The Easy 10-Step SEO Audit & Checklist

Millions of dollars or more are at stake with search engine optimization for businesses looking to compete at the enterprise level. At this level, most of your competition has likely invested heavily in search engine marketing tactics like SEO and PPC for over a decade. An enterprise SEO audit should also consider how the website’s performance compares to competing sites in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

An audit makes sure they are properly optimized for relevance and length. By tracking results, you can measure the impact of your audit (e.g., increased rankings, traffic, and engagement). It’ll also help spot new issues like broken links, slow pages, or dropped rankings.

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The audit can identify over 100+ issues, which can be overwhelming for beginners. So if you are new to auditing, I’d suggest focusing on the steps below rather than trying to fix all the issues one by one. Popular SEO tools include Morningscore.io, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, each offering features to support your SEO work.

For example, this shows us that our article on the top 100 most visited websites has declined massively over the last six months. For example, our list of top Google searches declined massively in 2021. It also has the same number of pages with an empty or missing meta description and thousands with a missing or empty H1 tag. For example, the core update in August 2018 appeared to largely affect health, fitness, and medical sites that failed to demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-A-T).

Step 2: Identify site structure improvements

This will ultimately help you improve your strategy by identifying what’s driving results and where to focus next. These issues can impact search engine rankings and user engagement. Document all findings in a spreadsheet, noting pages that need updates and prioritizing them based on their importance, such as high-traffic or core pages. If you need a detailed plan for optimizing these elements, see our SEO roadmap article for actionable next steps. SEO is not just about getting users and search engines to your site —it’s also about keeping and showing them around. One of the most powerful ways to do this is through internal linking, so be sure to include this in your SEO audit.

The keyword is extremely difficult to rank for, and the tool did identify some key areas for improvement. For free users, Claude’s analysis will also be more limited compared to Pro users because it won’t be able to process the full 180 page search quality rater guidelines document. My new free SEO tool instantly audits your content and tells you how to win based on Google’s leaked human quality rater guidelines.

• You can do this by simply searching for your target keywords and noting what questions appear in the PAA section.
• Spyfu has features for SEO, PPC advertising, and more, but we mainly use it as a competitive analysis tool in our SEO audit services.
• GrowthBar’s intelligent algorithms weight different factors in the SERP and deliver a delightful dashboard and roadmap for improving your blog post.
• But performing a site crawl is a quick way to assess lots of aspects at once.
• Indexing is the process by which search engines store webpages into their database to be retrieved when users perform searches.

A free Semrush account lets you audit up to 100 URLs with Site Audit. Or you can use this link to access a 14-day trial on a Semrush Pro subscription. There are a few different tools out there to help you perform a site crawl. Before we move on to the next step, identify which pages on your site drive the most clicks from Google. Do this SEO Anomaly using the “Performance” report in Google Search Console.

Cadence helped the document processing service provider by securing high-quality backlinks from authoritative industry sources. These backlinks drove direct traffic to the client’s website and proved their credibility in the eyes of search engines. However, while programmatic SEO offers significant advantages in speed and scalability, it comes with potential risks. If the content on these automatically generated pages is thin, repetitive, or lacking in value, users and search engines can perceive it as spam. Google rewards high-quality, user-friendly content and penalizes spam.

In my case, I realized I had been unknowingly over-optimizing some pages with the same keywords, causing them to compete with each other. This keyword cannibalization confused Google about which page to rank, diluting their visibility. I helped a SaaS project recover from an SEO penalty in 8 months—without using the disavow tool (which I don’t recommend anymore). Instead, I focused on building high-quality backlinks to create a healthy link profile.