SEO Audit Checklist: A Brief Overview

  • ByDaniel Ducloux

  • Thursday, March 28, 2013

A Brief Overview

*You may visit our Dallas SEO, Austin SEO, Houston SEO, or San Antonio SEO pages for examples.

Search Audit

  1. Audit indexed pages
  2. Audit search for brand and branded terms
  3. Audit Google cache for key pages

Audit Content

  1. Home page
  2. landing pages
  3. SEO pages
  4. Proper keyword targeting, keyword map, site architecture, etc.
  5. Keyword cannibalization (site architecture), mapping, etc. ^^^
  6. Proper formatting: H1’s, alt tags, etc.
  7. Engaging headings on blogs
  8. Content to Ads ratio

Duplicate Content Audit

  1. 1 URL for each piece of content (no duplicates)
  2. Search Google for duplicate content
  3. Sub-domain check
  4. Secure version check
  5. Other sites owned

Audit Accessibility

  1. Check robots.txt file
  2. turn off javascript, cookies, css (use web developer toolbar)
  3. Change agent to Googlebot and compare
  4. Check for 404 errors, etc.

Site Architecture

  1. Hierarchy of pages and structure
  2. landing pages for SEO
  3. quantity of category pages
  4. Pagination / faceted navigation
  5. Click to content ratio
  6. prioritize content

Technical Audit

  1. 301 redirects
  2. JavaScript usage
  3. iFrames
  4. Flash issues
  5. Speed of website
  6. alt texts
  7. Google Webmaster Tools errors
  8. Sitemaps (HTML, XML, etc.)

Canonicalization Audit

  1. Canonical version of site established via 301
  2. GWT
  3. Rel tag
  4. Absolute URL’s vs. relative URL’s

Audit of URL’s

  1. Clean up the URL’s
  2. Short URL’s
  3. Descriptive URL’s

Audit Internal Linking

  1. Quantity of links on page
  2. Vertical links
  3. Horizontal links
  4. Links inside of content
  5. Footer links
  6. Internal anchor texts used
  7. Broken links – inbound and outbound

Title Tag Audit

  1. Unique title tags
  2. Keyword rich title tags
  3. Primary phrases in title tags
  4. Include branding
  5. ~65 to 70 characters

Meta Tag Audit

  1. Meta keywords tag (used vs. not used)
  2. Meta description
  3. Optimize key page descriptions
  4. Meta robots tag – noindex, etc.