You need a sitemap to make it easier for users and search engines to navigate and crawl your website. It analyzes the top 10 keywords each page on your site is ranking for. Then it digs deeper, scanning crawled pages for mentions of these keywords, to show you internal link opportunities you might otherwise miss.
Competitive analysis and keyword research
To which pages/parts of the site are they trying to push users? Your target audience and business goals will inform the way you define and organize content. This type of SEO audit will involve on-page efforts like image optimization but largely refers to performance metrics like site speed and security. A technical SEO audit will identify opportunities to fix, eliminate, or reorganize code, prevent spam, switch from HTTP to HTTPS, and more.
A garden center faced a situation where a faulty site migration resulted in SEO Anomaly numerous broken URLs. These broken links were not only frustrating to users but also detrimental to SEO. The garden center hired Cadence, who identified and fixed these issues by recreating, republishing, and redirecting the URLs.
We created a disavow file and submitted it to Google, effectively asking them to disregard those links. After about a week, we requested the manual action be reviewed and it was successful. Tools like heatmaps and user surveys can show you what people really want. Then, invest in creating high-quality, helpful content that people can use. I have helped a client recover from an SEO penalty, and one thing I learned was that it requires patience and a lot of it. From the penalty that appeared in Google Search Console and until it was lifted we waited 8 months.
- It will also help prioritize and budget your tasks while ensuring a positive ROI from SEO as a marketing channel.
- High visibility and search rankings promote business, cultivate customer connections, and establish your site’s authority in your industry.
- That’s why an SEO audit can uncover improvements for not only your SEO but also your related tactics.
- But you can usually resurrect rankings by refreshing and republishing the content.
- These basic on-page elements help Google understand your content and help you to win more clicks from your rankings.
Stay ahead of competitors with the right SEO tool and make sure your site ranks higher in search results. Using an SEO tool is essential for efficiently analyzing and improving your website’s performance. SEO tools provide valuable insights into your site’s health, help identify issues, track rankings, and optimize content. By analyzing their keyword targeting, backlink profile, content quality, and technical SEO (such as site speed and mobile optimization). Mobile devices are accounting for a significant portion of internet traffic (62% in Feb 2025), so it’s essential to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Responsive design, touch-friendly buttons, and properly scaled images all contribute to a better mobile experience, improving your rankings and user satisfaction.
How to Do a Basic Website Audit to Improve SEO and UX (in 10 Steps)
SEO is a colossal effort; the process does not end there once that initial effort is made. After the audit, you make a plan to tackle these issues, prioritize them, and then slowly do them or get other teams to do them (if you have people). Then, monitor your actions to determine whether those changes work as intended. Regular monitoring is also a great opportunity to find improvements and better calibrate your SEO strategy.
Before getting started, I’d use this basic website auditing checklist to review certain necessary elements of a site’s performance. Does your site have URLs of excessive length due to keyword stuffing? Do they contain session IDs and/or include tons of dynamic parameters?
Preparatory steps of a technical SEO audit
Few things are more frustrating to your users than landing on a 404 Error page. This is why it’s crucial to look out for such errors during an SEO audit and fix the broken links that caused them. An SEO audit is a process that evaluates all aspects of a website that impact its performance in search engines and identifies opportunities for improvement. For a full deep dive on internal linking check out our internal linking wiki page and our guide on how to optimize your website’s internal links.