9-10 MIN READ.
If you own a website, you’ll want its traffic to soar, but it’s easier said than done. Not to worry though, there’s over 200 Google ranking factors that work together to make a website tick, which we’ll explore in this comprehensive website audit checklist.
Buckle up. Here’s your chance to stand out from the hive and beat your competitors to those vital positions in Google’s SERP and begin your SEO journey.
From on-page and off-page SEO to the more technical stuff, by time you’ve reached the end of our SEO checklist for 2024, you’ll be set on your way to becoming a true webmaster.
Contents:
What is an SEO Website Audit?
First stop on our SEO journey: what is an SEO website audit? Let me explain…
The purpose of a website audit is to provide a comprehensive and detailed evaluation of your site’s health, performance and speed prior to making any structural improvements or getting your wide-scale search engine optimisation underway.
This way you can identify areas of improvement and get the website’s traffic back on track.
Tools of the trade: what you need to perform your own SEO website audit
Before we take a deep dive into our website audit and SEO checklist for 2023, it’s worth getting to grips with the tools and resources that will pave the way to improved traffic and improved content.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but here are the tools we use, so you have a go yourself!
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- Google Pagespeed Insights & GTmetrix (both free!) – We use these to help identify page speed issues.
- Google Analytics & Google Search Console (both free!) – These are really powerful tools to understand your traffic and your performance in search results.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free to a certain level) – We use this desktop application to help find missing headers, meta data or 404 errors.
- Siteliner (free to a certain level) – We use this website to help identify the level of unique content on your site, average content length and any broken links.
- KWFinder (paid subscription) – We use this website to help identify keyword volume, relevancy, difficulty and user intent.
- SEO Quake (free!) – A great little browser plugin to quickly identify technical faults on a page.
- Ahrefs (paid subscription) – THE tool for exploring backlinks and helping with link reclamation.
- Moz Local & Moz Link Explorer (both free) – Great online tools for checking your appearance in local business directories and how your business appears online.
- SEMrush – (another paid subscription) – These tools are acclaimed for good reason, as they’re ideal for monitoring keyword and backlink gaps.
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On-page SEO
On-page SEO is anything you are in control of on your website. Where it differs from technical SEO is that on-page SEO is mainly content (text, images etc.) and it’s likely that you won’t need any technical expertise.
Having the right information and in the right places is key to getting your site noticed by search engines. We’re assuming that you’ve read our post on the importance of mobile-friendly websites for SEO so have purposefully left that out!
1. Relevant & engaging, well-written content
This is THE most important factor of your on-page optimisation, everything else comes second. If you don’t write content that your audience wants to read and engage with, you’re never going to rank.
Here are 3 copywriting principles we swear by.
Entertaining
Blog posts are great for your SEO as they boost your traffic organically. Users will come to your site to answer a particular query and end up sticking around for the content. Whenever you write anything for your website envision these repeat readers and produce content that will keep them coming back for more.
TIP: Remember that search engines only want to return the best result for the user. Don’t re-invent the wheel, look at the type of content that ranks for relevant search queries and do it better, but don’t copy it!
Navigational
It’s relatively easy to create engaging blog posts around specific topics compared to service or product pages. But how do you direct potential customers to these latter pages?
One simple answer is to build a blog structure around what marketers refer to as “marketing funnels” or “the buyer’s journey.” Catch users’ attention with broader, topical posts and leave breadcrumbs to other more focused posts. You can then use internal link building to direct users to your products/services.
Informational
You can use Google Analytics to see how your audience are interacting with pages and this is a good sign of their speed, design quality and relevancy.
We often hear from industry experts that content length is not a ranking factor. And this is quite true as there is no optimum content length for SEO.
This being said, longer content may answer your users’ questions better. Make sure your content gets your point across, keeps people reading and encourages them to interact with your site by using a call to action.
TIP: Remember that search engines only want to return the best result for the user. Don’t re-invent the wheel, look at the type of content that ranks for relevant search queries and do it better, but don’t copy it!
2. Page structure
Readable content = quality content. And the best way to achieve this is to structure your content to allow for users to easily navigate and parse the information that’s there.
Now, to do this you need a clear header structure. Headers are labelled in HTML as H1, H2, H3 etc. but the first three are the key for making your content understandable.
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- H1 – A page title (only used once per page)
- H2 – A header for a main page section
- H3 – A sub-title for a sub-section of your H2
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You can use them in any order you like as long as they follow a logical hierarchy, but we would always use a H1 first and use H2s to label our highest-level sections e.g.
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- H1
- H2
- H3
- H3
- H2
- H3
- H3
- H3
- H2
- H1
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Implementing lists
Remember that if your content is good your page may start to rank for keywords you didn’t expect, some of which may be related to information below the fold.
In addition to headers, create a list at the top of your page, especially if your content is long. Use the list to link to specific sections on your page and allow users to get to the section they want to read instantly. Check out the top of our page as an example.
Not only will this make for a better reading experience, but it increases your chances of ranking of more highly and nabbing Google’s well sought after featured snippets.
3. Keywords
This brings us nicely on to keywords. Keywords are what makes search engines tick and help the likes of Google identify both what a user is looking for and what a page is about.
As a rule of thumb, you should never stuff your page with them, but instead identify one primary keyword and a couple of secondary keywords with thoughtful keyword research to satisfy those search queries.
Quickfire tips: keyword placement
Your primary keyword should be included in the following areas, along with your secondary keywords – but don’t force the latter in. Remember: we’re writing for customers, not robots!
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- Meta title
- Meta description
- URL (if you change a URL make sure you re-direct the traffic from the old URL!)
- H1 header
- A sub-header
- As close as possible to the start of the first paragraph of the main body content
- Placed sporadically and naturally through your body text
- As one of your image ALT tags (if the image is relevant and not solely for decoration)
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User experience and site usability
4. Accessibility
One key driver to success is accessibility. This means ensuring websites are accessible and usable for everyone, including disabled users.
With this in mind, ensure your website meets the threshold of these four key principles colloquially known as POUR:
Perceivable
Removing barriers users may face accessing your website’s content, such as making pages accessible to screen readers and including well-written alt text for images and links.
Operable
Ensuring user interface and navigation are operable and usable for every device they are browsing on and allowing each user enough time to complete any given task.
Understandable
Allowing users to understand the information displayed on very page and be able to navigate the site without difficulty.
Robust
Accessible to and interpretable by different technologies and platforms, including screen readers.
To check your website meets all of these requirements you can use the free tool Wave to perform an evaluation against accessibility standards. All you have to do is paste in your site’s URL.
5. Site navigation
As just mentioned, your site should be easy to use (on all devices) and well-organised, but your pages should also complement each other.
Before you think about any dramatic changes to your structure, insert links to a page when another page is mentioned. This not only improves your site structure and how users navigate but also how search engines’ bots crawl your site too.
TIP: Optimise your new links by changing the anchor text to the primary/secondary keyword of the target page. For instance, if our target page’s primary keyword was “SEO Services” we would utilise anchor text like this: SEO Services.
Off-Page SEO & Backlinks
Off-page SEO is probably the most important factor for optimising your website. Anybody can shout about their business or their product but when others do the shouting for you, it’s far more persuasive. Similarly, when search engines find links back to your website (backlinks) it’s like a vote that your content is good and worth a look.
6. Free & Authoritative Backlinks
Backlinks aren’t all equal and often cost if you want an agency to gain them for you but there are free and effective options. If you’re a local business just starting out with SEO, enter your details in local business directories, we’ve written more about how and why local business directory citations are important here.
It’s also a good idea to sign up to review websites (Trustpilot & Feefo are good options) or business websites that allow you to have a profile and link back to your site.
Outreach
There are many forms of outreach but traditional outreach is the process of reaching out to other websites with fresh content (like an article or an infographic).
If the content is good, it’s likely the website owner won’t take much convincing to publish your content and link back to your site. If your website content is really good, you will find your backlinks increase organically with no outreach as other authors write about your site and its content.
Press requests
Many experts also monitor press request alert services. These services post requests when a journalist is looking for a quote or advice in a certain field. You reply to the request qualifying your expertise and a quote/answer. If the journalist uses your answer or quote it’s likely you’ll get a link!
Link reclamation
Another form of outreach is link reclamation. You need to use special tools to find mentions of your company, product or service that are not currently linked. Then you contact the website owner to ask them to add a link.
Should you pay for backlinks?
In order to secure backlinks from other sites, you can pay for them. As you might expect, this will differ between sites and the domain authority or clout they bring with them. Some sites may charge extortionate fees and others may not charge at all – it all depends on the value you can offer with your content.
As a general rule, it will be less costly to host your unique content on other sites, and if you’re requesting a link insertion into an existing post you will almost always have to pay.
A word of caution: link building services
If you want to compete online and don’t have the time or network to do it yourself, there is the option to pay for someone to curate backlinks for you. However, take heed with who you hire, and don’t sign up to a link building service where you pay x amount per link – they don’t work!
This is even before saying that most link building vendors will offer you low-quality links that may break Google’s terms of service and break the bank.
Instead, we suggest for you to pay for someone’s time to do the hard graft; it’s the only way to get valuable links through outreach. And it goes without saying that you should stick to reputable agencies with a solid portfolio.
Technical SEO
If you’ve had a talented, and SEO-aware web designer develop your site it’s likely that a lot of this is already done. Here’s an earlier post where we covered what SEO comes with a website. As a lot of this relies on your web designer or platform/theme your website is built on, so I’ll keep it brief!
7. Sitemaps and robots
Your website should contain a robots.txt file and a sitemap.xml file. These are powerful tools, which should be handled carefully. The combo of these two files essentially works as a set of directions to help search engine robots map and navigate your site.
And to set this up, you’ll need to submit your sitemaps to search engines as with Google’s Search Console. When you’ve completed the steps, you’ll be able to remove unnecessary URLs, so search engines can crawl and index your sites more efficiently!
Be warned though: any small mistake might prevent (the important parts of) your site being crawled or indexed correctly – what a nightmare! For this reason we recommend you do your homework to learn what makes them tick. Or, perhaps a safer option, leaving it to a professional developer.
8. Speed & security
Slow page speed can cause people to leave your site so you should use Google Pagespeed Insights and GTmetrix as indicators of your site’s speed. It’s also good practice for your site to have an SSL certificate, so check for a little padlock next to the “https” part of the URL in the address bar.
9. Broken links & 404 errors
Links that don’t work (either on your site or from other sites) can produce 404 errors which signal an unrecognised address. These are dead ends for users and search engines’ robots.
They can be a result of user error when linking or failure to implement redirects when changing URLs. Use specialised tools to find them and then create redirects for robots and users following the links. This way you can keep users happy and preserve that precious link authority.
10. Canonical, encoding & other techy-things!
It does get a little more technical the deeper you go, but there are plenty of tools available that identify more structural issues with your site. Browse our list of SEO Tools below to do your own audit and get to grips with the nitty-gritty of URLs and the ways bots crawl your site.
Next steps
The end is in sight! But wait – there’s a little more…
By this point in the website audit checklist, you’ll have gleaned all the information required to identify and fix the issues holding your site back from a higher search performance.
But there are a few bonus steps you should take if you want to ensure you stay on top of all the aspects we’ve covered so far and, perhaps more importantly, avoid slipping back down the rankings. Let’s take a look.
Evaluate your needs and prioritise accordingly
As with any SEO project, you’ll want to get into the nitty-gritty. A templatised website audit checklist is a valuable resource to start from, but it only gets you so far.
This means pouring in the time and effort to take into account your overall business strategy, objectives and pain points. Then you’ll be able to prioritise changes around them that are most pivotal to meeting your long-term goals.
Putting it short and sweet: each company is unique, and this should be reflected in your website audit.
Ask yourself: What content gaps can I fill? What immediate improvements can I make? Where can I get an edge over my competitor? What scope does my existing website structure give me? Their answers will be the key to your SEO puzzle.
Establish monitoring strategies
Another important thing going forward is to keep that momentum going. And what better why than automating your processes?
Website health
If you decide to invest in one of the professional SEO tools we mentioned previously, you can react to real-time issues with recurring website audits.
These recurrent SEO check-ups will scan your website on a regular basis, alerting you to any of the issues we’ve covered here in this checklist. This will allow you the flexibility to respond as and when they occur.
Rinse and repeat
By spotting and rectifying issues from this SEO checklist for 2023 both incrementally and regularly, you will increase your traffic. BUT, this isn’t the end, SEO is constantly evolving.
SEO is scaleable and once you see the benefits of SEO for your business, employing an SEO specialist will help you compete at a higher level.
It’s two birds one stone. Think about it: with an SEO professional in the saddle, you can rely on their expertise to stand out from the crowd all whilst freeing up time to focus on what you do best – managing your business.
Create a website that is totally ‘buzzworthy’
Now it’s time to get started enhancing your own website – to make sure it becomes a honeypot for potential customers.
Simply run through our SEO website audit checklist, identifying issues that require fixing as you go along. Or go the extra mile and get our busy bees at beefound.agency to conduct a free SEO audit to find out where your site has room to shine.
