The main areas for improvement for this site would be performance and security. The robots.txt file, on the other hand, is a text file that allows you to specify how you would like your site to be crawled. Before crawling a website, search engine crawlers will generally request the robots.txt file from a server. Once you‘ve addressed the three primary goals of a website audit, it’s time to loop in a developer or someone from your IT department for a technical evaluation. You could also hire an outside agency — just be sure to do your homework first. While high-quality, search-engine-optimized content is a great way to boost your traffic numbers, it’s what happens once those visitors are on your website that really counts.
Health Score gives you a high-level overview of your SEO performance based on the number of errors found. The best SEO reporting tool SEO Anomaly for you really comes down to how much flexibility you need, and how quickly you want to get things done. One of the standout features of My Reports is the built-in AI Summary tool.
Step 4. Identifying image issues
Featured snippets can DRAMATICALLY increase your organic traffic. 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 using the “Performance” report in Google Search Console.
Step 1: Preparing an SEO audit
Moreover, they naturally improve readability and user interaction with the page, which may serve as a positive signal to search engines. You have to check and tidy up the titles, meta descriptions, and H1–H6 headings on all of your pages. In this SEO audit checklist, I’ll walk you through the essentials of a technical SEO audit, from theory to practice.
- If visitors struggle to find what they’re looking for, they are more likely to leave, increasing bounce rates and negatively impacting SEO.
- If you have a lot of broken links on your site, you no longer provide a good user experience, and that means you’ll see a gradual decline in traffic and conversions.
- This file is crucial for SEO as it tells search engines how to crawl your site more efficiently.
If you’ve already used WebSite Auditor before, just click New on the top bar to start a new project. However, any of the reputable audit tools above like Semrush or Ahrefs will do a great job as well (often at a higher price point). Personally, I like Screaming Frog for technical SEO and Surfer or GrowthBar for content SEO. I run a Screaming Frog audit for most of my clients and take it to the bank, it finds one or two (or more) issues every time. I use Surfer and/or GrowthBar every day for AI content creation and page auditing. They are also working on a feature that would allow for easy side-by-side comparisons of previous crawls, to chart your progress and make cohesive action plans.
Of course, it’s much easier to avoid creating duplicate content than to find and fix it later. But judgment aside, sometimes it’s tough to avoid duplicates, especially on large e-commerce sites. Another element that can affect your rankings is meta refresh.