News

The 18-Step SEO Audit Checklist for 2025 + Free Template

When you first sign up for SERanking, you get access to a free trial to test out the platform for 14 days. During the trial, you can audit up to 5,000 pages total and 1,000 pages per day. PageSpeed Insights is great for quickly auditing single URLs but does not work well for your entire site. To use the tool, you need to visit the PageSpeed site, enter the URL to scan, and initiate the audit. You can drill down into each category to see detailed insights from the audit.

If you’re buying a website domain that has been used in the past, or you’re rebuilding a poor SEO strategy, you may discover some problematic backlinks while conducting your audit. Artificial or unnatural links have the potential toseriously hurt your search ranking. GrowthBar is an AI tool and SEO auditing tool for performing keyword research, writing, doing competitive analysis, and tracking SEO rankings. With the GrowthBar Chrome extension, you can access data about any website directly from the SERPs. Sitechecker is a comprehensive solution for SEO auditing that identifies opportunities to increase organic search traffic. Sitechecker is used to automatically monitor your website performance, inform you of timely error detection, and search for growth points.

SEO audit

Start by checking your page speed using Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool. Then review it manually to check for issues like missing or duplicate URLs. And to make it easier, I’ve created a free website audit checklist that you can refer to as you follow along. In this guide, I’ll walk you through five essential steps to maximize your site’s performance. Google Structured Data Testing Tool lets you know of incorrect and correct structured data and is recommended for checking any web page that contains structured data or schema.org markup in its source code.

SEO audit

Best SEO Audit Tools for Evaluating Google Search Presence

This will either prevent penalties from Google or help you recover from them if your website has already been penalized due to these links. Once you have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish, you can perform targeted audit processes and make data-driven decisions for long-term online success. If you’re running a multilingual website, you need to regularly check if your hreflang tags are implemented correctly.

Bounce Rate Analysis:

YouTube video

Website audit checklists allow businesses to identify both obvious and subtle SEO issues, prioritize high-impact actions, and make more informed decisions. An all-too-common mistake is for inexperienced web designers to place text in images, without understanding that the text is nearly invisible to search engines. That said, even though Google can crawl several hundred links (or more) per page, there are still valid reasons to limit the number of options you present to search engines. A high number of links dilutes the link equity every link passes and can make it harder for Google to determine which links are important. In order for a link to be crawlable, search engines typically need an tag with an href attribute. And yes, lots of developers create links without these attributes.

Earning links successfully from the same sites/pages that are elevating their domain strength demonstrates closing authority gaps. This amplifies search visibility gains in the long term, eventually surpassing their own page 1 positions. Comparing your website’s metrics against competitors’ data points allows you to gauge precisely where there are opportunities to exceed their performance. Upward-trending graphs signal strong SERP rankings and visibility driven by current initiatives. Declines, on SEO Anomaly the other hand, prompt the need to invest in new keyword and link-building efforts to sustain expansions. Regularly monitoring Organic Traffic metrics demonstrates how your technical and content optimization efforts are increasing interest and click from search engine results.

SEO audit

By doing this, you can ensure your changes don’t have a negative SEO impact. Live testing and tracking, along with access to all six tools, are the basic features of its pricing plans. The Page-O-Scope by Mobile Moxie helps you identify issues with your mobile site’s design and usability by scanning the mobile versions of your pages on different devices. The information captured during the auditing process allows our team to make accurate, impactful recommendations for your specific website and situation. It simply takes time to uncover root causes of the issues affecting your online health.

SEO audit

Best SEO Audit Tools for Testing Structured Data & Rich Results

  • If this task is made more difficult by a heavy ad presence, you likely want to mark it in your audit and experiment with reducing the top-of-page ad flow.
  • We’ve consolidated all the resources you need to learn how to confidently implement a competitive analysis strategy with unique learning strategies, task lessons and quizzes to test your knowledge.
  • Since websites are ever-changing, it’s easy to miss best practice elements that can help to move your results forward.
  • In this example, The HOTH is graded higher than the other website because we properly used the keyword in the title tag and kept it 70 words or less.
  • Setting up keyword rank tracking allows you to measure how your target keywords are performing in search engine results over time.

Surfer also has a new tool called Grow Flow that uses your Google Search Console data to identify biggest gaps in your content strategy. It’s also important to recognise the difference between the resource it takes to carry out an audit, and turnaround time. This may seem like common sense, but when dealing with clients or other stakeholders it’s critical that these sort of expectations are managed. You’ll need to consider business type, historical performance, competitors and other specific circumstances. By the summer of 2016, ‘Penguin’ had evolved to become part of Google’s core algorithm, and consequently run in real-time rather than the periodic updates we’d seen previously. This meant that the consideration of toxic links became more of an ongoing activity, and as a result the demand for standalone link audits reduced.