An optimized meta title can improve your organic rankings and increase the CTR for users. Each page should have a unique title that includes the topic (or keyword) that that page is meant to target. Performing an SEO audit regularly helps maintain your website’s health and search visibility. Systematically checking indexing, technical performance, on-page SEO, and backlinks, helps you to address any issues before they affect your rankings. Implementing practices makes sure your site remains competitive and well-optimized for search SEO Anomaly engines. On-page SEO elements like meta tags, headings, and internal links are essential for communicating the relevance of your content to search engines.
After years of working with clients, especially as the head of tech SEO for a U.K. Agency, I’ve found technical SEO audits to be a near-daily occurrence. With that, I know how important it is, especially for newer SEOs, to understand what each issue is and why it is important. Paste in your URL, and it’ll pull in the title and meta description.
Problems with external links
- Even if the page seems fine and smooth visually, check its code anyway.
- An audit tool can guide you in the right direction, but consistent effort and strategy implementation are crucial for achieving and maintaining high rankings.
- 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.
- In summary, SEO is all about optimizing content, building authority, and improving the overall user experience on your site.
- Broken links are URLs that point to a website that no longer exist or return an error.
As discussed extensively, SEO is a comprehensive, long-term strategy focused on optimizing individual web pages and content to rank higher in SERPs. Before you create content with keywords, you need to understand what content is currently ranking and what people really mean when they’re searching for a keyword. Go through your competitors’ websites that are ranking well on Google and see what they’re focusing on with their content.
Step #4: Evaluate Your Content
Many websites rush straight into link building, generating hundreds or even thousands of low-quality backlinks with exact-match anchor texts, before laying any SEO groundwork. You can label almost anything – products, articles, reviews, events – to clearly explain relationships and context. This clarity helps search engines understand why your content is relevant for a given query. After auditing over 500 websites, I’ve rarely seen Core Web Vitals alone significantly improve rankings. Typically, I recommend tackling technical and indexation issues first (because if Google can’t properly crawl/index, other optimizations won’t fully matter).
The above SEO audit checklist covers the technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO checks you need to make to improve your SEO. You can go deeper by enrolling in a technical SEO course and visiting the resources below. SEO Auditing is not only for finding and fixing errors but also for spotting opportunities to grow your website. One of the ways to do this is to identify new keywords that can generate targeted traffic. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most important SEO factors that must be addressed successfully. Study after study outlines the importance of page speed (especially for mobile) and how it can affect your rankings and conversion rates.
Always aim to leave the reader with immediately actionable next steps such as calls-to-action or links to resources. In the first part of your website audit, I’d focus on how users navigate your website — from your homepage to blog posts, to landing pages, and any related content in between. Creating a website audit report that clearly communicates the site issues found (and what to do about them) is an easy job when you have the right tools. Website audits usually evaluate a site for its content and technical performance. For example, Google’s primary goal is to serve the best and most trustworthy content to users from reputable sources. Sites that comply with data privacy requirements will most likely be viewed as more authoritative than those that don’t have these essential legal policies.
Easily find SEO related issues on your website and get actionable data to fix them before they become a problem. See where your SEO is working and where it needs improvement. Yoast SEO drastically simplifies adding schema for WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify users. The SEO plugin outputs JSON-LD (the format preferred by Google) to add schema markup directly to your page’s HTML — no coding required. Where necessary, merge similar pages into one in-depth article.
Lastly, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability; strive for a CLS score of less than 0.1. To improve this, ensure images and embedded videos have dimensions, and avoid inserting new content above existing content unless in response to a user’s action. Another way is to use Google Analytics to view traffic from all search engines. For one client, I used user engagement metrics from Google Search Console and heatmaps to recover from a Google core update hit.