25-Step SEO Audit Checklist For 2022

Are you worried about your site ranking or difficulties in SEO?

The best way to identify the seo issues is to start with an accurate website seo audit.

SEO audits help identify the technical seo issues of your site.

Once you identify website technical seo issues through a website audit, that can negatively impact your search rankings.

By fixing, it helps your website increase in ranking and traffic.

We all want our website to get top of the search results pages.

We want more traffic on our website, and we want that traffic to convert. But how can you get the results that you want to get?

And here’s the most crucial part that most people don’t focus on search engine optimization.

And you know what?

Website Seo Audit.

The technical seo of your website should be appropriately optimized to get a higher ranking & traffic on your website.

Google algorithm looks at various ranking factors while ranking any webpage in search results.

Thus to optimize your site for Google, you must follow some essential google ranking factors.

The way you optimize a website makes a big difference in ranking your site in search engine results.

To increase the chances to get a higher ranking in google, follow this seo audit checklist.

Let me explain

What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is that specifies the areas of improvement or opportunities you’ve identified through your seo site audit.

In an SEO site audit, you need to find out the roadblocks which are stopping your website from ranking above your competitors.

Thus an SEO audit’s primary intent is to identify the weak SEO point that is affecting your website performance in the search engine. Google made thousands of updates in its algorithm per year.

Make sure your website is optimized with the latest developments, it is essential to perform a site audit once in 3 months periods.

In this seo audit checklist, I will cover the best practices for auditing a website, and how to run an onsite SEO audit process faster and effectively.

Use this seo audit checklist to identify it.

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Here’s what this SEO audit checklist will be covering: 

1) Check Only One Version Of The Website Should Be Accessible
2) Check All The Important Pages Are Indexed in Google Or Not
3) Perform A Full Site Crawl To Identify The Technical Issues
4) Check the Canonical Version of the URLs
5) Check Your XML Sitemap File For Errors
6) Check Client Side Server (40x) Errors
7) Make Sure Your Website Should Be Mobile Friendly
8) Check For Redirection Chain Issues
9) Check for Breadcrumbs Issues
10) Analyze Your Top Level Navigation
11) Check Your Structured Data Markup
12) Check hreflang Tag Implemented Correctly
13) Check the Google Search Console & Google Analytics Setup Correctly
14) Check for the Duplicate & Thin Content
15) Check Your Website Loading Time
16) Reviews Your Website For Duplicate Meta Tags
17) Analyze Your URL Structure
18) Check your ALT Tags for Image Optimization
19) Analyze your Internal Linking Structure
20) Review your Robots.txt file for SEO
21) Check Browser Caching Of Your Website
22) Fix Pagination For Link Equity issues
23) Fix Broken Internal and Outbound Links
24) Fix the Crawl Errors in the Search Console
25) Best SEO Audit Tools

Let’s start-

1) Check That Only One Version Of The Website Should Be Accessible

Enter your domain in the browser and check for the various version one by one.

Take into account all the ways anyone could type your website address into a browser.

A search engine considers these all properties are as different sites.

Only one version should be accessible in a browser.

It means it will affect your website SEO visibility, but as well links juice will also be divided into these URLs.

So the best way to deal with this is that set up the 301 redirections to other versions of the website.

To make the process easy you can use this redirect checker tool to check all the versions once by entering your domain URL here.

Should I Use the www or Non-www Site Version?

It is up to you to choose whatever you like www or non-www; it doesn’t make any effect on your seo campaign.

And use only this version when you create backlinks or links your site from other sites.

HTTP vs. HTTPS?

If your site is on HTTP now, it’s time to move it to HTTPS.

As Google always favors secure websites.

HTTPS sites are more secure than HTTP sites. And which sections enabled the SSL can get a slight boost in the ranking.

SSL-enabled sites give your users peace of mind that your website can be trusted and their information is safe.

Recommendation-

1) Make sure only one version should be browseable.

If your website is accessing multiple versions, put the 301 redirects to the other versions.

2) Enable the SSL; it keeps your site secure and trusted in the eyes of Google and your user.

2) Check All The Important Pages Are Indexed in Google Or Not

Head over to google, enter the site command (site:yourdomain.com)

Under the search box, you will see actual indexed pages in Google for your website.

If you see any difference in the actual pages and indexed pages in google, it means there is some serious trouble on your website.

Now there are two types of scenarios can be –

1) Google has indexed fewer pages than the actual pages.

2) Google has indexed more pages than the actual pages.

Now you need to identify the cause of this problem.

How?

In the next step, I’ll show you the ways to identify & how to fix the problem of the indexation.

3) Perform A Full Site Crawl To Identify The Technical Issues

There are various tools in the market, but I would recommend them to the only one which I have used and tested myself.

Head over to screaming Frog if you haven’t, download it first.

Enter your domain here and wait.

Within a few seconds, it will show you the list of the URLs.

Screaming Frog is one of the best free SEO tools to perform a deep crawl for any website.

In the free version, you can check up to 500 pages, and if your site has more than 500 pages, then you need to upgrade it.

But for a small site, this tool gives you tons of information about your website’s technical SEO issues for free.

Check for the Noindex directives first –

If Noindex Meta Robots block your site pages, it will show the list of the URLs.

Download the file from here and if you find any pages that are No Index, make a list of the URLs and change the directive to Index, follow.

Check the Robots.txt file –

Enter robots.txt behind your primary domain.

(yourdomain.com/robots.txt)

If you see any critical URL blocked from robots.txt, remove the URL or make changes in the syntax.

If your robots.txt file is clean like mine, that’s fine.

Recommendation-

For the first scenario –

1) Google has indexed fewer pages than the actual pages.

Remove the Nonidex Meta tag from the essential pages that have been blocked by meta robots tags.

Change the Noindex, to Index, follow.

Use the URL inspection tool in the search console to submit the URL for indexing.

Wait for a few hours some time it will take at least 24 hours to crawl & index the pages.

Once done, check the status in the Google with site command and see the difference in the google index status.

For the second scenario –

2) Google has indexed more pages than the actual pages.

Probably Google has indexed useless pages that you don’t want to include in the Google index.

For example,

My blog is around 13 to 15 pages, which I want to index, but Google is showing 32 pages in their Index.

It means Google has indexed the futile pages of my blog.

So now I would like to remove those pages from the Google index.

I just put the Noindex, Nofollow directive on these futile pages and will wait for google to crawl the URLs.

Once google bots crawl these URLs, they will be removed from the google indexed.

Optimize the crawl budget by eliminating or de-indexing un-necessary pages from Google.

Because unnecessary URLs will eat your crawl budget, and Googlebot won’t be able to reach your main pages.

So make sure Google bots should crawl only essential pages for the rest of the pages put the Noindex tag.

4) Check the Canonical Version of the URLs

A canonical tag tells the search engine that this specific URL is the primary copy of the page.

Canonical tags on the pages tell the search engine bots that this is the original version of the web page.

The same content on different URLs is problematic for search engines.

Therefore implement a self canonical tag on every page even if there are no other versions of a page to prevent any possible duplicate content issue.

5) Check Your XML Sitemap File For Errors

At first check, your website has a sitemap or not.
(http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml)

A sitemap tells the search engine about your website structure, and it also helps to discover the crucial pages of your website.

If your website doesn’t have a sitemap, create one right now.

In this tool, you can generate up to 500 pages of sitemap for free.

For more than 500 pages, you need to pay for it.

Best practice for sitemap optimization –

1) Keep your sitemap on the root of the directory.

2) You can keep up to 50000 pages in a single sitemap file.

3) The sitemap file size shouldn’t be more than 50MB.

4) If your website has millions of pages, you must create multiple sitemap files and use a sitemap index file.

5) Keep your sitemap free from errors, include only those URLs in the sitemap file which you want to index.

6) Update your sitemap whenever you add the new page on your website.
It will help the search engine crawlers to discover fresh content quickly.

7) Submit your sitemap through the search console, and you can specify your sitemap location in the robots.txt file in the following way.
(sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml)

6) Check Client Side Server (40x) Errors.

What are the 40x errors?

A server error means google bot is unable to access your URLs.

Request sent to the server, but either server fails or the request times out.  As a result, Googlebot returned the 40x server errors.

There are many types of 40x errors (401, 403), but the most common is 404 error pages.

404 server errors happen when the page is no longer exists.

At first Test your Server Connectivity in Search Console –

Logins into your search console.

Navigate to Crawl > Coverage > Click on Error

Below you will see a list of the errors.

How to handle (40x) server errors?

You know 404 errors don’t affect your site ranking & indexing in google.

404 errors can be caused by site configurations or by typos.

So most 404 errors are not worth fixing.

Recommendation –
1) Make a list of the 404 URLs and review if these pages are worth fixing or not.
Check if any deleted pages are causing 404 errors.

2) Find the alternate of these deleted pages and put the 301 redirections. But don’t redirect all the 404 pages to your Home Page or never try to block them through robots.txt.

So leave the 404 pages as it is if there is no alternate of them or use the 410.

Google treats 410 (gone) as the same 404 (not found).

Even you can design custom 404 pages for a better user experience instead of redirection.

Want to learn more

Read – Find and fixing server errors in search console in index coverage report; check with this Google’s guide.

7) Make Sure Your Website Should Be Mobile Friendly

Let start with some stats –

Worldwide, more people own a cell phone than a toothbrush. Source

46% of people say they would not purchase from a brand again if they had an interruptive mobile experience. Source

Users spend, on average, 69% of their media time on smartphones. Source

That’s why you need your website should be mobile optimized.

At first check, how does your audience browse?

Login into your analytics account.

Go to audience> Mobile > Devices.

Here you will see which devices are generating more traffic.

If you see more visitors are landing on your website from mobile devices, then you must take a look at your mobile seo.

Test your website mobile-friendliness first-

Go to Google Mobile Friendliness Test Tool.

Enter your website URL and hit on the Test URL.

Now on the test results page, it will show you the issues if your page any have.

Click on page loading issues, and it will show you the source with the problem.

Now make a list of the URLs and fix these issues to make your web pages mobile-friendly.

Want to learn more

Read – How to make a mobile-friendly website?

8) Check For Redirection Chain Issues

What are redirect chains?

A URL is redirected from one location to another; this is called a redirect chain.

One URL is redirected to the final URL; this is called proper 301 redirections.

Redirects chains are bad for SEO but also bad for a better user experience.

Redirects chain gives the signals to Googlebot to stop following the redirect URLs.

The redirect chain also slows down the page speed.

Recommendation –

Keep the redirects as much less as you can.

You can keep up to 5 redirects in a chain. Because some browser only supports five max redirects in a chain.

To keep your crawl budget healthy, don’t use more than three redirects in a redirect chain.

And don’t mix up different types of redirects. If you are using 301 used, only 301 don’t mix it up with 302.

It will be confusing, and google bots won’t be able to reach the final destination URL.

9) Check for Breadcrumbs Issues

Breadcrumb is a type of navigation that utilizes to show the user’s current location on the website.

Also, breadcrumbs help search engines to understand how your site is structured.

Look at the below snapshot.

Look at the breadcrumbs navigation; it is showing the current location where you are now.

If you click on Home Decor in the breadcrumbs navigation section, you will jump to the Home Decor page.

Breadcrumbs make the user experience much better and also helps the search engine crawler to help understand the website structure & hierarchy.

Where to Use Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs primarily use in E-commerce sites, news sites, huge blogs & publication sites to provide a better user experience.

You may use breadcrumbs for any website except for the single-level website.

Check the website that breadcrumbs are implemented or not.

If breadcrumbs already there –

Head over to the internal pages and check if breadcrumbs navigation is displaying.

If yes, then check the categories in the breadcrumbs are showing correctly and in the correct order.

Moreover, you should look at the unnecessary breadcrumb usage as well.

Because most of the website doesn’t need the breadcrumbs navigation most of the time, main menus or secondary navigation shows all the essential ways to the user.

If breadcrumbs are not there –

Now it’s time to implement the breadcrumbs on the website.

If your site is on WordPress and Yoast is installed, now Click on Yoast SEO, in the left pane.

Click on Search Appearance, on top of the tab go to breadcrumbs and click on Enable it.

Now save the changes.

Once you configure the Yoast breadcrumbs, now copy the below code and paste it in the theme file where you want the breadcrumbs to be.

if ( function_exists(‘yoast_breadcrumb’) ) {
yoast_breadcrumb( ‘

‘,’

‘ );
}
?>

Want to learn more

Read – How to Implement Yoast SEO breadcrumbs in any WordPress website.

10) Analyze Your Top Level Navigation

Navigation is the key to success in attracting, engaging, and converting visitors to your website.

Clear navigation helps both the search engine and the user to find the right paths on your website.

Look at the below example –

Menus should be defined clearly and in a logical sequence because they direct the users where they need to go.

Recommendation – 

#1. Target pages in top-level navigation – Make sure your target pages always are linked from the top-level navigation.

#2. Use Descriptive text and primary keywords – Use descriptive text to describe the navigation labels.

#3. Avoid dropdown menus –  according to the usability studies, dropdown menus are annoying. As visitors, we move our eyes much faster than our mouse.

A user is already decided to click, but dropdown menus give us more options, and this can urge visitors to skip relevant top-level pages on the website.

But research also shows that using a “mega dropdown menu” can help to improve usability and can create an excellent navigation experience for a user as well.

Big drop down menus example –

#4. Don’t copy the other website navigation structure.

If other website navigation looks good, blindly don’t copy them.

First, find out what navigational components are most vital for you & your users.

And based on this, use the correct menu navigation.

11) Check Your Structured Data Markup

Structured data markup provides additional information about your webpage content on the search engine results page.

Google uses structured data markup to gather information about the web page and to understand the content of the webpage.

Look at the below snapshot –

Reviews structured data markup is applied on the webpage. And based on reviews markup, it is showing the review snippet under the listing in SERP.

How to use Structured Data Markup on your site?

There are two types of ways to add structured data to the website.

1. Google Structured Data Markup Helper
2. Structured Data with Schema.org

If you are not good at coding and can’t take the risk to mess with your website coding, you can use google structured data markup helper.

If you have good knowledge of coding (Html, Java), you can use the Schema.Org to implement it yourself.

Want to learn more

What is hreflang?

Similar content on multiple languages, hreflang tags on your website tells the search engine which language you are using on the specific page so that search engine can assist that particular language page to the users searching language.

Hreflang tag sends the signal to Google, which language is using on a page.

And based on this, google serves the exact content in the searcher language based on what language they’re using.

By using the hreflang code, it tells the search engine that these pages have the same content in a different language, but target regions are different.

Should you use hreflang?

If your website has multiple language content and you want to target different regions, you must use the hreflang tag.

Different ways to implement the hreflang tag.

1. You can use the link element in the Head Section of the HTML.

Example Code –

2. Use an XML Sitemap –

Example Code –

How to generate an hreflang tag?

Click on The hreflang Tags Generator Tool.

Enter your URL, select the language, and next select the country, regions.

Click on generate, and your code will be auto-generated.

Copy the code and paste it in the head section of the page HTML.

If you want to implement hreflang through an XML sitemap.

Click on Attributes in an XML Sitemap, now click on generate the hreflang tag.

Now download the XML sitemap and upload it to the server.

Look at the below example –

This Hreflang tag is placed in the Head of the HTML section.

This website is in two languages.

hreflang= “en” shows that this webpage is in the English language.

hreflang= “es” indicates that this webpage is in the Spanish language.

And hreflang=x-default means if no page matches the searcher language, then it will show the default page.

Hreflang tag’s solely purpose is to serve the right page to the right user.

Want to learn more

Read – Hreflang Tags SEO Best Practices

13) Check the Google Search Console & Google Analytics Setup Correctly

#1. Google Search Console – Google search console is the google free tool for all websites. It helps you to identify your website’s technical errors.

In the search console, you can check the indexation of your pages, crawl errors status, sitemap file status, robots.txt file status, and many more things.

How to check –

Press CTRL+U > CTRL + F> check for this code “google-site-verification”

If it is placed on your website, you can see this.

If it is not on your website, you need to set up the google search console first to track the data.

#1. Google Analytics –
Google Analytics is one of the essential tools in the marketing world.

To keep track of where the traffic is coming from, which devices, which country, and number of conversions are generating.

You can get all these insights for free in google analytics.

How to check –

Press CTRL+U > CTRL + F> check for this code “UA-” If it is on your website, you can see it like this.

If it is not on your website, you need to set up google analytics first.

How to setup google analytics?

#1. Click on this URL – https://analytics.google.com

#2. Now click on Start for Free, now click on Sign Up!

After clicking on the Signup button, a window will appear as given in the snapshot.

#3. Click on Get Tracking ID, Accepts the terms and conditions, and you will be redirected to the website tracking code page.

Now copy and paste the code in the section of every page on your website.

How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress?

#1. Click on Plugin on the right sidebar side, click on add new.

#2. Search for analytics in the search bar choose any of the plugins and click on install.

#3. As you activate it, it will start showing on the right side of the pane.

If not, you can find it under the setting menu.

#4. In the plugin setting page, paste the UA code here and click on save changes.

Wait for at least 24 hours for analytics to collect the data.

14) Check for the Duplicate & Thin Content

Duplicate content means that similar or the same content on different URLs.

The search engine hates duplicate content.

Duplicate content confused the search engine that which URL should rank and which not.

And even your website can get penalized for duplicate content.

Make sure to keep your website safe from duplicate content.

Enter your website on Copyscape and hit enter.

And it will show you the duplicate content with the URLs.

You can use siteliner to check the duplicate content-related issue as well.

Scan your website with these tools and check if you have a duplicate content-related issue.

If third-party sites steal your web content, you can contact them to remove the material or provide a link back (credit to the source) to your website.

If you find third-party sites, use your content without your knowledge or consent. You can issue DMCA Notice.

Thin Content – Thin content is which provides no value to the user.

Affiliates pages, doorway pages, or creating similar content over and over; all are examples of thin content.

How to identify thin content pages?

You can use various tools like – semrush, screaming Frog, deep crawl to find the thin content pages on your website.

If there are fewer words on the page that providing less value to the user query or similar content repeating over and over these, all are thin content pages.

How to fix it?

1) Altogether remove the pages.
2) Or put the Noindex meta tag on it.

Want to learn more

Read – DMCA Notices: Here’s Everything You Needed To Know In 2019

15) Check Your Website Loading Time

The time is taken by the webpage to show on the user screen.

Website speeds impact two major things conversion and user experience.

To make user experience and conversion betters try to reduce your website load time is less than 3 seconds.

Websites that loads fast search engine favors those websites higher in rankings and fast website help increase in the conversion rates as well.

Google algorithm is designed to judge the web page based on user experience and website usability.

Thus the better user experiences your web page will provide, and the more chances will be to rank your web page higher in search engine results.

Faster loading sites lower your bounce rates and help to provide a better user experience.

Slow websites will cost you money and provide a bad user experience.

According to Stats, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

So be sure your webpage should be loads in under 3 seconds.

How to check & optimize your website speed?

Use Gtmatrix and Google’s website speed tool to analyzes your page’s speed performance.

Review the recommendation and apply it to your page to improve your web page speed.

Want to learn more

Read – 12 Techniques of Website Speed Optimization

16) Reviews Your Website For Duplicate Meta Tags

All your webpages should be using proper Meta Title and Meta Description Tags.

Your pages should all have unique meta tags; there shouldn’t be duplicates.

Keep your Meta Title length under 60 characters and description tags, should be no more than 160 characters.

Head over to the screaming Frog, enter your URL, and hit start.

Click on Internal Tab below click on Filter select the HTML and click on export.

In the downloaded file, you can easily spot which URLs have empty meta or which URLs have duplicates meta tags.

For the empty or duplicates, meta tags create the new one.

Make sure to include your primary keywords with a call to action.

Meta tags do not impact direct ranking, but they increase the CTR of your listing in SERP.

17) Analyze Your URL Structure

Your website URL structure should be short, easily readable, and keyword optimized.

The URL structure is important because Google looks at the URL to determine what a page is about.

How can I check my URLs?

• In the screaming run, your website crawl report.
• Click on the URL tab.
• Export the data & analyze it.

If you found any unsafe character in the URLs ” < > # % [ ] | ~ { }
make sure to rewrite them as static, readable, text.

Best Practices for Structuring URLs –

1) Include your Primary Keywords in the URLs.
2) Use – as separator and avoid _.
3) Avoid Stop Words in the URLs (a, an the, at, on)
4) Always use lowercase letters in the URLs.
5) Use 1-2 folders per URL.

18) Check your ALT Tags for Image Optimization

Google can’t read the images, so to make the images readable, you need to provide alternate text in the ALT Tag.

ALT tag describes what’s on the image.

Through ALT texts help the images to rank well in the google image search.

Google can’t read the images, so to make the images readable, you need to provide alternate text in the ALT Tag.

ALT tag describes what’s on the image.

Through ALT texts, it helps the images to rank well in the google image search as well.

Recommendation for Image ALT Tag Optimization –

1) Be descriptive – describe image context and image subject through ALT Text.

2) Use your keywords – include primary keywords, if possible, even you can add long tails or LSI keywords but don’t stuff.

3) Use no more than 125 character – Use alt text that helps visitors and keep them unique. The ALT tag shouldn’t be too long, but short, which matches the context of the page.

19) Analyze your Internal Linking Structure

An internal link is a hyperlink that points from a page to another page on the same domain.

Proper placements of internal links help the search engine to crawl the website faster.

The Internal linking profile allows the user to navigate easily through the website.

How Internal Linking Helps Search Engine?

Internal links help search engine bots to discover valuable pages on your website and also helps understand the hierarchy of your site.

How Internal Linking Helps Users?

Use relevant links in internal linking which provide value to the user and match with the context of the webpage.

Internal Linking Best Practice –

1) Use relevant links – while doing internal linking, make sure to interlinked only the most related or relevant pages.

Only link the content that is relevant to the current content and which provides value to the reader.

2) User Anchor Text – Anchor text helps the search engines to understand the context of the link.

Utilize the keyword as anchor text, but don’t repeat the exact keyword again and again to every link anchor text.

Use descriptive text in the anchor text that gives a sense of the topic.

3) Deep Links – Build an internal linking profile by linking to your more in-depth internal pages. By doing internal linking to the deeper pages, it helps the search engines to crawl & index the pages fastly.

4) Keep your links follow – Make sure your internal links should always be FOLLOW.

Through this, link juice will be passed to deep internal pages as well.

How can I check internal links on my site?

Head over to search console >> Click on Links Tab >>

Scroll down to internal links and click on more.

On this page, you can see total internal links, the number of time internally linked pages.

Now click on export and download it.

Now check each link manually and start internal linking with other relevant pages.

20) Review your Robots.txt file for SEO

While doing seo site audits, make sure to check the pagination of the website as well.

Suppose you have an e-commerce site or blog/news site with lots of pages or articles. You must need to set up pagination to indicate the relationship between component URLs in a paginated series to search engines. 

Google also announced that they had not used rel=” next” and rel= “prev” in indexing for a long time, but other search engines such as Bing still use it.

As the right pagination help, the search engines understand the hierarchy and structure of the website.

Read this post to learn How to Audit pagination?

Once you complete the seo site audit follows these practice to implement correct pagination on the website.

1. Make sure to use a self-referencing canonical tag on every page.
2. Use the Rel next/prev appropriately on the paginated pages.

23) Fix Broken Internal and Outbound Links

Lousy link structure can cause a poor user experience for both users and search engines. Thus you should make sure your internal and outbound links should be working properly.

Because poor link structure can be frustrating for people and they will bounce back from your website to your competitor’s site. 

Hence while doing an SEO Audit crosscheck for broken internal and outbound links of your website to provide a better user for experience for your visitors. 

Look at the below mentioned different factors and fix all the errors: 

• orphaned pages (pages that aren’t being linked to at all)
• 301 or 302 links are pointing to the correct URLs 
• Links that point to a 4XX error page

Fix the broken links with the relevant URL and remove the URLs completely if it doesn’t exist.

24) Fix the Crawl Errors in the Search Console

Crawl errors mean that google is having trouble crawling and viewing the content on your site.

Fix the crawl errors as soon as possible because if any important pages google is not able to crawl it means they won’t rank it. And users won’t be able to find you anywhere in the search result.

You can find crawl errors in Google Search Console > Coverage.

25) Best SEO Audit Tools