Essential Checkpoints of SEO Audit

audit checklist by Boris Dzhingarov, licensed under Creative Commons (CC by 2.0)

The sum of all efforts is more important than the amount of resources you put on each effort. This applies well to SEO. The basics technical audit will get you a long way in making sure your website is safe from penalties and keep up with competitors as far as search rankings are concerned. Technical Audit isn’t as intimidating as many think. In fact, you may be employing some tactics yourself already.

It is, however, difficult to guess on what aspect your site may be falling short. And sooner, you will want your website to rank better than where it is now. So before putting on that competitive streak, let us first help you get started with fixing errors. Make the following your official 11-Point Check to your technical SEO Audit.

Identify Crawl Errors - Keep your site as optimised as possible by doing this on a regular basis (monthly). A crawl error report on your website will point out where your site has significant issues including 404’s, letting you fix them right away. These issues also include duplicate content, poor page speed or missing tags. There are a handful of tools that can help you automate site audits.
Check HTTPS Status Codes - If you still have HTTP URLs, search engines and users may not be able to access your site but instead get error status codes. Also, if you haven’t switched to HTTPS, this may be the perfect time too as Google has started ranking HTTPS sites better to push for better web security, so this having HTTP URLs can impact your site’s ranking.
Check XML Sitemap Status - Google and other search engines will only be able to rank your website pages if they can find them. Thus, it is essential that your site’s XML Sitemap is meeting these guidelines:
Check Site Load Time - Ideally, your site load time should be less than 3 seconds for both mobile and desktop. Site speed directly impacts user experience and affects other metrics used by search engines to rank your site. For example, if you have a slow site load time, users will leave your site; thus, affecting your bounce rate as well. You can check your site load time by entering your site URL in Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Check mobile friendliness - Google is in the process of moving mobile-first index ready sites to this new system. Thus, it makes sense to make your website mobile-friendly or use responsive design to keep up. Key factors to mobile-friendliness include:

-proper text size and wrapping

-link and button spacing

-mobile responsiveness across any website

-minimal rich media files (video, Javascript, Flash files) to keep it light and fast

-allows user to achieve what they came for in your site. This means that despite the small screen space, they should literally be able to do on mobile what they can on desktop.
Check for Keyword Cannibalisation - This happens when there are two pages competing for a keyword. Google will need to decide which page should rank better for the said keyword, resulting in a lower click-thru rate (CTR) for both pages. It also reduces the authority and lowers the pages’ conversion rates. The solution to this is to merge or consolidate the content into one page to fix the keyword cannibalisation.
Check your site’s robots.txt file - There are instances when site owners inadvertently block some pages or their entire site, so it is imperative to check your site’s robots.txt file. When doing this, look for “Disallow: /”
Perform a Google site search. Check how Google is indexing your site by using the site command. Type in “site:url.com” on the search field. You will find the number of pages of your site that Google has indexed. Please note however that if your site isn’t at the top of the results, something must be wrong. Check out for a possible penalty. Worse, you have inadvertently blocked your site from being indexed.
Check for duplicate metadata. Duplicate metadata or meta description is inevitable especially in large e-commerce sites with many pages. An SEO audit or crawl report will help you identify the volume of duplicate meta description issues you have on your site. Duplicate issues occur mostly when product details are copied and applied to other product variant pages. Unique and interesting meta descriptions have the potential to increase your click-thru rates, so fixing the issue is worth the effort.
Check for Duplicate Content. There are great tools such as Copyscape, SEMrush or Screaming Frog for identifying duplicate content on your site. You will need ample effort to fix the issues but doing so may prove to be a better site experience for your visitors and may encourage them to stay longer.
Check for broken links. Broken links create a bad user experience and put your site at risk of lower page rank. Thus, it is important to fix broken links. Luckily, your crawl report will conveniently reveal broken links on your site.

What we have listed above are basic elements of SEO Technical Audit and a good baseline if you care about the health of your site’s online presence. It’s like saying that it’s a mortal sin to skip these essentials. However, what is important is consistency. Proactively checking for these issues on a regular basis will prevent bigger issues from hurting your site ranking. Also, the more frequent you audit your site will save you a lot of time fixing issues and focus more on more profitable tasks such as increasing your page rank or building marketing efforts for your brand online.