The next step is to use a site audit tool like Semrush Site Audit, Ahrefs Website Audit, Screaming Frog, or others to identify potential issues with your SEO. The next step before doing a deeper analysis is to check your organic traffic. Login to Google Search Console and view the “Search Results” report. Learn how to do an SEO audit of your website to identify problematic areas. Use our SEO audit checklist to fix issues and improve your SEO. Sometimes “penalties” come in the form of unknowns, without manual actions, and teams are left to try and figure out what issues may be causing a loss in rankings.

You’ll want to check your index status report in the Google Search Console. In this feature, you will see the number of pages that Google has crawled on your domain. If you notice that the number of pages isn’t increasing, there a good chance that some of your pages aren’t getting indexed. When Google crawls through your site, it “reads” your content and indexes your pages. Indexing is crucial to your page appearing in the search results. If your pages aren’t indexed, they won’t appear in the search results, and it will hurt your SEO.

Google can’t index pages with this warning, so it’s worth checking they’re not pages you want indexed. Google search results come from its index, which is a database of hundreds of billions of webpages. Your pages need to be in this index to stand any chance at ranking.

Analyze Link Quality

• Core Web Vitals are metrics that Google uses to measure user experience.
• You can learn how your competitors are attracting visitors and see how they’re garnering conversions.
• It’ll give you insights on aspects of your site like title tags, meta descriptions, and images.
• To evaluate traffic, Google Search Console offers a free analysis tool.

Once you understand the value of ranking #1 for your target keywords, you can better estimate a budget and allocate the appropriate resources to accomplish your goal. It will also help prioritize and budget your tasks while ensuring a positive ROI from SEO as a marketing channel. Headings, together with paragraphs, bulleted lists, and other webpage structure elements, help create rich search results in Google.

Step 4: Fix redirects

That’s why regular technical SEO audits of your website should be an essential part of your SEO strategy. Once you’ve completed all the steps of the SEO audit checklist and fixed all the technical issues, you can ask Google to recrawl your pages to make it see the changes quicker. You can use WebSite Auditor to efficiently spot duplicate content issues. To do that, open the Site Audit module and check the On-page section (Duplicate titles and Duplicate meta descriptions). They also offer an embeddable widget that offers on-site SEO audits and White Label, giving you access to your users’ websites or sites they are interested in.

You can also use its keyword research tool to discover the keywords searchers use. This report will highlight existing issues and offer advice for improving your website’s performance, such as compressing design elements or optimizing images to boost loading speeds. Google Analytics is a digital marketing tool that gathers website information and provides insights on performance, SEO, visitor retention, and more. This tool translates complex datasets into clear metrics, letting you gauge user interactions and understand traffic patterns. Roughly two-thirds of the ranking algorithm is tied to link related signals.

Understanding what the audit is for and even doing it is not the most important aspect, but rather the actionable results that are derived from the audit. In order to improve your website performance, an SEO audit is essential. Again, there are plenty of tools for completing a search engine optimization audit. The ones we’ve listed are the ones our team feels are the best SEO audit tools available that people can use for free. Consistently analyzing data helps you to make informed decisions to improve your SEO strategy over time.

In some cases, it can even dilute link equity and, thus, may negatively impact rankings. Many of these updates target specific things like content quality or link spam. If you have traffic drops coinciding with major updates, this can tell you what areas likely need your focus. Check site speed with Google PageSpeed Insights and fix issues like image compression. Use an SEO tool like Morningscore to find broken links, and confirm your site is properly indexed in Google Search Console. Websites without an SSL certificate appear as “Not Secure” in browsers, which deter visitors.

In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses — and careers. Learn how to connect search, AI, and PPC into one unstoppable strategy. Tools lack the ability to understand context and strategy in the way that SEO professionals do. They usually can’t “connect the dots” or assess the real significance of certain findings. Even after getting those basics right, link building should never be random or reactive.

Fixing errors reported in Search Console is crucial to maintaining your site’s visibility. It’ll give you insights on aspects of your site like title tags, meta descriptions, and images. And it’ll help you identify broken links, understand your website’s architecture at a deep level, and much more. Another takeaway is that SEO audits have become SEO Anomaly more efficient and insightful with AI and automation.