The 18-Step SEO Audit Checklist for 2025 + Free Template

URL structure is a critical component of SEO that can impact both user experience and search engine rankings. Build relationships and partnerships to grow the authority and reach of your site. Though taking these steps requires some careful foresight, their dividends will pay dividends down the road. While quick wins get you started, long-term strategies are what solidify your site’s authority and visibility over time.

seo audit

Vertical Experience

Another element that can affect your rankings is meta refresh. It is used to automatically redirect a webpage to a different URL. Spammers often exploit this method to redirect visitors to pages with unrelated or potentially harmful content. Search engines don’t approve such methods and can penalize your website for this.

SEO Audit Tools You Should Be Using for Website Analysis

seo audit

In fact, our study of 11.8 million search results found that the top result in Google has 3.8x more backlinks than pages in positions 2-10. Rendering is one of the stages of the overall process Google uses to analyze your page content. To determine whether it should be indexed and, if so, where it should rank. To help the algorithms understand which pages meet search intent.

Expert SEO Audits Since 2004

Maybe you have lots of links from irrelevant directories or questionable foreign domains. Finally, go to the “Referring Domains” tab and look at the types of sites linking to you. The report labels pages as “Good,” “Needs improvement,” or “Poor.” Expand each issue to see the affected pages. Here, you’ll find separate reports for “Desktop” and “Mobile.” Click “Open Report” at the top of either chart for more details.

The second way is to compare your Google organic traffic for the dates Google released an algorithmic change. You should find out when the penalty was imposed and why your website was penalized. Then, you should create an action plan to correct the issues and remove the penalty. I recommend doing regular SEO audits (at least twice a year) to ensure your website is up-to-date with the latest developments. Perform your technical SEO audit at the end of your strategy. Improve internal linking to your other articles to increase topic relevance and site structure.

  • The audit can identify over 100+ issues, which can be overwhelming for beginners.
  • Doing an audit helps website owners create a plan for improvement, supporting long-term success in organic search results.
  • For a quick refresher, title tags serve as the title of your webpage in search results.
  • Which measures how fast your website responds to user interactions.

You can also double-check your organic search performance in Google Search Console. This is important to do because Ahrefs organic traffic numbers are estimations. Make sure your site uses HTTPS, which encrypts data and protects user information. If your site is still running on HTTP, install an SSL certificate and update all internal links accordingly. For those who want their website to rank high on Google, an SEO audit is a detailed review of your website’s performance and visibility to improve results.

seo audit

As you can see above, it lists down all the issues that occurred within your site by sorting them out from high priority to medium to low priority. In case you want to guide on claiming Semrush free trial, check this guide. Use the following link to try SEMrush Site Audit to find and fix your site issues today.

An SEO audit is the process of evaluating the SEO performance of a website. The main goal of an SEO audit is to identify issues and find new opportunities to help you achieve higher rankings in search engine results. It usually covers indexing, technical SEO, keyword research, on-page SEO, and SEO Anomaly competitor analysis. An SEO audit is one of the key actions of an SEO professional or website owner.