SEO Site Audit Checklist for 2024

SEO site audit process is a high priority for ranking #1 on the SERPs. A second thing to consider is using the actual best SEO tools to optimize your website. Choosing the right tools or what seobase likes to name it SEO triggers is highly determined by the level of efficient identification that the search engines prompt to rank your website on the first page. In this post, we will discuss the SEO site audit checklist for 2024 and what is the important elements you should consider:

Check To See If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly

Mobile SEO is a vital step in SEO site audit to rank your website pages on SERPs. It is the technique to optimize your web pages to help smartphone users. Mobile optimization also makes your site resources unrestricted to search engine algorithms.  According to a Statista report, as of the fourth quarter of 2021, it was found that mobile devices accounted for 63 percent of organic search engine visits. This value has remained almost the same over the past two quarters. In the first quarter of 2021, though, it decreased to 59 percent. Google uses a rolling out mobile-first indexing to enhance the users' experience. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to know if your site is mobile-friendly. 

Make Sure Google Indexes ONE Version of Your Website

While performing the SEO site audit, it is crucial to ensure that your site is only one version and not indexed with different site versions in Google. For instance, there are 4 distinct versions of the same site: 

• http://seobase.com 
• http://www.seobase.com 
• https://seobase.com 
• https://www.seobase.com

You might see these all the above URLs are the same. However, for Google and other search engines, they are not. They are different URLs for different websites. So, you need to redirect these versions properly.  Therefore, to check and fix this issue, Type each of the various versions into your browser search bar. They should land on your website. If you found a version of your site isn’t redirecting properly, you can redirect it to the version you want to use. Ask Google to recrawl your URLs.

Speed Up Your Site

According to Google, your site’s loading speed is a ranking factor. Therefore, speeding up websites is essential to enhance all of the Internet users' experiences, not just for your site. Here’s how to get your site to load speedily. 

• In the first step, you should clean up your site’s HTML code.
• Then, you can easily find problems with your code with PageSpeed Insights.

You can analyze and optimize your website with PageSpeed tools.

Bonus Tip: 

Test the popular pages from your website, such as blog posts, service pages, and category pages, not just the homepage. After that, you can run a speed test.

Note:

Large-size images can negatively affect your site speed. Therefore, you should optimize your images and accelerate your websites. Compress your images using a tool like Kraken or TinyPNG. 

Find and Delete The Extra Pages

In SEO site audit processes, it is important to know how many pages Google has indexed. If you find the number of pages that Google has indexed is higher than you thought. Then, it would help if you took action. According to Google, many sites have 50-75% MORE indexed pages than expected. To find and delete these extra indexed pages, you can type site: example.com. For example, "site:seobase.com" into Google.  This step could help to boost your website's Google traffic by nearly 50%. In addition, deleting the extra indexed pages makes the remaining steps of the SEO audit checklist easier. Fewer pages mean fewer problems. So, here are the most common types of the extra indexed pages, such; 

• Archive pages 
• Category and tag pages (WordPress) 
• Search result pages 
• Old press releases 
• Boilerplate content 
• Thin content (<50 words)

Find and Fix Indexing Problems

Indexing problems are one of the most factors that affect your website ranking. Therefore, you need to find and fix web pages that Google isn’t indexing. To perform this step of the SEO site audit, you can use Google Search Console. Then, The “Index Coverage” report will show you a list of pages that they can’t index for some reason. To double-check, that your website is performing well according to the SEO site audit checklist you can use the seobase SiteProfiler Tool.

Check Your Organic Traffic

Checking your organic traffic is a priority for your website. To check your organic traffic, you can use Google Analytics. In the first step, go to Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Channels. Second, select Organic Search. In this step, you'll see how many people visited your site from the search engine "Organic Search" for the entire last month. Then, set the dates to the last six months, for example. Everything should be improved as soon as you perform this SEO audit.

Improve Your On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is your key to ranking high on SERPs. It is not easy to optimize every page on your site separately. To perform this step in the SEO site audit checklist and improve your On-Page SEO, you just need to identify your most crucial pages. These pages could be related to these issues; 

• Target an important keyword
• Get less traffic than they did back in the day
• Pages already rank well. But, have the potential to crack the top 5

Then, optimize your pages following effective on-page SEO strategies.

Set-Up Keyword Rank Tracking

Rank Tracking could be the cornerstone that sets you apart from competitors or a crippling weakness. So, what purpose of using keyword rank tracking? Keyword rank tracking makes it handy to watch your competitors. Also, you can always book the first place of the SERPs for your website using the seobase Rank Tracker Tool. Moreover, you can learn How to use Rank Tracker Tool to Boost your website traffic.

Analyze Your Backlinks

Building backlinks is vital to rank on search engines. Above all that, Changing SEO techniques became imperative with the rapid changes in search engine algorithms.  According to Google, any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site. So, you need to learn about The Best Ethical Ways to Build Backlinks To Your Website. So, to check your backlinks, you need to;

• First, enter your homepage into a backlink analysis tool.
• Second, check out referring domains and Domain Authority.
• Finally, look for unwanted or broken backlinks.

You might want to disavow those links.

Fix Broken Links

According to Google, they don’t “lose sleep” over broken links. To get rid of the broken backlinks or to fix them, 

• First, find broken pages on your site that are not indexed on Google. Using the Google Search Console’s “Index Report” helps you to get this step done. See Google Search Console: Use cases for marketers
• After that, you can use an SEO tool to find broken internal and external links.

Optimize Your Content

To make your content valued and unique content that motivates Google and other search engines to see your website as trustworthy ad valued enough to enhance the user experience and rank high o SERPs. You should follow some simple steps: 

• Create short introductions.
• Separate your content into small paragraphs.
• Use many subheaders like H1, H2s, H3s, etc. 
• Include the main keyphrase in the headlines.
• Consider the keyphrase length.
• Distribute the main keyword to the content multiple times based on the content length.
• Use visuals, images, charts and video.
• Create a proper length meta description in a proper length. 
• Include enough transition words in the content based on the length. 
• Use enough active voice content.

You can learn some more effective tips by reading 6 Most Powerful Advanced SEO Tactics in 2024.

Optimize For UX Signals

Unlike the old Google, RankBrain measures how users interact with your site. Thus, using RankBrain has become more critical for SEO. It is a machine learning-based search engine algorithm. Somehow, it is important to the search engine optimization site audit. Optimizing the UX Signals helps your website rank high on Google SERPs. You can use the site audit pro tool to perform site audits. To optimize your UX designs for your website, you can include the next features in your website to make a better user experience :

• Simplified Navigation
• Build a Killer Homepage
• Company logo
• Homepage Footer
• Make it easy to connect
• Present Sales Funnel
• Strong Branding
• Effective use of visual elements
• Product Presentation
• Allow Users’ Feedback and Review

Get More From Your Internal Links

Internal linking is a highly underrated SEO strategy. For example, you can use multiple pages linked to other blog posts. Or many links pointing to your privacy policy or contact page. 

Use Seobase Site Profiler Tool To Audit Your Site

The SEO site audit is not that easy but still not impossible to perform your technical SEO. Hence, using site audit software is highly recommended to get many crucial site audit reports. Performing a successful site audit is a very good step toward a high ranking on SERPs. Using the seobase Site Profiler Tool makes your website pull attention from the search engines. See Best Online SEO Tools Experts Use in 2024.

Conclusion

In creating a website you should think about everything related to SEO. An SEO site audit is one of these important tips to ranking #1 on Google SERPs and other search engines. seobase provides webmasters with many important SEO best tools.