As any top SEO agency in Los Angeles will tell you, performing regular SEO audits is crucial for improving and maintaining your website’s search engine rankings and performance. An SEO audit identifies issues that may be negatively impacting your site so that you can fix them. Follow this comprehensive SEO audit checklist to catch problems and capitalize on optimization opportunities.
Examine Keyword Strategy and Top Pages
Start your site audit by looking at existing content and determining how well it targets relevant keywords. Review your top-ranking pages and identify additional terms and topics to create content around. The pages that drive the most organic traffic are a good indicator of what’s working. Determine if keyword cannibalization is an issue and if you need to better optimize pages for specific keywords.
Evaluate Site Architecture
Assess your website’s information architecture to ensure it is organized logically. Headers, footer links, site menus, categories, tags and internal links should have a sensible structure so visitors can easily navigate and search engines can crawl efficiently. If the site architecture is confusing, users and bots may struggle to access key content.
Check Indexation of Important Pages
Use Google Search Console to see if critical site pages are indexed or have errors. Pages that are indexed should show impressions and clicks. Crawl errors like 404s must be fixed immediately. Important thin content pages may be missing, wrongly configured with noindex tags, or blocked entirely. Indexing issues negatively impact organic visibility and traffic.
Analyze Page Speed Insights
Page experience factors like speed are now criteria in Google’s search algorithm. Run your homepage and other top entry pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights to catch desktop and mobile user experience problems. Here are some key elements to check:
Page Load Time
Aim for pages to fully load within 2-3 seconds. Longer times increase bounce rates. Breakdown metrics by Origin vs Host server speeds.
Total Page Size
Keep total page weight including images, videos, etc under 3MB for faster loads. Heavier pages lose visitor engagement.
Requests and File Sizes
Audit the number of server requests and size per file. Large files or excessive requests slow things down. Tackle largest offenders first.
Render Blocking Resources
Check that critical page elements load first before others. Prioritize what displays immediately on load.
Image Compression
All images should be compressed without losing quality. Smush images to optimize. Fix oversized files hogging bandwidth.
Review Internal Linking Structure
Click through main site menus and subpages to evaluate interlinking between important pages like services, blog and contact. Every page should be reachable through navigation. Cross-link related content where relevant. Avoid broken links and orphaned pages. Strong internal linking allows bots to better crawl your site and signals value through linked contextual clues.
Check Technical SEO Elements
Dig into source code to review foundational technical SEO elements. All pages should have meta titles under 60 characters, meta descriptions between 50-160 characters, header tags starting with H1, image alt text, and no blocking robots directives aside from sensitive pages like login and contact forms. Fix any technical problems identified.
Analyze External Link Building
Login to your Google Search Console account and navigate to the links report. Review the number of domains linking to your website, follow/nofollow ratios, anchor text distribution and bad links pointing at your site. Compare to prior periods and industry averages. Active outreach grows more high-quality backlinks, while disavowing spam links helps protect rankings.
Following this comprehensive SEO audit checklist will allow you to catch technical problems, content gaps, site architecture issues, tracking errors and more. Regularly monitoring these elements improves website visibility, traffic and conversions over time. Fix any discovered problems methodically until everything looks good or reaches alignment with goals.
