SEO Audit Checklist

No matter if it’s your first or twenty-fifth SEO audit, having a checklist of items to fix can only serve to strengthen the audit.

This free SEO audit checklist is an easy way to keep track of everything that needs to be done on your website.

1. Sitemaps
Sitemaps serve as an essential roadmap for search engines to access and understand your content, helping search engines identify when new pages have been published or can even assist in discovering alternative language versions of your page. XML and HTML sitemaps are two primary types.

Submitting an incorrect URL in your sitemap may send mixed signals to search engines, creating duplicate content issues and indexability problems for dynamically generated pages and any secondary versions that redirect to one canonical version of each page. This is particularly problematic with dynamically generated pages which often generate duplicate information for search engines.

Make it a task to review all of your posts to ensure they contain unique meta descriptions that target their keywords, and optimise for them accordingly. If any aren’t, change them as quickly as possible (even just one or two each day), this is an easy and fast way to increase SEO rankings!

2. Broken Links
Verify that all pages on your website are linked from both the homepage and major category pages, making sure none are broken or missing.

If any problems exist on your site, use the free SEO Audit task list to mark them for resolution. Another factor which could harm it is having multiple versions of its URL (www/no www/https or non-https) which should all redirect to one version.

Make sure your comments (if applicable) are nofollow, as otherwise they could pass link juice to competitors. Check that any images used have the correct attribution; Google looks for E-A-T – expertise authoritative trustworthiness – which you can learn more about in my mini-lesson here. It is also worth verifying all posts have appropriate internal linking so they direct visitors towards the best content without diverting their attention away from it.

3. On-Page Optimization
Your site structure is undoubtedly one of the most critical elements of SEO. Search engines use it to find pages and posts, it determines how much link juice flows around your domain and it makes navigation simpler for bots.

Be sure to ensure your title tags and meta descriptions reflect the keywords you’re targeting, and outline an attractive value proposition for your target audience in your meta description text – it will appear in search engine results pages and should encourage searchers to click your result!

Review your internal linking structure to ensure that each post is linked from at least one other post and all posts within a category (if applicable) are linked back down to and from your homepage and major categories (if relevant). These simple wins can make a substantial impactful statement about how important internal linking can be for success.

4. Content
Now is an opportune time to review your blog’s content for aspects that contribute to Google E – A – T (Expertise Authoritative Trustworthiness). This process may take time and may identify some problems which need resolving.

As an example, be sure that all images used are relevant and supportive of the post they’re in. Also ensure you’ve included ALT text for visually impaired readers.

Finally, review the permalinks for your posts and pages to ensure that they point to the appropriate version and do not create duplicate versions of pages. Do this by entering each URL individually into search engines such as Google to ensure they all resolve to one URL – otherwise mark them as problems to address in order to avoid duplication penalties from Google.