This harms their user experience and potentially drives them away from your website. Now that we’re done with preparatory work, let’s move on to the key steps of an SEO audit checklist. Before you embark on a technical SEO audit (of a newly bought domain or an existing one), check if it’s not under any search engine sanctions.
Update content templates and remove cloaked links
This type of audit may also include identifying opportunities to optimize for the featured snippet, people also ask section, and passage ranking. If you’re facing a similar issue, I suggest starting with a keyword mapping exercise. Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to identify overlaps and assign unique keywords to each page. Always prioritize user intent and avoid stuffing keywords, it’s more about relevance and quality now.
- After a quick audit, I discovered their developer had pushed a sitewide «noindex» tag to production by mistake.
- You can analyze how well you’re ranking against competitors for keywords and determine potential new sources of revenue.
- These can provide invaluable insights into CRO and other website improvements, especially those that would have positive SEO effects.
- Resolve this by frequently updating content to keep it high-quality, relevant, and up to date.
Check that you’re using HTTPs
Check the Mobile Friendliness and Page Speed section to identify actionable suggestions for optimizing performance. If you’re interested in exploring Core Web Vitals of a single page, navigate to the Page Audit section and access the Technical Audit tab. Before you choose any of these solutions, I recommend checking each orphan page with Google Analytics to see if it gets traffic. Once SEO Anomaly the crawl is complete, you’ll see orphan pages marked with grey nodes in the site structure. You just need to go through these pages and clean up unnecessary links. Prolonging existing redirects to the new site can hinder Google’s ability to reach the intended page and waste the crawl budget.
Writing meta descriptions and optimized title tags will help with SEO by encouraging users to click on your page and telling Google what your page is about. For example, it’s suggesting that we rewrite our list of the best keyword tools because it used to rank in the top three for its target keyword but now doesn’t even rank in the top 100. 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.
With top free SEO tools like Ahrefs Backlink Checker, you can research your competitors’ backlink strategies and identify link-building opportunities for your site. Ready to conduct a competitor analysis but don’t know which tools you can use to check website traffic? For example, a page providing instructions for how to tie a friendship bracelet that’s missing instructional images and essential keywords will rank poorly. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool includes a page experience factor that considers both page load speeds and UX. If your site has long loading times, visitors may become frustrated and navigate away from your page to seek a better experience from competitors.
White Label SEO Reports
Alt text, or alternative text, describes an image on a website. It is an incredibly important part of image optimization, as it improves accessibility on your website for millions of people throughout the world who are visually impaired. Plus, as clusters of multiple-language pages share each other’s ranking signals, using hreflang tags correctly can have a direct impact as a ranking factor. New pages—as well as those that are not linked internally or externally, e.g., those found on newer sites—may not be crawled as frequently, if at all.