This SEO audit checklist is a simple tool for small businesses to quickly assess the health of their website and the organic factors that may need to be addressed.
We have put together a infographic that you might find helpful when conducting your own SEO audit. Otherwise keep on reading for more information!
Before You Start Your SEO Audit Checklist
Have you installed a Google Analytics code onto your website?
Google Analytics is important for understanding how people are using your site and where they are coming from. This data will help optimize your site to focus on your target audience and understand user behavior.
Have you installed Google Webmaster Tools?
Webmaster Tools analyzes your site health and gives an overview of crawl errors, poor sites that are linking to your domain, indexing issues, and Google messages.
Indexing Optimization
Are your pages indexed in Google?
- Type into Google your website using a site search. E.G site:www.towermarketing.net
- Do you see a list of results for your website?
- Is your homepage at the top of the list?
If you do not see all your pages showing up in the search results it may mean that Google has penalized your site for not following the Google guidelines. If you don’t see all your results, I suggest you log into Google Webmaster Tools to see if you have any messages from Google regarding a manual penalty.
Does your brand show up in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs)?
If you have a brand use quotation marks to see if it shows up in the results. E.g. type “Prince Street Cafe”, “Moxie House” or “Candy Factory” into Google and it should appear at the top of the results page. Every business owner and marketer knows that their brand is of great value, and if your brand is not showing up in the SERPs then there is a serious problem. We suggest you focus your SEO efforts on developing the web presence of your brand and grow awareness.
Is the robots.txt file blocking important content on your site from being indexed?
Type /robots.txt to the end of you domain and you will see a list of pages that are stopping search engine like Google from indexing your site. For example type www.example.com/robots.txt and you should see something similar to this…
Mobile Optimization
Is your website mobile-friendly?
Enter your website into Google’s Mobile-Friendly test page and Google will let you know if your site meets mobile requirements. Google is ranking websites according to whether they are mobile-friendly or not. If your site is not mobile-friendly you will be losing valuable rankings and important web presence to competitors whose sites have been designed to fit on mobile screen sizes.
Content Optimization
Are your title tags optimized?
Are each of your pages’ title tags optimized and unique?
Is your brand name included in your title tag?
Do your title tags fit the 500-pixel width allocated by Google so they are fully displayed and not cut-off?
Use this free Moz tool to see if your title tags fit the appropriate width.
Do your title tags include keywords describing your business, industry, product, or service?
Your title is the first line of text a user sees in the SERPs and it is imperative that a good keyword is used to help describe the page title. This assures the user that if they click on the title it will take them to a page relevant to the keyword.
Does the on-page content include a primary keyword several times throughout the page?
We suggest that each page have a designated keyword that best describes that page to prevent keyword cannibalization. The primary keywords should by used in the Meta Tags, H-tags and body copy of a page.
Do your images include alt text?
Google can’t read images and relies on alt-text to describe the image.
Does your homepage include enough content?
Is there at least one paragraph on the home page?
There needs to be a certain amount of content on the homepage to give search engines context regarding what the website is about. Rule of thumb is to have at least 150 words on the homepage.
Is the content formatted in an easy to read layout?
Is the content easy to read and understand?
Have you used headings to break up sections?
Are there internal links throughout the site?
Internal links are important for helping search engines crawl the site and highlight specific anchor-text that point users to relevant pages and posts.
Sitemap Optimization
Has an XML sitemap been submitted to Google Webmaster Tools?
Sitemaps are import for helping Google crawl and index your site.
Is your site healthy? Did you find SEO issues with your websites that need to be fixed? Are there opportunities for your site to perform better? Let us know how we can help.