SEO audit: a complete guide to the basics
2025
During an audit, the focus isn’t on making fixes but on assessing page-specific issues that need attention. The findings from this step are compiled into a roadmap or task tracker for later action. SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Lumar (formerly Deepcrawl), Screaming Frog, and Moz Pro use crawlers to scan your website and check its general health and performance.
Contrary to popular opinion, broken links don’t result in site penalties. As content cycles in and out, and your site’s structure changes over time, 404s occur naturally. That said, broken links in inopportune places can fracture your internal linking structure. They can also be a pain in the ass for users trying to navigate from one page to another. Local SEO involves the set of practices to help your business rank in local search.
- However, if you’re using WordPress, you can use a plugin like Yoast SEO to create both a robots.txt file and sitemap easily.
- Once you have your site’s data, you can add competitors to compare side by side.
- With that additional revenue, your company can hire new team members, open a new facility, or even launch a new product or service.
- Many SEOs often overlook security issues, but Google takes it very seriously.
An SEO audit is your roadmap for how you’ll eventually get there. Where you want to be is everywhere people are searching for you BHS Links – your products, your services, or the things you know a lot about. Scores varied from 80 to 90 depending on the tool, and tools that use a letter system to score the site generally returned an “A”.
Crawling & Indexing
After auditing hundreds of websites, the biggest pattern I notice isn’t complex technical SEO issues, though they do matter. Too often, I see sites start building backlinks simply because their SEO isn’t progressing, hoping more links will magically help. For example, if you have a page with strong external backlinks, linking internally from that high-authority page to weaker ones can pass authority and help those pages rank better. While log files offer the most detailed view of search engine interactions, even a quick check in Crawl Stats helps you spot issues you might otherwise miss.
Lesson #11: SEO Tools Alone Can’t Replace Manual SEO Checks
Unless you’re auditing your own site, IA-based recommendations should hinge on the goals of project stakeholders. To which pages/parts of the site are they trying to push users? Your target audience and business goals will inform the way you define and organize content. This type of SEO audit will involve on-page efforts like image optimization but largely refers to performance metrics like site speed and security. A technical SEO audit will identify opportunities to fix, eliminate, or reorganize code, prevent spam, switch from HTTP to HTTPS, and more. An SEO audit refers to the process of evaluating various elements of a website that impact its performance in organic search.
If the content on these automatically generated pages is thin, repetitive, or lacking in value, users and search engines can perceive it as spam. Google rewards high-quality, user-friendly content and penalizes spam. It’s all about aligning your website and content with what the search engine considers valuable for search results.
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