Complete SEO Audit Checklist for Businesses | 2024

If you’re a business owner searching for a methodology to monitor and evaluate your SEO performance, you can perform the SEO audit checklist.

SEO audits are practices that are regularly conducted to evaluate your website's performance on the search engine. To do an audit, the SEO audit checklist can help you provide step-by-step to make sure all your audits run properly.

Read the article below to learn how to do an SEO audit and what important aspects should be included in your SEO audit checklist!

What Is an SEO Audit Checklist?

An SEO audit checklist is a guide step-by-step approach to evaluate how optimized your websites are for search engines. By using this systematic approach, you can regularly check your SEO health with ease.

An SEO audit can also help you identify the issues your website is facing and give valuable insight into where you should improve to make your SEO performance excellent.

Benefits You Can Get From Using SEO Audit Checklist

The main goal of using a website audit checklist is to guide you to make your SEO audit easier and leave no stone unturned. Conducting regular audits can help your website perform and rank well in search results.

Here are other benefits that you can get from using an SEO audit checklist for your business audit:

• Help ensure consistency. 
• Improve audit efficiency.
• Simplifies complex audit process by breaking it into parts.
• Makes progress easy to track.
• Improves audit accuracy.
• Ensure that nothing is left out. 
• Improve overall SEO performance.

How to Do an SEO Audit

Every business will have a different SEO audit checklist due to a variety of business goals and needs, but the common aspects that are usually evaluated in SEO audits include content audits, on-page audits, off-page audits, technical audits, and local SEO audits. 

Here are the detailed explanations of each part of how to do a website audit that you must include on your checklist: 

1. SEO Content Audit

Content is one aspect that is the way your business initiates interaction and also communicates value, information, and solutions to problems to your target audience. 

1. Make Goal-Based Content

The first thing you can evaluate from a content audit is checking whether your content is still relevant to your business niche and objectives.

By checking, you can strategize more effectively and specifically direct your content to the goals you want to achieve, whether it is increasing traffic, increasing conversions, increasing brand awareness, or increasing sales.

2. Asses Your Old Content

You can look at every metric you get from your old content and analyze trends. See how many clicks you get and the downward trend. 

In addition, you can also get insight into what kind of content and writing approach your audience likes from the old content you have created.

3. Uncover Your Gaps

From assessing the content, you can find where your content gaps are and where you missed opportunities for content in certain keywords.

2. On-Page SEO Audit

The next part you must include on your SEO audit template is an on-page SEO audit, which involves checking all the aspects of your website. 

1. Update Regularly Your Keyword 

Keyword research is an important step to make your website or content more easily found by the right target audience.

You can evaluate the relevance of your keywords whether it is still in accordance with user intent or need a new approach, and check your keyword placement, whether it has been placed appropriately in the content or on the main page of the website. 

Finally, check keyword cannibalization to make sure the issue does not occur because it can reduce your ranking.

2. Website Traffic’s Check

The next aspect that should be on your audit checklist is checking website traffic. By analyzing traffic, you can identify what content is preferred by users and check whether the content topic is still relevant. 

3. Make User Experience Improvement

Optimizing your website’s user experience involves several actions, such as making sure that you have clear navigation, creating alternative text for images, optimizing content layout by using proper headings, and adding interactive elements to your website.

4. Internal linking’s Check

To make your internal linking well-optimized, you can do an evaluation on some aspects such as sitemaps, website structure, anchor text, orphaned pages, and broken links. 

3. Off-Page SEO Audit

An off-page SEO audit involves evaluating aspects that are outside of your websites that are related to your connection and relationship with other parties, and this includes backlink and competitor analysis.

1. Check Site’s Backlink

Checking backlinks can be done with the help of Google Search Console. You can start assessing quality backlinks in the “links” section and make sure that the link points to your websites from reputable and relevant sites.

If there are low-quality links that potentially cause harm and spam issues, you can use Google tools to disavow those links to avoid any adverse penalties. 

2. Do Website Competitor Analysis

Focusing on your website is important, but if you have a comparable competitor, you will gain greater insight and the ability to be outstanding. 

You can compare metrics such as your competitor's authority score, keywords, organic traffic, and referring domains.

4. Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO audit involves evaluating overall aspects that related to your website's technical to make your website easier to crawl by search engines. 

1. Check Website Indexing

The first important thing is that you must check whether your site is indexed properly by Google. You can also utilize tools from the Google Search Console, which is in the pages report section. 

Make sure all your pages are indexed, also don't forget to make sure that Google only indexes one version of your web page if there is a duplicate version.

2. Optimize Your Site Crawlability

Site crawlability is an important aspect of technical SEO, which can help Google easily index your website. You can begin checking crawlability by assessing your robot.txt file to ensure that your website has a clear structure and proper internal linking according to the guide.

To identify errors such as broken links or inaccessible pages, you can find them using the Google Search Console and fix them as soon as possible.

3. Check Mobile-Friendliness

Next, you need to check that the mobile version of your site is well-functioning, uses proper responsive design, has high loading speed, and is suitable for mobile size. Prioritise maintaining website consistency to satisfy user experience and improve search ranking.

4. Fix Broken Pages

Sometimes, broken pages can happen accidentally on your website pages. Broken pages are usually marked with 404 errors. You can identify it with the help of the Google Search Console. If there are indeed broken pages, then find out the root cause and fix it immediately.

5. Local SEO Audit

The last aspect you can add to your website audit checklist is a local SEO audit. If you are a UK business owner who wants to focus on building visibility, awareness, and authority in specific locations, your checklist should include:

• Local Keyword Research: Identify relevant keyword that includes local term, in this way, you have a better understanding of what your target audience are searching for in your area, and you can costumise your content accordingly. 
• Local Content: Research current trends in your local market and consider making content that resonates with that.
• Google My Business: If there are any business information changes or some new offerings don’t forget to update your Google My Business profile.
• Business Listing: You can list your website on various local directories such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, or other local council websites.
• Reviews and Ratings: Encourage your customers to leave any positive comment or reviews of your product or services, regularly responding them to enhance your reputation.
• Local Ranking: You can do regular monitoring of local ranking that is relevant to your industry to tract if there are any changes or areas of improvement.

Conclusion

The SEO audit checklist can be a powerful guideline if you want to conduct a website auditystematically. By arranging all important aspects on these checklist, you can increase the effectiveness of your audit process and make sure nothing is being missed.

Sometimes, doing an SEO audit can be very overwhelming and time-consuming, especially if your website is big and has a complex structure. But, you don’t need to worry! If you need professional help, you can use SEO Services by cmlabs. 

Our professional and experienced team will help you to make SEO audit easier and more efficient. So, don't wait any longer and contact our marketing today to get a free consultation.

Maximize your SEO performance and grow your business with cmlabs now!