{"id":116851,"date":"2019-05-16T17:08:21","date_gmt":"2019-05-16T09:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/?p=16851"},"modified":"2021-05-11T05:49:03","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T05:49:03","slug":"seo-audit-comprehensive-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/seo-audit-comprehensive-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"SEO Audit 2020: A Comprehensive Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cover<\/a><\/p>\n

Website optimization is made up of different facets that need to be optimized individually in order for your site to slowly reach the top spot in the first page of the search results. Onsite optimization – consisting of different factors that are <\/span>inside<\/b> your website need to be checked and optimized, offsite optimization – consists of different factors that deal with links that connect other websites to yours, and technical optimization – everything technical (codes and other factors that need IT expertise). All of these are important for your rankings and should not be disregarded. But the challenge is to find the pain points out of all these facets and fix them.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A website is a delicate object that needs constant maintenance and care from webmasters and SEOs. Our job is to create the most optimized site that contains useful, authoritative, and high-quality content<\/a> that is able to assist users in their search queries and help them find what they\u2019re looking for. So, how do we do that? We audit the site to find the broken facets and fix them accordingly. Here\u2019s how:<\/span><\/p>\n

SEO Audit Guide<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. Check Website Traffic<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Check Google Search Console Coverage Report<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Check Submitted Sitemaps<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Check for Crawl Anomalies<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Check the SERPs<\/a><\/li>\n
  6. Robots.txt Validation<\/a><\/li>\n
  7. Onsite Diagnosis and Fix<\/a><\/li>\n
  8. Pagination Audit<\/a><\/li>\n
  9. XML Sitemap Check<\/a><\/li>\n
  10. Geography\/Location<\/a><\/li>\n
  11. Structured Data Audit<\/a><\/li>\n
  12. Internal Linking Audit<\/a><\/li>\n
  13. Check Follow\/Nofollow Links<\/a><\/li>\n
  14. Check for Orphaned Pages<\/a><\/li>\n
  15. SSL Audit<\/a><\/li>\n
  16. Site Speed Test and Improvement<\/a><\/li>\n
  17. AMP Setup and Errors<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Check your Website Traffic <\/span><\/h2>\n

    Traffic is a consequential effect of your SEO efforts. If you were able to improve your search visibility for a high volume keyword, you can almost be sure that your site\u2019s traffic count will also increase. However, a drop in an otherwise steady number of traffic does not always mean that your search visibility took a drop as well. Take a look at this example:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"Google<\/a><\/p>\n

    We do a weekly checkup of our traffic count and once we saw the sudden drop, we knew something was wrong. The problem was, we didn\u2019t do anything. I just published a new post and it suddenly became that way. I won\u2019t go into how we investigated and fixed the cause of the drop, but this just goes to show how important it is to do a regular check of your traffic in Google Analytics. If we didn\u2019t do the regular checks, then our traffic count might have just stayed that way until it becomes a crisis. <\/span><\/p>\n

    Make it a habit to regularly check your traffic count for the sole reason of you being on top of everything. I recommend doing this twice a week, if you can check it 4 times a week, then that would be best. This is an important foundation of your site audit and checking your traffic can never be disregarded. After checking your traffic, the next step is to:<\/span><\/p>\n

    Check your Google Search Console Coverage Report<\/span><\/h2>\n

    Google Search Console is probably the most crucial tool for SEOs and learning how to use it at its full extent is a must. As an SEO professional, it is important that the pages that you want Google to index are being shown in the search results and those that you don\u2019t want to show should not appear in the SERPs.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"GSC<\/a><\/p>\n

    Google Search Console\u2019s Coverage Report is the best way to know how Google sees your pages and monitor the pages on your website that is being indexed. You would also be able to see crawling errors so you could fix them immediately.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Check your Submitted Sitemaps<\/span><\/h3>\n

    Since your sitemap contains all the URLs you want Google to crawl, you should make sure that all your sitemaps are submitted and crawled by Google. You could submit multiple sitemaps in Search Console but this decision should be based on the size of your website.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"Sitemaps<\/a><\/p>\n

    If you have less than a thousand pages, it would be better if you only have one sitemap. If your website is a travel booking website and has 50,000 pages or more, you could divide your sitemap to multiple sitemaps to better organize your URLs.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Take note that having more than one sitemap does not mean crawling priorities will change. It is only a great way of structuring your website and telling crawl bots what are the parts of your website that are important.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Submitted and Indexed<\/span><\/h3>\n

    Under this report, you should see all the URLs that are in your sitemap. If you see URLs here that should not be indexed such as testing pages or images, you should <\/span>place a noindex tag on them<\/span><\/a> to tell crawl bots that this should not be shown in the search results.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Indexed, Not Submitted in Sitemap<\/span><\/h3>\n

    Most of the time, this report shows pages that you don\u2019t want users to see purposely in the search results. Even though you submitted a sitemap, Google could still crawl links that are not in your sitemap.<\/span><\/p>\n

    As much as possible, the number of pages indexed in this report should be kept at a minimum. If there are pages indexed that you don\u2019t want users to purposely see, place a noindex tag on them. If you see important pages here, it would be much better if you could add them to your sitemap.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Check for Crawl Anomalies<\/span><\/h2>\n

    \"Crawl<\/a><\/p>\n

    In Google Search Console under the Coverage Report, you could also see pages that were crawled by Google but were excluded from the search results. This could be because of the noindex tag, robots.txt file, or other errors that might cause crawl anomalies and make a page non-indexable by Google.<\/span><\/p>\n

    You should check this report as you might have important pages that are under these. For pages that are under \u2018Blocked by Robots.txt\u2019 or \u2018Excluded by Noindex tag\u2019, fixes should be as easy as removing them from the robots.txt file or removing the noindex meta tag.<\/span><\/p>\n

    For important pages under \u2018Crawl Anomaly\u2019, you should check it using the URL Inspection tool of Search Console to see more details why Google is having problems crawling and indexing it.<\/span><\/p>\n

    If you don\u2019t see any important pages here, there is no need for any further actions and let search console keep unimportant pages here.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Check the SERPs<\/span><\/h2>\n

    This is one of the most important things a lot of SEOs usually forget. A lot of people are busy doing link building and strategizing with their on-page SEO that they don\u2019t check what their pages look in the search results.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"Site<\/a><\/p>\n

    To do this, go to Google search and use the advanced search command \u201csite:\u201d to show all the results Google has for your website. This is a great way of knowing how users see you in the search results.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Check for page titles that are too long or too short, have misspelled words or wrong grammar. Though meta descriptions are not used as a ranking factor by Google anymore, it is still a strong Click Through Rate factor and should still be optimized so make sure that meta descriptions of your pages are enticing for users. <\/span><\/p>\n

    Robots.txt Validation<\/span><\/h2>\n

    The robots.txt file, also called the robots exclusion protocol or standard, is what the search engine look for to determine which pages on your site to crawl. Robots.txt is vital to your SEO Audit since a slight misconfiguration or problem can cause a world of problems for you. What more if you totally neglect to check it for the audit? <\/span><\/p>\n

    Putting your robots.txt to the test by making sure that the search engine can properly access is one of the <\/span>best SEO practices<\/span><\/a> in the industry. If your robots.txt file is missing, chances are all of your publicly available pages would be crawled and added to their index. <\/span><\/p>\n

    To start, just add \/robots.txt next to your URL.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"Robots.txt\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    If you haven\u2019t created a robots.txt file already, you can use a plain text editor like Notepad for Windows or TextEdit for Mac. It is important that you use these basic programs because using Office tools could insert additional code into the text. <\/span><\/p>\n

    However, you can keep in mind that you can use any program that is in the .txt file type. Robots.txt can help you block URLs that are irrelevant for crawling. Blocking pages such as author pages, administrator credentials, or plugins among others, will help the search engine prioritize the more important pages on your site. <\/span><\/p>\n

    The search engine bot will see your robots.txt file first as it enters your site for crawling. <\/span><\/p>\n

    use programs like Microsoft Word, the program could insert additional code into the text. Of course, you shouldn\u2019t miss out on the robots crawling directives such as user-agent, disallow, allow, and the sitemap. <\/span><\/p>\n

    Onsite Diagnosis and Fix<\/span><\/h2>\n

    After diagnosing your site through the different facets of the search engine (Google), it\u2019s time for you to check your website as an entity. The tool we\u2019ve always used to check on our site\u2019s onsite status is Screaming Frog. We\u2019ve always used it as the websites we handle grow larger as the months pass by. You set the parameters and it\u2019s even capable of crawling\/compiling outbound links to let you know if you have broken links. Here\u2019s what the overview looks like:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \"Capture\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    Screaming Frog compiles all the different onsite factors and lists down errors that you might want\/need to fix. Onsite factors that Screaming Frog shows are:<\/span><\/p>\n