Every journey starts with a single step, and Search Engine Optimization begins with the SEO Audit. The SEO strategies deployed by Advology Solution are analyzed with the necessary attributes of web optimization ranking factors. The ranking factors are examined with the help of the SEO website audit checklist.

Download SEO Audit Checklist: Click here to download complete 100+ important factors of SEO audit checklist that will help to improve website performance and rankings on search engines.

Google and Bing are search engines that send crawlers to check a website's content structure, performance, HTML code and JavaScript. Your website is not going to get crawled by itself. Instead, it requires structured content, adequate keyword density and user-friendliness to make a website fully optimized.

The SEO audit checklist examines the overall health of your webpage, identifies the key errors, and provides essential solutions to overcome the faults. In this blog post, you will briefly learn everything about the SEO audit checklist. The checklist is important to run a lucrative business such as eCommerce.

Pay close attention to this piece of write-up and work through our provided manual to rank higher in both search engines – Google and Bing. However, before proceeding with the manual and everything related to the same, let’s understand what an SEO Audit means.

The SEO Audit – What Is It?

It is a process that checks for all the fundamental elements that keep a website from getting crawled by a Search Engine. Simply put, the procedure ensures that a web portal obeys the rules to deploy SEO strategies.

If a webpage is fully optimized for an SEO deployment, nothing can stop a website from getting crawled by Google and Bing.

The SEO Audit Checklist Consist Of;

• Excel File
• HTML Codes
• Website Codes
• Meta Tags
• JavaScript
• Website Extensions
• Content Structure
• Overall Performance

Above mentioned key elements are examined during an SEO Audit Checklist. While proceeding with an SEO campaign, it is not possible and essential to study every step. Nonetheless, there are some prerequisites that you must check separately.

The Other Prerequisites Of An SEO Campaign Required To Examine;

• The on-page content
• Required on-page SEO practices
• Content structure/format
• Keyword strategy
• Technical errors that prohibit the deployment of an SEO tactic

The factors illustrated above help you probe the factors keeping your website from functioning smoothly. By examining them, you will get to know how to address each issue. While commencing the SEO audit, ensure that the content is visible.

Mobile and other handheld devices are the next big thing and are constantly evolving. Hence, SEO auditing tells you if your website is mobile-friendly. Apart from that, the auditing also lets you look into other key factors that can be addressed accordingly.

What Does The SEO Website Audit Checklist Focus On?

What Does Website Audit Checks?

1. Content Visibility

Website content may not play a technical role, but it is a ranking factor. Similarly, just like other factors, you may want to take the content of your website seriously. Its visibility plays an important role and becomes a deciding factor in your web page ranking.

The visibility of content is the first step in SEO auditing. Check all your website's crucial segments, such as the homepage, product page, and category page, and make sure the content is visible. The visibility isn’t limited to human eyes only but is extended to Googlebot as well.

You must know that some Content Management Systems manage these pages differently. Therefore, your website audit checklist must include all kinds. Here’s what the SEO audit checklist focuses on;

• To see if the website renders automatically.
• To examine if the content looks perfect.
• To check if the Googlebot renders the browser to cater to pages.
• To analyze JavaScript if any crucial element in your page is missing.
• To study cached SERPs.

You can use SEO website audit checklist to see how Googlebot canvasses the webpages. To find your webpage in the index, copy the webpage link, and go to the web browser. Thereon, type “site:example.com” in the search box and hit the enter button. If you can see the link for the webpage on the result page, then it indicates that your content has been indexed.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics plays a crucial role for SEO. It helps in understanding how your website is performing optimally for searches, how much traffic is creating and where you should invest your time and money.

Analytics will give you an overview of how much Return on Investment (ROI) are you generating from SEO tactics.

Importance Of Google Analytics

The SEO audit checklist includes using Google Analytics as well. It not only indicates the traffic of your website, also provides you the essential clues about tracking. To learn about how it works, pay attention to the below-mentioned points;

• It could be a red flag when you witness extreme highs and lows in graphs.
• It indicates that when you load a tracking code, it does not fire properly.
• Look for the periods with no session.
• A sudden tweak in the shift.
• The bounce rates.
• All of these indicate the tracking code is firing properly.

Tracking code installation is crucial to fetch important data. If it is not installed correctly, it becomes hard to verify where the traffic is coming from. Also, it becomes practically difficult to determine which page is of more significance and which one is not.

3. Browser Plugin – Google’s Tag Assistant

Tracking code is a necessary element that helps you track the user’s activity. It is a small script encoded in the HTML source code of your website. It plays a crucial role in SEO that helps advertisers and webmasters in examining the visitors coming to your website.

Now the question is, how Google’s Tag Assistant helps in tracking the visitors? Well, The Tag Assistant from Google is a browser plugin that verifies whether or not the tracking code is installed properly.

• Click on Google’s Tag Assistant while on the page you want to track.
• Move your cursor to the icon and click “Enable”.
• Refresh the page, move your cursor to the Tag Assistant again.
• There you will see the Google Tags installed on your webpage.

It is utilized by the digital marketing experts to check whether or not codes are installed properly. Here’s how to check it more keenly.

• If tags are shown with red or blue icons, they are not installed properly.
• When you are shown with the tags coloured in blue or red, you must install them correctly.
• You are provided with an option to record the browsing session for an SEO auditing.
• Google Tags are also used in other marketing campaigns including; Re-Marketing, AdWords Conversion Tracking, Google Tag Manager, Floodlight, etc.

4. Canonical Tag

The canonical tag is the way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of the page. You should not ignore the canonical tags, as it helps in preventing the problems which are caused by duplicate or identical content appearing on different URLs.

By placing the Canonical tags in the right place, Google can correctly consolidate link equity, index, and the rank for the main versions of your content as per relevant queries.

To proceed with the process, you can use the Lighthouse App. It is a free of cost SEO audit checklist tool offered by Google. It also checks the other technical attributes of your website and lets you know how to rectify the errors.

It is a way that lets Google know which page is the master version of your website. The process informs Google that the pages are the same page coming from your website and are not duplicates. It provides the site’s performance and improves traffic.

• It boosts the performance of the website.
• It helps in SEO audit and removes the possibility of duplicate pages.
• It guides your website to canonicalize correctly.

5. Google Search Console

It is an indispensable part of SEO auditing and an important tool that ensures the overall health of your website. The free tool is available for everyone who owns a website. When proceeding with SEO auditing, ensure that you access the Google Search Console correctly.

During the SEO auditing, ensure you access it through the correct Gmail account. If you do not have one, make an account and access the console. You need to find the property of your website through the Google Search Console.

• It would help if you verify that your website's protocol and domain match your site's live version in the search console.
• For a complete SEO audit, ensure that your site’s property is accessible and it matches with the live version.
• The properties must not be treated the same way and if the properties are wrong, then reliable data won’t be available.
• It studies if the website is optimized and is visible to Google.
• Google Search Console verifies if the server has any errors.

6. Checking The Manual Actions

To proceed with the SEO audit, this is how you can process the Manual Actions;

• Access to the Navigation Panel on your Google Search Console.
• Move to the left and choose “Security & Manual Actions”.
• After that, proceed with the “Manual Actions”.

Website owners who routinely do technical SEO auditing can always follow the same procedure to check for Manual Actions. What do the Manual Actions mean to Google?

• It means that a human reviewer from the Google end is determining it.
• The manual actions refer to the penalty imposed for violating Google’s T&C and guidelines.
• Since the process is not compliant with the Webmaster, it can be penalized if quality guidelines are violated.
• In case, if Google penalizes your webpages, then it will be affected on the whole website resulting in a huge drop on the organic ranking on search result pages. The drop in the natural ranking can result in a few days or even overnight.
• Your website can come under a serious underperformance issue if you haven’t checked for Manual Actions before.

More often than not, manual actions occur when bad-faith attempts are made to influence Google’s search index. It was a bad choice if you did it to improve the SEO of your website.

• Never use black hat means to manipulate the Google search index.
• Luckily, the Google search console lets you know if there’s any penalty for the attempt to manipulate.
• When you find that your site is under the Manual Actions impression, take the necessary steps to rectify it.
• When you are proceeding with the auditing process, make sure that by no means do you indulge in black hat means and violate Google guidelines.
• The Manual Actions report in the Google Search Console lets you see the number of actions against your website.
• If there is no Manual Action against your website, then it will appear in a green check mark.

You can always request for a review if the manual actions issues are fixed. Just in case, the attempt was made in context of an error, then again you can request for a review report. If Google’s guidelines are to be rightly followed, then explain the detailed issue concerning your website.

Apart from that, discreetly depict the steps you have taken to rectify the issue. Document the necessary steps you have taken to rectify the penalty put against you. Lastly, never repeat the same action.

7. Mobile-Friendly Test Tool

In November 2016, Google announced Mobile-First Indexing and at the start of the year 2018, the tech giant announced that the whole web will be Mobile-First Indexing by the end of 2020. It indicates that Google offers major relevance to hand-held devices and wants a website to cater to all mobile platforms.

According to Google, it doesn’t give a ranking advantage to a website that doesn’t support any mobile platform. Therefore, if a website doesn’t support a mobile platform, its ranking performance will decrease dramatically.

Including Mobile-Friendly Test tools is a wise move for Technical SEO auditing. Following are the importance of including Mobile-Friendly Test tool in your SEO audit checklist;

• The tool helps you in determining how Google responds to the mobile-friendly version of the website.
• It determines if there’s any issue with your website even if it is mobile-friendly and not responding to the SEO tactics.
• The browser you use, change the size of its window for reflective formatting.
• Check how your website responds to it.
• Reflective formatting is one of the crucial factors in mobile friendliness.
• For checking HTML elements in your website’s source code – .

There are other factors that you must take into consideration when you are SEO auditing. The checklist must have all the important tools and plugins to proceed with a thorough check up. Domain factors are one among them that you must take into consideration.

• It includes the name of the domain, history, age and other elements.
• Study what matters the most when you audit E-A-T, keyword, headlines, cannibalization, the user engagement and much more. This is a Page-Level factor that you must take care of.
• The SEO Audit checklist must include content length. Assess the images, link of a specific page, textual content, etc. Also, you must see how content is distributed on a website’s pages.
• You must learn how to identify issues like duplicate content. Assess the mentioned issues right in the beginning in order to fix them.
• The organic Click-Through-Rate, also known as, CTR directly impacts the website and that includes, schema markup, and site architecture.

SEO audit checklist is the first step to ensure an SEO strategy is well planned. An SEO services company in Gurgaon must take a thorough look at their SEO tactic to get the most results.

Your SEO audit checklist is a kind of roadmap corrector that tells you where to go and where not to. If you truly want to land your page in the top SERPs then you must make an SEO audit checklist to minimize the errors.

The audit maximizes your visibility and brings your website in the SERPs. It’s a perfect roadmap that helps you to reach where you want to reach. It unveils the errors your website is having and gives you the time to rectify them.

It could be your biggest mistake if you take SEO as a tactic measure. SEO can never be the measurement, unless you have an SEO audit checklist. Search Engines like Google and Bing have evolved and demand the marketers to use their SEO tactics wisely.

Conclusive Words

This is how the SEO audit process looks like. Make sure you are following the instructions and guidelines mentioned in the write-up to get the maximum results. The SEO audit works equally well for both small enterprises and large industries. Whether it is the ecommerce business you are focusing on or you are promoting the SaaS based business – audit procedure is the same for all websites. Apart from that, it is wise to look for a reputed company to audit your website on SEO parameters. Hope the list helped you with the right solutions regarding the auditing process.

You may also read: The Importance And Benefits Of Multilingual SEO For A Business