The Ultimate Template For Doing Website Audit

A website audit is key to boosting your site’s performance and keeping it healthy by making sure it follows all the best SEO practices while also offering a great user experience and functionality. I’ve put together a detailed video on Website Audits that covers all the points listed below. This guide will help you improve your website’s visibility on SERP, and we’ll also explore some handy tools for conducting our audits.

Recommended Tools For Audit

Before we jump into the audit, we are going to take help of few SEO tool that will help in analyzing your site’s different aspects. I’ve made sure that all the tools used in this audit are completely free, so that anyone can conduct a full audit easily without spending a penny.

• Google Analytics for understanding user behavior.
• Google Search Console for performance data and crawling errors.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider for crawling and indexing insights.
• GTmetrix or Google’s PageSpeed Insights for speed analysis.
• Ahrefs or SEMrush for backlink profiles.

Key Areas of Focus While Doing Website Audit

Here’s a table summarizing the primary areas to audit, along with a brief description of each:

Detailed Audit Checklist

Basics

• Ensure Google Analytics is installed.
• Set up properties in search engines.

Crawling & Indexing

• Confirm the URL is indexed and returns a 200 status code.
• Ensure URLs are indexable by robots meta tag and X-robots-tag.
• Verify sitemap file locations in robots.txt and submit to search engines.

Meta & Structured Data

• Check that each page has a title element containing keywords within the first 60 characters.
• Verify the presence of unique meta descriptions and favicons.
• Implement OG and social meta data, and structured data markup.

Content

• Avoid duplicate content and organize with hierarchical HTML tags.
• Ensure content is keyword-targeted and adheres to Google’s Quality Guidelines.
• Content should support paginated loading for infinite scroll, with publication and updated dates visible.

Links & Navigation

• Verify that links are crawlable and use descriptive anchor text.
• Avoid linking to broken pages (404) and ensure links are qualified when necessary (nofollow, ugc, sponsored).

Images

• Ensure images have descriptive alt attributes and defined heights and widths.
• List images in image sitemaps.

Mobile

• Confirm the site passes Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and prefers responsive web design.

Speed

• Ensure the content loads fully within a reasonable time and passes Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment.

Security

• Verify the site uses proper HTTPS and supports HSTS.

Backlinks (Off-Page)

• Check for relevant backlinks that don’t violate Google Guidelines.
• Ensure disavow file doesn’t block important links.

Suggestions for Improvement

• Start with on-page adjustments like content optimization and technical fixes.
• Enhance backlink quality and diversity.
• Focus on essential pages such as product and home pages, and use social media to drive traffic.
• Regularly consult Google Search Console and Analytics for ongoing performance monitoring.

Conclusion

Conducting a thorough website audit not only boosts your site’s performance but also improves its visibility and user experience. Think of this guide as your go to roadmap to spot areas for improvement in your website and keep your site in good health.