The Technical SEO & Beyond Site Audit Checklist

Companies trying to properly raise their online presence and user interaction depend on this technology. This article will explore the benefits and drawbacks of SEO keyword ranking tools so that you can decide whether it’s right for your business and which is the best option for you & your clients. JetOctopus is designed with a sharp focus on log analysis and crawling for enterprise-level SEO. The integration of crawl reports, log insights, and Google Search Console data in JetOctopus forms a powerful combination, providing a well-rounded technical audit. SEO PowerSuite offers an array of features that encompass everything from site optimization and ranking tracking to competitor analysis and backlink management. Oncrawl emerges as a standout technical and data SEO platform, particularly recognized for its prowess in enterprise SEO audits and daily monitoring.

My Top SEO Tools for 2025

Google’s bots are smarter and now prioritize structured, fast, mobile-friendly websites. Resolving crawl errors early ensures your site is fully accessible to search engines and sets the foundation for everything else in your audit. While this is okay for users, search engines may consider them different websites. This means you may have problems with indexing, duplicate content issues, and loss of page rank. It’ll give you insights on aspects of your site like title tags, meta descriptions, and images. And it’ll help you identify broken links, understand your website’s architecture at a deep level, and much more.

Marketing Hub

SEO audit

Choose which checks and sections to show, and add custom content for that personal touch. Additionally we provide a clear, actionable, prioritised list of recommendations to help improve. Maintain a consistent tone BHS Links and voice across your content to build a strong brand identity, and ensure that branding elements, such as logos and messaging, are consistent throughout the content.

SEO audit

Step 5: Review and Optimize Your Content

  • As a best practice, it should also link to the XML sitemap so the bot can find a list of the most important URLs.
  • Backlinks can help you rank better for keywords that matter the most to your business.
  • Finally, Google is known to devalue sitewide and/or boilerplate links, so if you have footer navigation with the same 500 links on every page, it might be valuable to experiment with new linking practices.
  • Here are the steps I follow when performing a thorough SEO audit.

Typically, this means ordering your content with headings in a hierarchical fashion. Most SEO studies show a strong relationship between the use of headings and Google rankings, so we recommend using headings to organize your content in a smart, logical way. While Google won’t penalize you for duplicate content, duplicate pages typically get filtered out of search results as Google strives to „show pages with distinct information.“ If the URL is simple, you might get away with a quick visual inspection of your robots.txt file. In most cases, you’ll likely want to do a more thorough check of the URL using one of the tools listed below. Most of the time, robots directives are placed in the HTML as a meta robots tag.

Discover whether your pages load quickly for users and search engine crawlers and receive recommendations for speeding up your website. Our free SEO Checker tool gives you a complete audit of your site’s current search engine optimization (SEO) performance and a custom report with all the details. Ahrefs isn’t necessarily known for being the most impressive platform out there from a user experience standpoint, but the audit tool is definitely simple enough to get up and running. (Just note that the free audit tool will require website ownership verification, which can be a hassle.) I found it a little tougher to navigate than Semrush, but it’s not that hard to get the hang of. Small downside for one of the best technical SEO tools out there.

SEO audit

One such area of issues which has taken on increased importance over recent years is that of toxic links. Back in 2012 Google unleashed it’s first Penguin update, designed to target what it considered to be ‘dodgy’ backlinks – In the world of SEO, chaos ensued. As we covered earlier, there’s often crossover between what’s seen as a ‘technical SEO audit’ and ‘website SEO audit’. Definitions vary and there’s a lot of scope for overlap in several areas. Some people might refer to a ‘website SEO audit’ as a technical audit, yet others would argue that only a small portion of the elements covered would qualify as ‘technical.

SEO audit

If your site is slow or unresponsive, visitors will bounce—and Google will notice. Compress images, enable browser caching, use a content delivery network (CDN), and minimize JavaScript to speed things up. Compare your audit results between crawls to track your progress. Analyze your WordPress site to detect critical errors and get actionableinsights to boost your SEO and get more traffic. Another effective method is to review your existing content’s performance using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Look for patterns in user queries and the performance of existing pages.