Would you like to perform and maintain an SEO audit checklist of your WordPress site that can assist you in improving your search engine rankings and getting more traffic?
Search engine optimization can be precarious if you don’t know what’s working. By performing an SEO audit, you can break down and analyze your site, track down open doors for development, and resolve fundamental issues.
This article will go through a WordPress SEO audit checklist to help your rankings.
What Is An SEO Audit?
An SEO site audit is a comprehensive analysis of your website’s technical SEO health, on-page optimization, and content.
The audit helps you identify any areas of improvement to make your site more search engine friendly and improve your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs.
It’s used to identify any potential issues such as your website’s structure, content, loading speed, and mobile-friendliness that could be holding your website back from achieving higher search engine rankings.
Why SEO Audit Is Necessary? How SEO Audit Helps To Improve Ranking?
There are many reasons why you might want to conduct an SEO audit.
Maybe you’re launching a new website and want to ensure that it is optimized for search engines from the start.
Or maybe you’ve been working on your SEO for a while but haven’t seen the results you were hoping for, and you want to figure out what the problem is.
An SEO audit can also be a helpful check-in to make sure that your website is still on track and has all the right SEO elements in place.
As Google’s algorithms change and evolve, it’s important to keep up with the latest best practices to make sure that your website is as visible and effective as possible.
What Should Be In An SEO Audit? The Ultimate SEO Audit Checklist
1. When Do You Need Your Content To Reach Your Clients?
- Before they know, they are keen on a product/service. (Top-of-funnel content)
- When they are investigating/contrasting other options. (Middle-of-channel content)
- Just before the retail location or point of sale. (Bottom-of-channel content)
When you know which part of the funnel your SEO will uphold, you can track down an SEO strategy that can work for your organization, and everything from now on gets a ton more, a lot easier.
You’ll have the option to assess your content’s performance considering important metrics, comprehend where you can find content gaps, and complete this audit in a designated way that will get you genuine outcomes.
If you see this question and answer each of the three, you want to layout priorities.
Preferably, a piece of content might be aimed at one of these funnel parts.
Do you have the opportunity and energy to be producing content at a speed that can stay aware of these three unique needs?
If not, pick the one important to you, center on that for now, and check whether you can expand the role of content into different areas of your funnels down the line.
2. Remove Excess And Low-Quality Content
While it appears unreasonable, Google has said they don’t value the recurrence of posting or even the high volume of content as a ranking factor.
Throughout the most recent couple of years, sites have figured out how to further develop their search rankings by removing many pages from search results. It is called Content Pruning; this strategy can prompt huge traffic increases as significant as 44%.
Similarly, with standard pruning, Content Pruning is a cycle where you remove the extra to maximize results.
Remove pages that fill in little purpose and that don’t satisfactorily answer the search questions of Google searches.
While you should find problematic pages found with the SEO tools in the last step, tools regularly don’t get on most issue pages. So it would help if you did some manual searches.
What preferred spot to start once again, Google itself? Put the URL in the Google search engine, and you’ll get each page Google has filed for your website. Check what number of pages Google has indexed, and if the number is crazy, start pruning.
If you are not clear where to start, consider using Google Analytics to observe your pages that get practically zero traffic. You can get this data by signing in and choosing Behavior/Site Content/All Pages afterward. You can see each page on your site and how much traffic it has had in the period (which you can change in the top-right corner).
Any failure to meet expectations pages should be put on a list for updating, no-indexing, or removal.
If you bring CMS in use, you should likewise note the superfluously indexed pages.
There may be a setting in the backend that you can change to fix the issues instead of physically erasing or no-indexing hundreds or thousands of pages.
3. Analyze Keywords And Organic Traffic
Understanding which keywords gain most of your organic traffic can help you in two ways: you get a shortlist of your most significant pages where you can zero in your on-page SEO audit. You can comprehend what keywords work for your audience to observe comparable keywords that can bring you much more traffic.
Your top keywords probably won’t be the ones you expect. Many sites rely on traffic from minor keywords. Long-tail searches represent 91.8% of all search queries done online. Also, more than half of searches are three words or longer. This propensity implies that you likely get most of your traffic from lower volume, long-tail keywords.
The initial step to digging into this trend is to analyze the keywords that direct people to your site.
If a connection is built between Google Analytics with Search Console, you can analyze your keywords within GA. Open up the Acquisition breakdown, and navigate to organic search.
Select ” Landing page ” as the primary dimension whenever you show up at the channel breakdown, basically for the Organic Search. Here you select “Landing page” as the primary dimension. (The Keyword view often shows “not provided” now and isn’t extremely valuable.)
This provides an outline of the main pages on your site for organic search. Then, at that point, you can cross-reference these outcomes with the queries breakdown in Search Console.
Since Google doesn’t straightforwardly attach queries to the landing pages in Search Console, while GA no longer displays those keywords searchers used on Google, this roundabout way is probably your most ideal choice. There are additionally growing options that are accessible through keyword tools.
You can learn and have an idea from your top keywords and observe if you can find other areas which could be moved to bring you even more relevant search traffic. Ask yourself:
- What keywords are gaining the most traffic?
- Which landing pages (and the related keywords) prompt the most significant number of changes?
- How do my present top catchphrases assist me with accomplishing my SEO aim?
From that point forward, use Related Keywords tools to observe new keywords that old pages could be re-advanced for or that could turn into the essential keywords in their piece of new content.
Since you presently know what has worked before (your present top keywords) and your SEO objectives, spotting keywords that share qualities with the first and dovetail with the second could be your next enormous lift in SEO traffic.
It is ideal for getting familiar with observing essential keywords in our manual for keyword analyzing and tracking down your most productive keywords.
4. Page Speed And Load Times
Perhaps the best move for your SEO is to upgrade your pages’ load times, considering Google currently lists page speed as an official ranking factor. A simple method for checking your site loading speed is to use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights.
5. Ensure That Your Site Is Using HTTPS
The following SEO audit checklist audit shows whether your site has an SSL certification. An SSL certification encrypts the connection between your client’s browser and your site server.
Google and other search engines will prioritize secure sites using HTTPS over those still using HTTP.
It is best to check if your site is secure by looking for a padlock sign in your browser’s search bar. .
6. Crawl Your Website And Fix Technical Errors
Indeed, even in 2023, principal technical SEO issues are more typical than you might think, and an accurate way to find these issues is by crawling your site.
- 50% with duplicate content and indexation issues,
- 45% with broken image and alt tag issues, and
- 35% with broken links.
There is a broad scope of free and paid tools to crawl your site. We prescribe using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider to start your SEO audit (it’s free for the initial 500 URLs and afterward £149/year after that).
Now is the right time to choose your crawler configuration whenever you’ve signed up for an account. You want to configure your crawler to act like the web index you’ve centered on (Googlebot, Bingbot, and so on). You can choose your agent by clicking on configuration and selecting user agent in Screaming Frog (just accessible in the paid version).
When every fixing is taken care of, enter your URL and click “Start.” It depends on the size of your domain. This could take a long time – so remember, patience is a virtue. You can use the outcome of the data to observe issues you can fix for speedy successes in your technical SEO audit. This can include:
- Copy Content
- Broken Links
- Redirects
- Too short/long Meta Tags
- Noindex Tags
Since it distinguishes the particular URL for every issue, you can go in and fix them individually.
7. All Versions Of Your URL Lead To The Same Site
It is ideal for you to check that the www and non-www versions or even HTTP and HTTPS versions of your URL.
For instance, if somebody enters:
- http://www.example.com, or
- https://www.example.com,
- https://example.com,
- http://example.com
In their browser at that point, they should see the same site.
You can look at your essential WordPress URL by going to Settings » General and afterward look at the address in the ‘WordPress Address (URL)’ and ‘Site Address (URL)’ fields.
If various versions of your webpage’s URLs don’t redirect to the exact location at that point, Google will think about the two URLs as independent sites.
It won’t know which URL to focus on while indexing and could prompt copy content issues.
8. Ensure You’ve Got Internal And External Links
During an SEO audit, the next thing to check is to ensure that all the pages you’re trying to rank on the google search have internal and external links.
Internal links are links from different pages on the same site, while external links or outbound links are links to another site. They’re pivotal for your SEO achievement, yet many businesses ignore their significance.
Search engines follow various links to find and file new pages in the search results. Creating internal and external links permits the search engine to find new content on your site and lift rankings with no problem.
That, however, interfaces additionally assist your readers in navigating your site or finding a source for stats and other data.
You can use SEO tools like Semrush to run a site audit, which will show you any pages that could use more internal links.
9. Robots Meta Tags And Robots.Txt
Robots.txt files guide search engines like Google which segments of your website you need to crawl and even for indexing and which ones you DON’T need them to crawl (these pages will be filed if anything links to that page).
Since your robots.txt file is so significant regarding indexing your site, any accidents here can cause intensifying SEO issues.
To avoid issues of any type, use help like TechnicalSEO’s text checker, which naturally checks your robots.txt for changes and informs you if it recognizes any changes.
If you need to de-index explicit pages, Google suggests using robots’ meta tags to use a granular, page-specific approach to control how a single page should be indexed and served to clients in indexed lists. You should add the robot’s meta tag into your header.
You tell most search engines they shouldn’t use this page on their SERPs by adding the meta tag.
Another choice is to use Noindex: in the robots.txt document. Google doesn’t authoritatively uphold this. However, we’ve observed that the command has worked for many people.
10. List Your Site To Be Mobile-Responsive
The next thing is to check in a WordPress SEO audit is whether your site is mobile responsive.
Google involves your site’s mobile version for indexing, rather than desktop. To support your rankings at that point, your site should be mobile-ready.
To figure out how dynamic your site is, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test device. Just enter your site’s URL and click the ‘Test URL’ button.
The tool will currently analyze your site and show the experimental outcomes regardless of whether your site is mobile-ready.
If your site isn’t advanced or optimized for mobile at that point, you can change your site theme and select a responsive WordPress theme.
11. Examine For Malware And Unwanted Vulnerabilities
One more fundamental thing to check while directing an SEO audit is to examine for security risks. If Google Safe Browsing flags your site for malware or unwanted vulnerabilities, it will show a warning to your visitors.
This can hurt your SEO, as people will try not to visit your site. Google will likewise bring down your rankings since your site contains malware and harmful programs.
To remove malware and other suspicious files from your site, you’ll require a WordPress security scanner.
Many sites use Sucuri as the best WordPress firewall and security service. It looks at your site for harmful code, malware, spam infusion, and other vulnerabilities and helps clear your site.
Sucuri likewise screens your site for potential risks threats day in and day out and blocks any dubious action, hacking endeavors, DDoS attacks, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Not only that, but it additionally helps in safeguarding the server-side.
Conclusion
- Consider SEO site audits as standard maintenance for the site. It’s an extraordinary method for checking if the site is in top condition or needs a bit of push to perform better on search results. Before you evaluate and audit sites, the following are a couple of key focus points:
- Try not to regard the audit as a step-by-step guide. Remember that it just gives findings and recommendations. The procedure will come from you.
- There’s no restriction to the number of audits you can do.
- You don’t need to go through days or weeks to do an audit; use the tools and install the audit widget on your site if you want to create a quick SEO report.
- Try not to depend on guesswork. You have SEO audit tools and SEO reporting software to furnish you with the correct information – use them.
- Zero in on the foundation when auditing a site: Usability, Security, SEO, and Social Activity.
The writing is on the wall! Presently, it’s your chance to do an SEO audit. We are glad to share some secrets held with us in letting you perform the SEO audits in the most accurate way possible.