To do checklist while doing SEO audit of a website or web page-
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique used to increase the visibility of a website on a search engine’s result page. Performing an SEO audit of your website is very important to keep your website up-to-date, to rank better, to get more traffic, and many other reasons by identifying the areas that need improvement so that you can take actions accordingly in order to correct them.
SEO audit the process of analyzing all the factors that affects the visibility of your website in search engines. It checks for site errors and evaluate the friendliness of website.
Here are the preferable parameters that you should consider in your checklist ( included how to perform SEO audit respectively) :
- Meta tags- Title, Description, H1 tag
Check the titles and descriptions unique for each web page and within the specified size limit.
H1 tag- H1 is the title or headline of a particular page. The most important heading tag is H1 tag and the least important is H6 tag.
Use H tags with each of your main article headings. H1 for the main heading and then h2,h3,..till h6 but do follow the hierarchy. Do not skip any of the tag numbers ( like h1,h2,h5) otherwise, it will break the heading structure, which is not good for SEO.
- Content- The content of your website should be unique. you can use copyscape tool to check the uniqueness of content of all pages.
- Quality Content- A quality content plays a vital role in page ranking. It means your content should be relevant, updated,user friendly, grammatically correct and no spelling error. you can use Grammarly tool to check it.
- URL Structure- Check if the URL of each page is unique, have keyword and properly formatted.
- URL Canonicalization- Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several Choices,and it usually refers to home page. Set a canonical URL for all pages.
- ALT tag & Image optimization- All images need to have the ALT tag defined. Text should describe what the image is about.
- Internal & External links- Check if each page has 2-10 internal links. Pages you want to rank better in search should have greater number of Internal links. Internal links also help you to control bounce rate.
- Broken links- Check for your website does not contain any broken link. There are many tools where you can check for broken links. Fix them if any by taking corrective actions or doing 301 redirects to a valid URL.
- Anchor text- Use words smartly in anchor text. The word contained in the anchor text helps to determine the ranking that page will receive from search engines.
- ROBOTS.TXT file- Robots.txt file instructs search engine crawlers which pages need to be crawled and which not. A mistake in robots.txt can create serious indexing issues.
- Website Structure- Check if your website structure is SEO friendly. It should follow latest standards, should catch user engagement, properly structured breadcrumb, logo, articles, bold text, etc.
- Breadcrumb- Activate a Breadcrumb menu. Breadcrumb navigation allows website visitors to keep track of their location following the hierarchy of website. [Eg: Home> blogs> about> contact ]
- 404 Page- Check if your 404 page is optimized. It is the page shown to visitors when they reach a page that is not found on your website.
- 301 redirects- If you have moved or changed any of your web pages then use 301 redirect.
- Http or Https- Https is the secure version of http. Your website URLs should start with https. It means your website have a secured certificate installed. It will increase your website ranking because google prefers trusted and certified sites.
- Page speed- Make sure your website page loading speed should be fast enough and preferably faster than your competitors. You can use tools like Page insights, GTmetrix or other trusted tools.
- Mobile friendly website- For obvious reason, with the increase use of mobile devices you should make your website mobile friendly, so that your website do not lose the traffic and ranking.
- Keyword Density- It is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.
- XML Sitemap- Optimize your XML Sitemap. Check XML sitemap of all your website important pages submitted to google search console.
- Search Console or Webmaster Tools- Check your website is registered with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools.
- Language- Configure multilingual SEO if your website is available in more than one language.
- Backlinks- Check number and type of backlinks. A backlink is a hyperlink on a third-party web page that links back to web page on your site. Find opportunities to acquire new high quality backlinks.
- Competitor Analysis- Perform Competitor site analysis. Use SEMrush.