Technical SEO Audit

When it comes to how a website performs, one of the best, if not the best way to get a solid understanding of what is going on under the hood is to run a good technical SEO audit.

A comprehensive audit will show what's working and what's not, and ultimately give all of the information required to identify the weaknesses in the current strategy and plan ahead to improve overall performance.

However, there is a lot to cover when it comes to a full SEO audit. That's exactly why this checklist exists - it's designed to be run as a repetitive process, and it'll definitely make your life easier in the long run if you're running regular SEO audits.

Let's get started with the checklist!

First of all, you need to record some basic identifying information about the domain and some simple questions about how SEO is being conducted.

Just fill out the form fields and proceed to the next task.

You can use a free tool like SEMRush to check the search volume of your domain. Be sure to check the root domain (e.g. "google.com" as opposed to "google.com/search").

You'll be able to see graphs and charts clearly presenting various metrics including organic traffic, search volume, keywords and competitors.

Keywords should be optimized for each page, but the keyword ranking for the root domain is one of the most important metrics in a technical SEO audit.

Using the SEMRush tool from the previous task, check the top keywords for your domain and record your findings in the form fields below.

There are a lot of free and paid tools available to view keyword ranking and competitor traffic for an SEO audit, but we're sticking with SERMRush for the convenience of having a free tool that offers a variety of different analysis options that we can tweak to get a good look at the overall performance of a domain's SEO.

Scroll to the "Main Organic Competitors" section to see live updated metrics. 

Search the root domain in a number of different search engines to build a more consistent picture of how the domain ranks.

SERP features are special results that Google shows based on a variety of different qualifiers, some of which you have control over, others you have very little control over.

There are four main groupings of SERP features. Here are the two which offer the highest degree of control:

1. Rich Snippets these add an additional layer of information to a result, like a star rating, publication date or a review aggregation rating.
2. Paid Results - these are paid, as you might imagine, by bidding on keywords (with a service like AdWords)

The remaining two are more determined by Google's algorithms and depend less on factors like microdata formatting, and are typically more difficult to access:

1. Universal Results appear alongside organic results, such as images or featured snippets.
2. Knowledge Graphs include data that appears in panels or graphs like stock value, celebrity information or weather reports.

Sometimes search results can highlight negative reviews or feedback for a particular domain, and obviously, this is can be damaging to the brand's reputation.

This task is primarily concerned with producing an additional field of data for a final SEO report, so just check the SERP listings for the domain and brand and report your findings in the form field below.

Robots.txt provides instructions for web robots - also aptly known as web crawers, spiders, or wanderers. These so-called robots are simply programs that automatically perform web searches and record information databases about web content, and robots.txt is used to allow or disallow them from accessing certain parts of a website.

It's important that robots.txt is configured correctly to ensure that nothing is being blocked unintentionally; the sub-tasks below will guide you through all the considerations necessary for robots.txt to be optimized for SEO.

Data has shown that HTTPS encryption is an important part of a domain's search ranking performance, so it's crucial that it be set up as soon as possible.

Whether it's already active or not, record your findings in the form field below and proceed.

Domains not using HTTPS encryption will almost certainly be negatively hit in their search rankings.

The process for enabling HTTPS on a domain is as follows:

There are many ways to reach a single URL, and canonicalization, or "canonical legitimacy" is one way to make sure all search engines are being redirected to the correct location.

This process depends on using HTML tags to talk to search engines crawling a particular domain and direct them to a "master" URL, solving problems relating to duplicate content appearing on more than one URL.

You can use the free MozBar tool from Moz or just look at the page's HTML code to check whether canonical tags exist for that specific page.

Make the following checks and confirm them by marking the sub-tasks and completing the form fields below.

Screaming Frog's default setting is to crawl only the specific subdomains entered into the search directory. If you want to crawl your entire website for insight into each and every page, you'll need to change the settings in the Configuration menu.

Make sure you check "Crawl All Subdomains" in the "Basic" settings tab, to be sure that all links are followed and every nook and cranny of your site is crawled.

Follow these sub-tasks and check each one of them as you go:

Screaming Frog has a useful backlink health checking tool called SEO Spider; use it to find unhealthy link behavior such as broken or redirecting URLs.

Check out this quick video for everything you need to get started:

Once you've set up SEO Spider and ran a test on the domain in question, review the extracted data and check the status of each link.

Once Screaming Frog's Spider has finished crawling, sort the ‘Internal’ tab results by ‘Status Code’. In this view, you can clearly see each error code (404, 301, or otherwise) and remedy them accordingly.

De-select image, Javascript, flash or CSS crawling in the Spider Configuration menu beforehand to reduce the time it takes to perform a full crawl.

Now you should be looking at a list of URLs from the crawl.

When you click on one of these URLs, information in the tabs below the main list will change.

Open the "InLinks" tab at the bottom section of the interface, where you'll be able to see a list of pages linking to the selected URL, plus additional data like anchor text and directives used on those links.

If you want to export the entire list of broken links, do the following:

To export the full list of pages that include broken or redirected links, choose ‘Redirection (3xx) In Links’ or ‘Client Error (4xx) In Links’ or ‘Server Error (5xx) In Links’ in the ‘Advanced Export’ menu, and you’ll get a CSV export of the data.

This task calls for another round of Moz's SEO Toolbar. You'll want to visit the domain's homepage and check the On-Page Elements.

A lot of SEO optimization can be squeezed out of simple formatting decisions on important pages like the landing and main content pages. Simple things like making sure that there is only one H1 tag, and that it contains the page's keyword, are some of the most important considerations.

Site navigation is a crucial part of user experience, and determines whether or not a visitor to your website will be optimally following your carefully strategized link structure. If the website navigation is poorly organized and not thought out properly, visitors will not understand what content is most important and this will reflect in search rankings.

Follow the sub-checklist below and fill out all form fields in this task.

You can use Ahrefs to check the domain authority across a variety of different metrics; a free account will be fine for this.

The instructions for how to get started are outlined in this sub-checklist:

Similarly, you can check the backlinks in Ahrefs by doing the following:

Still with Ahrefs, next make sure to have a look at how your main competitors rank for search volume and backlinks.

Simply follow the sub-checklist down below and be sure to fill out all form fields in this task.

Obviously, the main impact of a socially integrated SEO strategy is an increase of backlinking and general visibility for your website's landing pages.

As such, making sure your brand and domain have a presence when searched against their social profiles is a must.

Follow this sub-checklist, which contains steps to search against all major social media platforms, and continue on to fill in the form fields for this task.

Below is the finished audit report, aggregated from the tasks in this checklist:

This report details a technical SEO audit performed on {{form.Date_of_this_audit}} for the {{form.Brand_name}} domain {{form.Domain_name}}.

Traffic Analysis

Based on our analysis, it has been determined that the search volume at the time of the audit was {{form.What_is_the_current_search_volume?}}, trending in a {{form.What_direction_is_the_search_volume_trending?}} direction.

The top organic keywords for this domain are:
1. {{form.What_is_the_current_top_organic_keyword?}}
2. {{form.What_is_the_current_second_highest_ranking_organic_keyword?}}
3. {{form.What_is_the_current_third_highest_ranking_organic_keyword?}}

The main competitor is {{form.Who_is_the_primary_competitor?}}, and compared to this competitor the audited domain is ranking {{form.How_does_the_main_competitor's_domain_ranking_compare?}}.

SERP Presence

The domain appeared as the first result for {{form.For_which_search_engines_did_the_domain_appear_as_the_first_result?}}, with {{form.How_many_pages_appear_in_the_results_for_a_root_domain_search?}} pages appearing in the search for the root domain.

The following SERP features appear as a result of a domain name search:
{{form.What_SERP_features_appeared_for_the_domain_name_search?}}

The following SERP features appear as a result of a brand name search:
{{form.What_SERP_features_appeared_for_the_brand_name_search?}}

Currently, {{form.Are_any_of_the_search_listings_negatively_affecting_the_brand's_reputation?}} that appear as a result of a brand name search.

Technical Factors

{{form.Does_the_domain_have_HTTPS_encryption?}}.

The following domain URLs caused 301 redirects:
{{form.Which_domain_URLs_301_redirected?}}

Content

The following advice has been given for how the landing page formatting could be improved: {{form.How_could_the_formatting_of_the_landing_page_be_improved?}}

The following advice has been given for how site navigation could be improved: {{form.How_could_site_navigation_be_improved?}}

Authority

Our research has found that the Ahrefs ranking for this domain is {{form.How_would_you_describe_the_Ahrefs_ranking_for_this_domain?}} with a referring domains to backlinks ratio of: {{form.What_is_the_ratio_between_referring_domains_and_backlinks?_2}}.

The main competitor's referring domain to backlink ratio is {{form.How_does_the_main_competitor's_backlink_to_referral_ratio_compare?}}.

Social Media

Finally, searches for brand and domain social media presence found that the profiles in the search results were {{form.Are_all_social_media_profiles_complete_and_updated?}}

The domain seems to have a strong presence on the following social media platforms: {{form.Which_social_media_searches_yielded_relevant_profiles?_2}}.

{{form.Is_new_content_being_published_regularly_on_social_media_pages?}}, with {{form.Does_there_seem_to_be_much_social_interaction_with_the_content_(comments,_likes,_shares,_etc.)?}}.

If necessary, upload the finished audit report to the form field in this task.

If it's more convenient, you may use a URL field.

Using the Members form field below, assign the individual who will approve the audit report.

Now that you've done all of the tasks pertaining to the actual SEO audit, you have a handy report that's been auto-filled with all of the forms throughout this checklist.

Process Street checklists are designed to be easily exported so you can save and share them as you need. What's more, the results of this checklist have been formatted into a "Send Email"  widget in the style of a comprehensive report, so you can forward it to your client or marketing team.

Just check that all of the information is correct and hit "Send".

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