An SEO audit is a process that evaluates all aspects of a website that impact its performance in search engines and identifies opportunities for improvement. For a full deep dive on internal linking check out our internal linking wiki page and our guide on how to optimize your website’s internal links. Once, my client in the home care industry was hit with a content penalty back in 2019. I was shocked because we weren’t churning out low-quality content on the website. Instead, we were publishing high-quality articles with expert insights directly from the actual home care providers (employees) of the business. However, after deep diving and analyzing the content, we discovered that some links in the articles were redirecting to irrelevant websites.
Holistic SEO Audit
If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else. Successful bloggers should see an increase in all these stats simultaneously. Make sure that all your links work properly, that they are relevant, healthy and with proper keywords.
What’s an SEO audit and why are they so important?
A Local SEO audit will analyze your website’s organic visibility as it pertains to a specific region. A Local SEO audit will focus on things like your Google Business profile, placement on Google Maps, and external links and citations. If your website can be accessed with or without the “www” prefix in the URL, it’s crucial to make a choice and stick with it.
It will tell you whether any URLs have errors that affect mobile usability. If your traffic’s gone to zero, you may need to check for a manual action. This is where a human reviewer at Google decides your site doesn’t comply with the Google search essentials. It means that some or all of your site won’t be shown in Google’s search results. A “crawl” is where software scans your website to find SEO issues.
- The best option is to optimize the image file size before uploading the image to your website.
- If pages on your site are returning 404 errors, server (5xx) errors, or are timing out, they’ll show up in this report.
- If you’re dealing with a penalty, my advice is to thoroughly audit your site—look for thin or ineffective content, bad backlinks, or technical issues—and tackle those step by step.
- I know, tackling a technical SEO audit may seem daunting at first sight.
Because so many users are searching from phones or other mobile devices, considering and optimizing mobile UX supports your site’s overall performance. To fix this, determine the canonical page and implement 301 redirects. These are HTTP status codes used to correct indexed duplicate content. They alert search engines when a page moves to a new location, merging multiple page rankings into one and prompting search engines to remove duplicate URLs from their indices. This SEO Anomaly process focuses search engine authority on one version of content and clarifies which page should rank higher in search results.