Follow this 16-step SEO audit process to nail your site’s SEO and boost your search traffic.
Most SEO audits have two things in common:
they’re too technical;
they take DAYS (or even WEEKS) to complete!
This one is different.
It takes hours, not weeks, and you won’t need a degree in computer science to follow along.
SIDENOTE. If your site is HUGE—I’m talking hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pages—it may take longer than a few hours. For most small to medium-sized sites, however, this should be doable in hours rather than days.
Here’s a breakdown of the SEO audit process we’ll be following:
Steps 1-4: check for BIG issues (that may be holding your site back)
Steps 5-9: uncover easy-to-fix on-site problems;
Steps 10-12: analyze organic search traffic (and find low-hanging opportunities);
Steps 13-14: backlink analysis (VERY important!);
Steps 15-16: content audit AND “content gap” analysis.
As you can see, the aim here isn’t to show you how to do a “technical” SEO audit (which you can do with almost any SEO site audit tool).
The aim is to provide a comprehensive approach to auditing your website from an SEO perspective. This means auditing your rankings, backlink profile, existing content… anything that could be hindering your search performance.
Looking for an even simpler, beginner audit process? Check this video.
Let’s get started.
NOTE. The original version of this post was written by David McSweeney in 2016. But we gave it a HUGE rewrite for 2018. Still, I wanted to make sure David received at least some credit for his work, as the original was FANTASTIC. I hope my updated version can do it justice. 🙂
Tools required for the SEO audit process
Here are the tools I will be using during the audit process.
Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
Ahrefs (or Ahrefs Webmaster Tools)
Copyscape
SERP Simulator
Web Page Word Counter
Not all of them are essential, but they will help make the process easier.
EDITOR’S NOTE
For this walk-through, I’ll be auditing two sites.
In steps 1–9, I will be looking at Simple Life Insure—a life insurance broker from California.
simple life insure
I will introduce the second site before step 10.
Let’s go!
Step 1. Check that only ONE version of your site is browseable
In a moment, I’ll show you how to begin crawling your site for SEO issues.
But first, you need to check that only one version of your site is browseable.
Consider all the ways someone could type your website address into a browser (or link to it).
For example:
http://yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com
https://yourdomain.com
https://www.yourdomain.com
Only ONE of these should be accessible in a browser.
The others should be 301 redirected to the canonical version.
In the case of Simple Life Insure, everything looks fine.
You can see that if we type the HTTP version into the address bar, it automatically redirects to the HTTPS version.
simple life insure http to https redirect
Same goes for the www version. It redirects to the non-www version.
simple life insure www to non www redirect
To be honest, the non-www to www issue (or vice-versa) is rarely a problem, but I have seen a lot of sites with redirection issues for http to https.
Even my blog has issues!
the seo project https http error
So that’s something that should be fixed as a priority.
SIDENOTE. It’s also worth testing this with a couple of other URLs on your site to make sure that the 301 redirects are implemented sitewide.
If all is good, make a note of the canonical version (e.g., https://simplelifeinsure.com) and move on to step #2.
RECOMMENDATION
We would recommend you use https:// (either www or non-www) as there is a slight rankings boost for SSL enabled sites.
Plus, it also keeps your site secure and increases trust.
You can get a free SSL certificate for your site from Let’s Encrypt.
Step 2. Start a website crawl
In a moment, we’ll run through a few more manual checks on the website.
But first, we need to start a website crawl running in the background.
An SEO crawler will spider the site in telemarketing list the same way as Google and give us some useful information on the structure and current SEO setup.
There are quite a few SEO analyzer tools capable of doing this, such as
Screaming Frog (£149/year);
Beam Us Up (Free)
Both are great options, but as this is the Ahrefs blog, we’ll use Ahrefs’ Site Audit.
Site Audit > New Project > Paste domain in the ‘Scope & seeds’ section > Uncheck any 301 redirects.
scope and seeds ahrefs site explorer
Hit “Next.”
For the most part, you can leave the rest of the settings as they are.
But I do recommend toggling the Check HTTP status of external links and Execute JavaScript options (under Crawl settings) to “on.”
crawl settings changes
This will ensure that Site Audit also checks all external links on your website and any JS links.
When you’re done, hit “Create project.” Ahrefs’ Site Audit will start worki