competition keyword related to “employee scheduling software” is “best employee scheduling software.” While you’d like to rank for that keyword, it’s probably not a prudent move to say “we’re the best” on your homepage. That’s a keyword best reserved for a blog post (check out our SEO blog post templates here).

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. The first step in doing that is conducting keyword research.

How to do keyword research

Using one of the above SEO products—or a free keyword tool—search for keywords related to your topic that have high intent, high volume (number of monthly search queries), and low difficulty (level of competition in the SERP for that keyword):

“How to do an seo audit,” for example, would be considered an ancillary keyword that I might want to fit into this post—in either an H2 or in body copy. Or, perhaps I know my post is going to have a section on conducting keyword research:

“How to Do Keyword Research” is a better-optimized H3 than “how to conduct keyword research,” because it has far more volume. As you might imagine, doing vertical-specific keyword research is a great way to generate blog topics. If possible, target keywords should be in the:

• UR
• Title
• H1 (if applicable)
• H2 (subheadings in your post—at least one)
• Meta title (see Step 6)
• Meta description (ditto)
• Body copy (littered (in moderation) throughout)

Ancillary keywords should, if possible, be used in H2s and in body copy. Naturally, if you’re creating a new piece of content, it’ll be easier to make sure you fully optimize all these elements. If you’re updating old pages, you just have to do the best you can. It wouldn’t necessarily make sense, for instance, to change a URL simply to optimize for a new keyword.

Step 7: Identify page update opportunities

Making even small updates to a page signals to Google that it should crawl that page. As such, regular updates will help keep your pages fresh and relevant in the eyes of the search engine.

There are two types of content that should be updated regularly:

• Top pages, which I discussed in Step 3. These are the pages that drive the most traffic for your business. Updating them assures they’ll continue to drive traffic for your business.
• Opportunity pages. An opportunity page is a page which, if it were to move up slightly in the SERP, would gain a meaningful increase in traffic. Popular SEO products are equipped with rank trackers that allow you to see where pages rank for certain keywords, if those rankings have changed, and how much traffic is being generated from each keyword.

Pages that rank just outside the top 10 should be updated religiously to give them a chance to move up to page one. A similar approach should be taken with pages that rank just outside the top 3. Traffic falls off precipitously after the first 3 spots, and nearly altogether after the first page.

How to make page updates

You can check out our post on how to update evergreen content but here are some key pointers.

• Add new information and research. For example, if you have a blog post about Google algorithm updates, and a new algorithm update just came out, that post is ripe for an update. Keeping your content up to date will ensure that your organic visitors’ needs are being met, so they don’t bounce back to the SERP and click another result (which can ultimately harm your rankings).
• Add keywords. Identify related, ancillary keywords that have shown to be traffic drivers and add those keywords to your page.
• General housekeeping. Compress images and fix or eliminate broken links. Cumbersome images result in slow load times (more in Step 8). Broken links result in a poor user experience (more in Step 9). Remedying these on-page elements can give your page the boost it needs to achieve the desired ranking.
• Pruning content. A fourth type of content update is actually removing content from your site. It may seem counterintuitive, but if there are pages on your site that get little to no organic traffic, they may be hurting your overall organic rankings by lowering the average value of your site in Google’s eyes. Look for pages with 0 or close to 0 organic visits in the past year, and if you can’t overhaul the pages right away to add more value, deindex them.

Step 9: Scan for site errors

A 404 is a “page not found” error, generally caused by broken links and images within your site. For example, if a page on your site links to a piece of content that has since been deleted, anyone who clicks that link will get a 404 error.

Contrary to popular opinion, broken links don’t result in site penalties. As content cycles in and out, and your site’s structure changes over time, 404s occur naturally. That said, broken links in inopportune places can fracture your internal linking structure. They can also be a pain in the ass for users trying to navigate from one page to another.

How to find and fix broken links

Site audit tools have the ability to identify all the 404s within your site. Once you identify them, fixing them is a matter of determining how important each link is to your linking structure and user experience. Have a page which no longer exists, or which now exists at a new URL? It’s a good idea to make sure all high-traffic pages which formerly linked to that page now 301 redirect to the new page; or, that they at least redirect back your home page.

This chrome extension is useful for identifying broken links on a page-by-page basis.