To pull all this together, I decided to run a website audit on one of my favorite bloggers, Christina Galbato. Identify areas of your SEO Anomaly navigation that are entirely Flash or JavaScript. Search engines have challenges with reading and accessing these, which could prevent your site from getting indexed. Here’s what I’d be looking for in the technical assessment stage of your website audit. This is where optimized calls-to-action (CTAs), marketing offers, and landing pages play a major role in the performance of your website. As part of determining the overall efficiency of your website, your audit should check to make sure your site is designed with your visitors in mind.

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Or you can customize it further with the drag-and-drop tools. Looker Studio gives you the flexibility to choose how you want to set up your SEO reports. This lets you pull all your SEO, PPC, and marketing data into one clean, interactive dashboard. Google Looker Studio is a free tool that helps you create SEO dashboards that are visually appealing and customizable. You can waste hours each month collecting data from various platforms. Like copying numbers from Google Analytics, Search Console, and rank trackers into spreadsheets.

What to Look for in SEO Audit Tools

It’s all about aligning your website and content with what the search engine considers valuable for search results. If your site is slow, people are going to go to one of those faster sites, increasing your bounce rate and hurting your rankings in search results. For example, backlinks — or links to your site from other sites — are a key component of off-page SEO. When a site with a good reputation online includes a link to your site on one of their pages, they pass on some of the value of their site to yours. Your pages gain more value, and you have the potential for people to click the link on the other page and land on your website. Backlinks can help you rank better for keywords that matter the most to your business.

• Each page on your site should have a unique title and meta description.
• If you don’t have access to Google Search Console, plug any page from your website into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
• It is a paid tool, but you can run an audit of 500 URLs for free.
• A thorough SEO audit shows how well a site follows best practices.
• Calling out 302-, 404-, and 500-level response codes can be useful to tell users that something’s wrong.

Since Google best understands digestible content format, the presence of structured data is your chance to get into rich snippets. As you know, Google has fully switched to mobile-first indexing. So, mobile-friendliness bears paramount importance for organic rankings. For a quicker check, you can also use the PageSpeed Insights tool.

If you can’t use a plugin, you can create an XML sitemap online. While backlinks are only rarely included in a technical SEO audit, a lack of relevant backlinks is often the number one reason good, relevant content struggles to rank. While this doesn’t represent a complete link audit, we recommend a few quick link checks to make sure you aren’t leaving rankings behind. Content isn’t often considered “technical” SEO, but many technical issues with the content itself can impact indexing and rankings. Beyond the quality of the content itself, these technical issues need to be checked and addressed. With that in mind, your first step should be to ensure that your business has an active Bing Places profile.

Prior to starting with an SEO audit checklist, you need to set up analytics tools. When I was leading marketing for PlushCare, a telemedicine provider that was acquired for $450M, we did some crazy things in the name of search engine optimization (SEO). Google Search Console is one of the best free SEO tools for analytics.

We explained why in our complete guide to optimizing meta descriptions. As the title tag remains one of the most important on-page ranking factors, it’s in our interest to fix all of the above. Clicking into the “Tech & Meta.” report gives us an optimization score, and a breakdown of all issues uncovered during the crawl.