In summary, don’t neglect the external side of SEO in your audit. Your site’s backlink health and overall online presence are integral to your SEO success. By cleaning up bad links and recognizing areas to improve (like earning more quality links), you set the stage for sustainable rankings. On top of that, the majority of websites (around 80%) haven’t implemented schema markup for structured data , missing out on richer search results. These issues quietly undermine your SEO performance every day. Browse various agency websites, and you’ll notice they promote different features of their audit.
Crawl mobile websites
To get the most out of this post, I recommend turning on the option to check the HTTP status of external links. If you’re an Ahrefs user, begin by launching a new project in Site Audit. Luckily, most of the fixes to the issues discussed in this guide are self-explanatory. However, I will do my best to explain the more BHS Links complex ones as we go.
Identify organic traffic drops and content decline
Don’t stuff your keyword everywhere… That can actually hurt your SEO. You can use related keywords in your content to help give search engines the context of your page. These standards directly impact your search rankings and the trust that users have in your content. You can download a free off-page SEO checklist here which covers the following items below in more depth. Meta descriptions provide a concise overview of the content on a web page and can influence click-through rates (CTR) by giving search engines and users more context about your content.
Ahrefs and Semrush show which keywords your pages rank for and identify gaps. A large part of SEO consists of improving written content, so review its quality and improve where necessary. The Semrush/Ahrefs site audit should have given you many pointers. Giving them a good experience will do wonders in the long run. In your SEO site audit, start by diagnosing common UX factors.
As you can see from the image above, links are broken down into indexable and not indexable and you can find the same issues across both categories. However, each issue has a different predetermined importance level—depending on whether the link is indexable or not. Linking to credible sources makes your own website more credible to both visitors and search engines. This is because you show that your information is backed up with sound research. These are problematic because they waste “link equity” and provide users with a negative experience. Alt text can also serve as anchor text for image links, help you to rank on Google Images, and improve topical relevance.
- One study by Search Engine Land noted a 20-30% increase in CTR for pages with structured data generating rich results (like review stars).
- This can be achieved by reducing the impact of third-party code, minimizing JavaScript execution time, and more.
- Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of a website to meet search engine standards and improving organic rankings and user experience.
- This keyword cannibalization confused Google about which page to rank, diluting their visibility.
- Serpstat is an affordable all in one SEO toolkit and its pricing starts just at $69/mo and it offers a Site Audit tool which evaluates how optimized a website is.
Also, using canonical tags incorrectly (or not at all) can seriously affect your crawl budget. Although many SEOs may tell you that on-page issues like those with meta descriptions aren’t a big deal, I personally think it is part of good SEO housekeeping. Also, an audit can highlight technical problems your website has that you may not be aware of, such as hreflang errors, canonical issues, or mixed content problems. Understanding issues found within a technical audit allows you to analyze a site fully and come up with a comprehensive strategy. On the other hand, most of the pages ranking for “best headphones” are blog posts and guides. This indicates that searchers are in learning mode, not buying mode.
