8 SEO Audit Checklist to Improve Site Rankings | 2024

Implementing SEO might require in-depth tactics, but what if despite the comprehensive strategies, your site is still not ranking? What is wrong? If you undergo this case, the first thing you can do is carry out an SEO audit. 

This audit can help you find the issues causing your site to fail to rank high on the search results. Regarding this, you must understand the SEO audit checklists to perform the analysis.

This guide will assist you in learning about the website audit checklist and how to do it properly for your site. 

An Overview of SEO Audit

An SEO audit determines how search engines optimised your website. It identifies problems that could be harming the website's rankings and offers ways to fix them. 

In carrying out the audit, you might need some tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Sequence Stat Site Audit, or others.

But, why should you perform an SEO audit? It is crucial because it allows you to maintain a lead over your competitors in search results, enhances the way users interact with your website, 

find profitable SEO prospects to optimise your return on investment, enable you to improve your SEO plan, and let you explain to those involved in your business the value of SEO.

SEO Audit Checklist: How to Do Site Audit?

The SEO audit process can vary based on the sites and issues. However, you can stick to this SEO audit template:

1. See Your Organic Traffic

First, you can see the organic traffic you get on Google Analytics to see which pages need more optimisation. 

To do so, you can go to Google Analytics > Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. Then, find Organic Search on the default channel group. You can also see the traffic based on certain periods by customising the dates. 

Next, you need to see the site's performance on Google Search Console to see the targeted pages to optimise. What you must note is that do not panic if your organic traffic is stagnant or decreasing because enhancing the functionality of your website is the main goal of this SEO assessment.

2. Crawl the Website

The most effective method for getting a tonne of valuable information on each page of your website is to conduct a website crawl.

Site crawling gives you information about on-page SEO, crawlability, page load speed, structured data, internal linking, and many more. 

You can use some crawling tools to perform it and figure out some issues, such as duplicate content and indexation issues. 

3. Improve Site Architecture

The SEO audit checklist also includes improving site architecture, which you can do as follows:

• Increase content production on each page because the older posts, which have the most equity, are pushed away from your homepage by about 20 to 30 clicks if your blog index only displays ten pages at a time. To move those older entries closer to the homepage, you can increase the number of posts per page.
• Develop user-friendly solutions that will increase page authority without sacrificing the user experience by collaborating closely with developers and designers.
• To completely maximise that prized link space, look for overlapping links and replace those duplicates with links to other pages to which you wish to convey equity.

4. Fix Thin Content

The Google algorithm now prioritizes people-first and valuable content, meaning that if yours is still thin, it will be hard to appear on the search engine result pages. 

Thin content is a piece of work that is insufficient to fulfil user needs and intents. You can target some pages by identifying pages with dropped rank, exporting the top 25-100 by traffic, or auditing all of the pages. 

5. Optimise Robots.txt and Robots Meta Tags

Search engines like Google can be informed about which parts of your website you want them to crawl and index by using robots.txt files. Because your robots.txt file is so crucial to your website's indexation, any errors in it could exacerbate SEO issues.

To avoid any issue on robots.txt, you can check it on tools and add the robots metatag to the header. You may notify search engines not to display this page in their results by adding this meta tag.

6. Check Page Speed

To give the best user experience, your site must load fast. Not only that, fast load times become one of the official ranking factors on Google, meaning that you must maximise the page load times. 

Figuring out the speed can be done using a page speed test, like what cmlabs has. There, you can see the performance, accessibility, PWA, and many more. 

After that, you can fix the issue in load times, one of which is compressing image size to load faster. 

7. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Having a mobile-friendly website is important because it is estimated that there will be 1.6 million smartphone users in Malaysia. This means that the chance of your site being accessed from the mobile phone is wider. 

Most importantly, one of the primary page experience signals that Google considers when ranking webpages is mobile friendliness. Google might give your website a lower ranking in search results if it is not optimised for mobile devices.

8. Improve On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the practice of optimising the internal element of your website. This must be on your SEO site audit checklist because that is how you can gain traffic and put your site in front of the audience. 

Some best practices you can do are creating valuable content matching audiences’ needs, putting keywords on content, title tag, and meta description, adding internal and external links, optimising images with alt text, and many more. 

There are many SEO audit checklists you will need based on your site’s condition. If you want to optimise it with extensive SEO tactics, you can entrust it to SEO Services by cmlabs. 

Without any further ado, secure a meeting now and tell us your SEO needs for free!