What is SEO Audit?
SEO Audit is an in-depth analysis of a website, focused on the technical and content aspects relevant to SEO. Each website has its characteristics, its history, its needs, and is a very stimulating activity that requires method, precision, and skills in multiple fields.
Analyzing a site with automatic SEO tools does not allow us to go to the bottom of the problems, these tools are limited because they have to adapt to infinite configurations existing between CMS, programming languages and types of website. To perform a professional SEO analysis you need a lot of “manual” work, and that’s exactly what our SEO experts do.
The SEO Audit technical checklist
To perform a good SEO Audit it is important to have a precise schedule to follow otherwise it is easy to forget some checks. To never lose our way, we use a checklist with all the aspects that are fundamental to evaluate, divided by area of belonging. For each factor in the list, we report the level of severity identified, this automatically generates a final SEO score useful for obtaining the overall situation of the website.
Our SEO Audit process
- First of all, when we start studying a new site we are interested in understanding its playing field and the competition with which it has to deal online. So we start with a marketing analysis where we compare the ranking for the main keywords, the popularity link and the size of the site, and compare these indicators with the top 5/10 competitors. From this analysis, it is easy to understand the possibilities of fighting for the top positions or if the site is too weak and under-sized to compete with the most authoritative sites;
- Once the sector has been identified, we analyze the technical structure of the site, trying to identify the greatest number of errors or incorrectness possible between sitemap.xml, robots.txt, crawling, indexing and internal linking;
- After checking the structure, we proceed to the analysis of the HTML code to check the correct compilation of all the tags relevant to SEO and the optimization of the images used on the site. The checklist includes the main tags that can send signals of relevance to the search engines;
- One of the sections that we believe is most important is content optimization. We are interested in understanding how content (blog articles and service pages) are written and generated with a view to focusing on the correct keywords, the quality of the texts, the consistency of the publications, and SEO copywriting. It is also very important to identify problems that could activate Google Panda, such as duplicate or low-quality content;
- In the usability section, we focus on analyzing the usability of the site from mobile devices and the speed of the webserver (whether or not it is a ranking factor we are not interested at all, it is too important a factor regardless of the ranking and cannot be neglected). For this analysis we use GTmetrix, Pingdom, Page Speed and Yslow;
- The penultimate section concerns off-site analysis: backlinks and social signals;
- The last point is dedicated to the risk of Google penalties, algorithmic, or manual reported in Google Search Console.
Structure of our SEO Checklist
The SEO audit analyzes SEO factors divided into 7 logical categories that we find inline in the document.
- Market analysis: keyword analysis, ranking, and online competitors
- Technical: verifies technical aspects
- HTML optimization: check HTML code optimization
- Content optimization: quality control of content and editorial guidelines
- Usability: evaluation of mobile usability and loading speed
- Inbound: assessment of online authority and backlink profile
- Google penalties: penalty risk assessment
Elements of the SEO Checklist
All the elements in our checklist that we analyze.
1 Keyword analysis
2 Competitor analysis
3 Domain management
- Domain History / Renew / Neighbor
- Multi-domains
- Language MNG
- Thecnologies
4 Google Search Console
5 Robots.txt
6 Sitemap.xml
7 Crawling
- Crawling Overview
- Crawling Stats (GSG)
- Webserver Log Analisys
8 Indexing
- Index Status (GSC)
- Index Ratios
- WWW vs NOT WWW
- Test HTTP Header
- HTTP Status Code
- HTTS Protocol
9 URL
- URL SEO Friendly
- URL Structure
- URL Errors
10 Internal Links
- Parameters
- Internal Links
- Internal 404
- Website Section Analysis
- Internal Anchor Text
- Navigation Path
- Infinite Scroll SEO Friendly
- Breadcrumbs
- Absolute Links
- Links On-page
- Deep Links
11 W3C, HTML5, CSS & Javascript
- HTML5
- CSS
- AJAX & JS Elements
- JS Calls – Defer & Async
- NO-Javascript Test
- Browser Console
12 How Google sees your site
- Google Cache
- Fetch as Googlebot
- Old Cheats
13 Tech Tags Optimization
- TEXT/HTML Ratio
- HTML Lang Code Reference & Meta Lang
- Structured Data Markup
- Rel Canonical
- Rel Alternate Hreflang
- Pagination & Rel NEXT/PREV
- The Open Graph
14 Meta Tags and Body Optimization
- Meta Title
- Meta Description
- Meta Keyword
- Headings
- Strong & Italic
- Body Text
15 Images Optimization
- Image Index
- Images ALT Tag
- Images Dimension
- Images Compression
- Image Scale
- Logo Optimization
16 Custom HTML Optimization
- Custom 404
- HTML
17 Content Optimization
- Content Genaration
- Page Design
- Keyword-Focus
- SEO-Copywriting
- Doorway Pages
- QDF-Freshness
18 Mobile & SEO
- Mobile Implementation
- Mobile Redirect
- Responsive Design
- AMP – Accelerate Mobile Pages Project
19 Usability
- Webserver Performance
- CDN – Content Delivery Network
20 Inbound
- Inbound 404
- Link Popularity & Trust
- Anchor Text
- GEO
- Linked Pages
- Site-Wide
- Local Directory
- Social Signal
21 Google Penalty
- Internal X2 Content
- Autogenerated Content
- Low Quality Content
- BAD/Spam Rich Snippet Markup
- ADS & Affiliate Abuse
- BAD Links Profile
Now that you know how we work, are you ready to collaborate with us?
Let’s start a new project together!