Compelete SEO Audit Checklist: Your Blueprint for Online Success

Introduction

Any website owner who wants to increase their site's exposure and functionality on search engines like Google and other similar platform must invest their time and financial resources in an SEO audit.  This procedure involves a detailed analysis of your website to pinpoint areas in need of improvement.

It assists in making sure your website satisfies the technical requirements set forth by search engines, which can have a big impact on your website's online visibility and rating.

You can find hidden problems that could be impeding the functionality of your website, such as broken links, out-of-date keywords, or slow loading times, by regularly performing SEO audits. SEO audits offer a road map for improving the health of your website, raising its search engine rating, and drawing in more traffic.

Objectives of conducting a SEO Audit and why need for a SEO Audit checklist?

Finding the good and bad points in your website's search engine performance requires doing an SEO audit. Increasing organic traffic, raising user engagement, and optimising website exposure on search engines are the main goals.

With the help of SEO Audit one can make improvements in his website which will lead to better ranking on google. This include aspects like keyword optimization, backlink quality, content relevance and much more.

With the help of SEO Audit one can make improvements in his website which will lead to better ranking on google. This include aspects like keyword optimization, backlink quality, content relevance and much more.

On-Page SEO Audit Checklist : Optimizing for Better Visibility and Engagement

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Optimization

For blog and services pages title tag is important. For those who are not aware let me tell you that it is a headline of the webpage. It appear on a search engine result page. If you see the above image you can see the text marked in Blue is meta title and below that is a description which clearly tell readers and google both that what the page is all about.

From SEO and its checklist prospective a title should be no more than 60 characters  and description no more than 160 characters. Title and Description both should include your seed or primary keyword (Keyword for which a page is being optimized for).  This is important from google prospective.

Heading Tags and Content Structure

Heading tags

Heading Tags are used to organize your content on your page in a hierarchical structure. They are like titles and subtitles of a book. Heading consist from H1 to H6. H1 is the most important and for subsequent section and other sub heading H2 to H6 is considered.

Heading Tags are used to organize your content on your page in a hierarchical structure. They are like titles and subtitles of a book. Heading consist from H1 to H6. H1 is the most important and for subsequent section and other sub heading H2 to H6 is considered.

Content Structure

A well organized structure is recommended and is included in our checklist  as a well organized content is appreciable and is fastly index on google pages.  To make it more in a structure kind of use short paragraph, bullet points and sufficient space during para break to make the content easy to read.  Content which goes out in the flow make the reader engaged and help reduce bounce rates. For scraping content from web and organizing the content you can use Online Notepad from Hotspotseo.

Filling up the image alt text and file names optimization

It is recommended to add an alternative name to the image so that google can understand what the image is all about and its important from SEO Audit checklist prospective. Including your seed or primary keyword once is important from SEO checklist prospective. One can set the names which actually describe the image.

Avoid generic name like Image.png.
Same goes out for title of the image.
A good example is Alt Text : chocklate chips cookies.
A good example is Alt Text : chocklate chips cookies.

Internal Links strategy and Anchor Text Distribution

Internal Linking is important from SEO Checklist Prospective as when you are linking other important pages internally. It send signals to google that the page is fulfilling the objective and google can show it on their platform so that reader can read it.

Not only this it help google index pages faster as the crawler will find the link easily. It can lead more time spend on your site as users will end up reading or exploring more relevant content.

Anchor Text  - Clickable text in hyperlink. Using descriptive or relevant words in the anchor text is appropriate rather than writing something like "Click Here"  which can improve SEO a lot. The objective of anchor is to give users and search engine  a very brief information about the page which you are actually linking to.

Above were some Components of On-Page SEO fundemental and these above factors help in search engine as well as a users  to navigate your content effectiviely. Optimizing accordingly with our SEO checklist will definately lead to betterment of the website and also from google ranking prospective.  In nutshell more website traffic and User engagement.

Off Page SEO Audit Checklist

A backlink is a simply a link passing from one website to another. The more authoritive website are linking to you the more authority you have in the eyes of google.

Backlinking profile analysis

It include analyzing the links which are pointing to your website and where they come from and how it overall impact your website SEO. This off page audit is important as reviewing it is essential so that wrong websites which were penalized or were found spammy by google should be removed.

Identifying a Toxic Backlink

A toxic backlinks is a kind of backlink which do more harm then good not all links are good. Some of the links are harmful and need to be removed or disavow to avoid penalization from google. Some of these link themselves link to us or competitors get these done intensionally to get the upper hand in ranking.

Social Media Presence and it impact in SEO

While social media presence or sharing your blogs post and other link will not directly impact on SEO but bring traffic to the website which is more valuable.

Bring better traffic

More traffic often means better ranking as its signal to search engines that you website is popular and is valuable.

Brand Recogniation

Regular posting on websites help you build your brand recogniation.  When people will start learning about your brand they will click on your link, will read the page, will share it further, will navigate to other pages of the websites and also will also link back to the website indirectly leading to overall growth of the website.

Linking to website via Social Media

Social media is a great platform to spread your content to the wider audience.  When people will come across your content they will read it and once they like your content will definately link back to us which is very important from SEO Prospective.

Technical SEO Audit Checklist

Google Crawler and Spider websites often and on popular website they visit mulitple times a day basically it often crawl your site effectively. May be due to some reasons if the search engine cannot crawl your website effectively then there is a possibility that your page  will not show up for revelant searches or in other words will not be seen in search results.

Website has crawlibility issues and other Factors

If a search engine cannot crawl your site effectively you are already missing out a lot of potencial. If a search engine cannot crawl your site effectively. It won't be able to index the pages which means your content will not be seen in the search engine result page.

Mobile Responsiveness and Page Load Speed Analysis

As smart phones are increasing popular and also once cannot disagree that information is available on the click of the search button however if your website structure is not mobile friendly, user experience is not satisfactory and if worst of all if your content take more than 8 seconds to load so till this time user get frustrated and bounce off and start looking for an alternate search results or best of all refined their search keywords. This factor is important as google search engine loves those website which have less crawlibilty issues and loads faster. So this is also an essential part of an seo audit checklist.

XML Sitemap and Robots.txt

XML Sitemap is a file that helps search engine understand your website structure by listing all the important pages. Robots.txt is a file that is important and it help to tell google which page is not to be indexed and also help by preventing search engine from wasting time, crawling irrelevant and unwanted pages.

Say there is a employee login page of the company website. One can avoid getting it index in google search engine or other seach engine like bing, Yandex and other leading serch engine.

As we are aware that google crawler have minimum budget when it comes to crawling and because of robots.txt one can ensure that right pages get crawled so to index them faster end up potencially increasing your website visiblity on Web.

Look for Broken Links and fix it

Broken link is response 404 code resource not found on the website. It is a kind of a error on the website. Broken links are typically links that are actually not taking user anywhere and to make it worse these broken links also lead to poor user experience and annoy users.  If lot of broken links are found and are not fixed this can make website credibility poor and also potencially decrease organic traffic. You can use Broken Link Checker tool to find the broken links of your website technical audit.

Fixing the broken link is an essentail step that is why we have added this point to our SEO Audit checklist. Fixing broken link help to maintain site reputation a better user satisfaction and support better search engine ranking.

Fixing Meta description

Fixing meta description is an important element of a SEO Audit checklist as it influence click through rate from Search engine result pages. Meta description provide a brief summary of the page and based on that a user can decide whether to click on the link or title or not.

Fixing meta description is an important element of a SEO Audit checklist as it influence click through rate from Search engine result pages. Meta description provide a brief summary of the page and based on that a user can decide whether to click on the link or title or not.

A perfect meta description should be 160 characters straight. No more than it with  strong call to action.  One should while auditing via a SEO tool like Hotspot should check their meta's and shortlist those which are poorely written or are missing because in that case google will automatically pull out some text from the webpage url and show it to the visitors on its platforms resulting in poor click through rate For this tool use Best SEO Audit Tool by Hotspotseo.

No Index Tags

One of the important element of SEO Audit checklist. As we are aware of no index tags as it tell search engine not to show certain pages from a website in SERP's. This is important while auditing and is recommended by experts to check regularly that is No index tags are properly implemented second are we stopping unwanted pages to be indexed on various search engine. No index tags also focus on most relevant and useful pages.

One of the important element of SEO Audit checklist. As we are aware of no index tags as it tell search engine not to show certain pages from a website in SERP's. This is important while auditing and is recommended by experts to check regularly that is No index tags are properly implemented second are we stopping unwanted pages to be indexed on various search engine. No index tags also focus on most relevant and useful pages.

Look for duplicate version of the site

When duplication arrise when you are dealing with a duplicate version of your site such as multiple URL's that can lead to hotspotseo.com.

It is crucial to tell google search engine which one of the url is primary.

hotspotseo.comwww.hotspotseo.com
http://hotspotseo.com
https://www.hotspotseo.com
https://hotspotseo.com

This kind of problem effectively using 301 redirect or cannoical tags depending on the situation.  Both have only one objective of sending traffic coming from various url to the the primary url of the website that is https:www.hotspotseo.com.

It help to consildate link equity and traffic under one address. This tell search engine that which page is the master version to index and further helping to avoid duplicate content issues without pysically redirecting the visitor.

It help to consildate link equity and traffic under one address. This tell search engine that which page is the master version to index and further helping to avoid duplicate content issues without pysically redirecting the visitor.

Keyword Analysis

Self Research of Keywords

Effective keyword analysis is important from user search prospective and it is also the backbone of a successful seo strategy. Keywords chosen after the analysis should match your target audiences.   The goal of keyword analysis is to match the searcher content and also which are a relevant content and have a healthy balance of search volume and competition. Primary keywords are those that are directly related to the topic which you are writing on or your main topics.

Say: If you are writing on health on "Health Tips". So your primary keywords can be "daily health tips" whereas secondary keywords could be like "dietary advice" or "exercise routine"

Competitor Keyword analysis

Apart from regular searching of keywords one should can also take a glimpse that what keywords are your competitors are ranking on. Once can choose those keyword and can prepare a custom tailored seo strategy for a better online visibility. Competitors keyword analysis will get you exact keywords which compeitor blog pages is ranking for their content strategy and various audience engagement. Tools like Google Keyword Planner and other paid tools like Semrush, Ahref will be helpful in competitor analysis.

Identify keyword Gaps

What is a keyword Gap?

"Keyword Gap is a keyword that your compeitors rank for but your site does not".

By analysis keyword gaps is crucial for content strategy that can drive more organic traffic to your site. By filling these keyword  you can create content around them and can fill those gaps overall resulting in better organic visibility of the website.

Keyword research is not only limited to filling up gaps or self research or competitor analysis. It is about predicting trends in your niche industry.  Google Trends can be helpul in predicting trends and you can choose your keyword accordingly.

User Experience (UX)

UX is also important part of my SEO Checklist as its important to look at Critical Aspect of User Experience , Navigation and User Experience.  These elements are important and cannot be overlooked. It helps in boosing your website SEO as visitors visiting your site should have a positive experience when it comes to the UX as it will help the user to stay longer on the website and engage more.

To measure this metric for your website. Take a glimpse at bounce rate and session duration.

Lower Bounce Rate:

Higher session made on the website page indicate that your content is valuable and are spending time more exploring the content or reading it or viewing other valuable pages also.

Higher Bounce Rate:

It mean that your content is not found valuable by the user and user is not engaging with it or might not be found releavant to the readers.

Navigation and User Interface

Ensure that your navigation menu is simple and logical with all the information available with very few clicks. Navigation should be strictly made from mobile users prospective as Information is not available at the finger tip via smart devices. Navigation and user interface cannot be skipped.  One can make sure that site is responsiveness and mobile friendly to the large user intent.

Call to Action Placement and Effectiveness

One of the other important factor is "Call to Action" placement. These are important for guiding the users so that they can take the desired action like subscribing to the newsletter, registering for a webinar or making a purchase like add to cart. These essential call to action elements can be placed after deeply analyzing what are the most important aspect on the entire website say "above the fold"

The wording of your cta should be clear, concise , compelling and should encourage a user to take the desired action you expect. If that is happening than your goal of call to action placement is effectively succedding.

Content Audit - An Intial Website

A content audit is an essential step for a website and by auditing your content regularly will definately give you a seo boost increasing in online visibility by attracting audience and that is the reason I have added it to my Seo Audit Checklist.

By conducting a content audit, you gain insights into what part of your content strategy are you working, what content need to be deleted or what content need improvement and what can be eliminated. When managing your content via auditing one can perform a thorough audit with the steps mentioned below.  This will help you go through and solve various problem which might occur and are directly related to the content. It can be seen in website with 100+ Pages.

Quality and Relevance of the existing content

When managing your website the intial step is to perform  a content audit thorougly. The main objective is to determine the qulaity and relevance of your existing content. High quality content is what google loves and it will help you boost your website seo. To ensure your content is up to the par, check each piece for accuracy, and compressiveness and also check whether it fulfill the purpose of the need of your audience. Regularly reviewing and updates to your content keep your website not just current but also valuable to visitors. This is an important aspect of SEO Audit Checklist and cannot be overlooked.

Look for Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is not appreciated by google and can be confusing to the crawler to understand two indentical or near indentical pages.  To find and get rid of such kind of duplicate pages you can use a leading audit tool like Hot Spot Seo to look and find duplicate pages if any.

Remove Excess and Low Quality Content

As many of you dont agree but we have added this point in our SEO Audit Checklist after researching well that John Muller (Google Search Spokesperson on Internet) clearly said that frequent posting or volume of content as a ranking factor. Based on the study done by our in house experts we came across that sites which actually removed low quality and excess amount of content have seen traffic increase by 44%.

This is called content pruning.

(Content Pruning is the process when you remove unnecessary pages to maximize your organic results).

One can find out how many actual pages are indexed in google by using the

site:"website url" or via Google Search Console.

If you find out that the number of low quality content pages a lot its is better to start pruning.

One can find low quality pages from Google Analytics also. Once you actually start pruning we suggest its better to shortlist those url where content need to be rewritten or updated or worst of all deleted.

Check your page speeds Insights

An important element and also a ranking factor that is a Page speed of a webstie. To check the page speed of your website one can hop on to Google Page Speed Insights. Type in the URL and run the test

One can fix the issues in google by installing a leading plugin in CMS like Wordpress or by hiring dedicated web developers. For better speed of website one can follow below practices

1.Reducing the size of the videos and images.
2. Using Web P format of Images
3. Shifting to fast moving server to host your website
4. CDN and cloud flare can be of great help.
5.Installing Lazy loads scripts.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals now a ranking factors from google is an important element for our SEO Audit Checklist. CWV feature help website owners find and resolve any issues and help them provide positive User Experience.

CWV have three parts:- LCP  (Large Contentful Paint)LCP measure how much time does large piece of page takes to load. CLS (Cumilative Layout Shift)CLS measure the visual stability of the page when begin loaded. INP (Interaction to Next Paint) INP measure the delay between the user's action on a page and response to it.

The report of Core Web Vitals is dividied for Destop and Mobile.This website inform any issues that might be affecting your website performance. The report list all of the major issues that need urgent attention.