Every website owner wants their website to rank high on search engines, but not everyone knows exactly what needs to be done to achieve this. The days of overflowing your web page with keywords are gone, as search engines are coming up with new algorithms, every month. This is why it has become mandatory to perform an SEO Audit. 

But where should you start?

Starting is always the hard part of the procedure, and that’s why we are here to provide you with a quick guide to help you prevent making the mistakes that are holding you back from achieving all that you should this year!

Here is a 12 step checklist, which you can follow to help your website rank high:

Step 1: Keyword Research and Analysis

Step 2: Competitor Analysis

Step 3: Linking

Step 4: Voice Search Optimization

Step 5: On-Page SEO Factors

Step 6: Mobile Compatibility

Step 7: Remove Duplicate Content

Step 8: Security

Step 9: Indexing

Step 10: Site Speed Up

Step 11: Remove Zero Value Pages

Step 12: Optimize UX and UI

Bonus: Find and Remove Error 404 Pages

Bonus: Robot.txt

So, What is an SEO Audit?

SEO audit is an analysis of your web presence, i.e. your SEO strategies and campaign. SEO audit aims to tell you what is being done well and provides a set of actions that need to be carried out to improve your page ranking. It's a great way to improve your website’s performance, and attain higher traffic and position. It's best to audit your site when you first launch it, to ensure that your SEO is as best as it can be, and later can be continued to be audited quarterly or biannually.

Now that the idea of an SEO audit is clear, let's jump right into this 2021 checklist!

Keyword Research and Analysis

Keywords are one of the most important parts of SEO - they are the deciding factor of the sites that need to be shown, upon search. It is crucial to carefully go through your website to understand the types of keywords that you are using; long-tail or short-tail. It is best to use long-tail as they contain more words, hence are more likely to match the search of the customers. A good example of a long-tail keyword is “Jazz dance class close to Connaught Place” because it is not generic and will bring qualified leads to your website. The issue with having a great deal of short-tail keywords is that big businesses are already using them, so your chance of reaching the top decreases. The websites that are ranking for these competitive short-tail keywords are well established, authoritative and trusted. On top of that, they are probably able to spend a lot on ranking high, inorganically.

Competitor Analysis

“If you don’t take care of your customers, your competitor will” - Bob Hooey

While doing your SEO audit, it is essential to spy on your competitors and learn from them, so that you can rank higher than them.

You must have tons of competitors who are already ranking high for specific keywords, and as an antidote, you should come up with a SEO strategy so that your website also reaches the top. This will also help you find keywords that are relevant to your business but you aren’t currently using.

Another part of competitor analysis involves checking out their web page content as that has a huge impact on SEO rankings. It can attract or repel traffic, causing your website to perform better or worse respectively. Having a look at their content will give you an idea of what the customers are looking for and will be able to implement those changes to yours.

Competitor analysis will allow you to have a better understanding of how you can change your web page and exceed your competitors.

Linking - Backlinks Analysis and Fixing Broken Links

Firstly, addressing backlinks -  Link building is very important in determining your website’s SEO ranking. If you have too many spammy links in your blogs/content, it can misguide Google into thinking that your content doesn’t have great quality or reliable information. Google’s algorithm can pick up such links very fast which is why unnatural backlinks can hurt your ranking. It is necessary to at least be aware of these sites, and if any malicious sites are found, then you can disavow them.

Secondly, make sure that you don’t have any broken links. Broken links are links that don’t exist any longer or their URL has changed, giving the error 404 messages. This could occur if you have deleted a page, such as Zombie Pages, and haven’t redirected the URL. The issue with broken links is that, since it gives a bad user experience to the customers, therefore may decrease traffic to your website, which will result in Google Algorithm lowering your ranking. So, if you find any broken links on your web page, get rid of them as soon as possible.

Voice Search Optimization

Currently, the use of voice search, also known as voice-enabled, is growing exponentially. To stay in the trend and gain traffic, it is mandatory to ensure that your website is compatible with voice search.  

The way that voice searches work is that they extract concise and relevant information from featured snippets on search engines. This is why the first thing to keep in mind is to make sure that your content is easy to read and digest. The customer must be able to come back to your website for at least that specific piece of writing.

Another thing to remember is that if your client searches for a question, your writing should directly answer it. So for example, if the customer asks “What is jazz dance form?”, the answer should straight out tell what jazz dance form is, rather than talking about different dance forms and then coming to it.

Only if you provide the readers with crisp information, will your writing be featured in a snippet, allowing voice searches to be answered through your website.

On-Page SEO Factors

Having a well-set web page is crucial and so technical elements of SEO need to be done perfectly. Your website should have strategically thought-out titles, headings, summaries, and meta descriptions that contain relevant keywords. Here is a shortlist for you to consider:

1. Primary Keyword - Choose a primary keyword for your page (the one that is most relevant to the page and has a high search volume). Use this keyword once in your main title, at least in one of your subheadings and a few times in your main body.
2. Pick 3 to 6 more keywords that you want to put in your content (make sure you don’t overstuff your page with keywords as this will degrade your ranking).
3. Link the title and subheadings to the heading and title tags.
4. Ensure that your content is easy to read and understand - even a 10th grader should be able to make out what you are communicating.
5. Avoid any duplication
6. Link the content when and where necessary - make sure it’s not overdone and are links are reliable
7. Add images to your page as this increases user experience and put an alt tag to it
8. Perfect your Meta title and descriptions.

Check out- The Ultimate SEO checklist for Saas Marketers

Mobile Compatibility

Mobile is more salient than it is said to be. Firstly, it's because more than 60% of searches today take place on mobile phones and therefore, customers are more likely to prefer mobile-friendly websites. Another reason to ensure your website and mobile compatibility is because of Google’s Mobile-First indexing, which ensures that mobile-friendly websites rank higher than others. This, not to mention, attracts more traffic to your website.

Tip: The key to achieving this is through the use of responsive designing as it can adapt to any device that is being used.

Remove Duplicate Content

When you are writing content for your website, make sure that you don’t duplicate your writings. More than half the analyzed web pages are reported to have duplicate pages. Duplicity can weaken the dominance of your website, in turn degrading your SEO rankings.  To avoid this, canonicalization is the way - it informs search engines which version of your page is the most recent (the master copy) and redirects the audience to it. The URLs might be the same for all the pages, but if we don’t canonicalize them, then Google will not be able to figure out which one to index. Canonicalization will help you index your website better, allowing search engines to understand your website, hence boost its ranking.

Security

Do you feel comfortable going to ‘Not Secure’ websites? I am sure the tiny voice in your head answered no. Similarly, you will not get a lot of traffic on your website if it isn’t secured, as the clients are bound to be worried that their information is in danger. Due to this, the Google algorithm ensures that unsecured pages are not ranked high, to be able to provide their users with the best experience.

When you are auditing your web page, make sure that your site has the HTTPS protocol rather than HTTP. This will label your site as secure, allowing your ranking to increase. 

Indexing

Indexing is a very important part of your SEO optimization. When Google crawls through your website, i.e. reads your content, it indexes your pages.  To be a part of the search results, your pages need to be indexed, otherwise, your SEO will be majorly hurt. To prevent your pages from accidentally going unnoticed by Google, you will need to check your index report. You can do so on the free monitoring service provided by Google called the Google Search Console. By analyzing your URL on this tool, you will come to know the number of pages that Google has indexed on your web page. In case that the number of pages indexed is not rising, then there is a possibility that your pages are not getting indexed due to some coding error.

Tip: You can also use the shortcut site:yourURL.com to find which of your pages are indexed.

Site Speed Up

Have you ever experienced the frustration of a website taking too long to load? You just keep on waiting and waiting, but to no avail, it keeps loading. Imagine if your viewers had to do the same on your website? Should you expect them to wait for it to load? Of course not.

Not only do your customers, but search engines like Google also have a problem with this. Google only prefers pages that load quickly as they want their customers to have a great experience. If your page loads too slowly, people will stop visiting your website and you will lose your customers to your competitors, bringing a bad name to you as well as Google. So to keep your ranking intact, it's mandatory to speed up your site. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can help you determine your page speed so that you can bring any changes required to fasten your page loading.

Remove Zero Value Pages

When you command Google to find out how many of your pages it has indexed, there is a chance that there are more pages than you thought. Most sites have 50% to 75% extra indexed pages than there should be. These pages are called Zero Value Pages or Zombie Pages. Google algorithm drastically decreases your ranking if too many zero value pages are present as it understands the difference between quality and quantity. Removing those zombie pages can not only increase traffic to your website but also make your auditing process a lot easier (+faster) as there are fewer but more relevant pages to work with. Typical Zombie pages include boilerplates, archived pages, thin content, old newsletter etc.

Optimize UX and UI

Google algorithm is no longer like it used to be. With its new software called RankBrain, it has learnt to understand what satisfies a customer and how the users are interacting with the website. Due to this, it has become critical to perfect UX signals as well as your website’s UI. If your page contains UX and UI that makes the customers happy, Google will rank your website very highly. If you promise your customers a listicle article but present a whitepaper instead, your readers are bound to be disappointed and repelled from your site. Or if your website looks very boring and there is no creativity to attract customers, Google will tuck away your article. If you effectively manage to give your clients what they are looking for, you will surely rank very high!

Read: How to redesign websites without hurting your SEO.

Find and Remove Error 404 Pages

Many websites also have broken pages that produce Error 404 and it's critical to ensure that these pages are checked and removed. These are the pages that got deleted on your website or the URL has been changed but not redirected. If you produce redirect links for these pages, the audience will not have to deal with the Error 404 page, improving your user experience, hence allowing a higher ranking. By fixing restricted pages and 404 errors through redirection, you will be able to send the visitors to the relevant page, which will improve your SEO performance.

Robots.txt

If your website has a robots.txt file with wrong instructions implanted, search engines won’t be able to index the page as it may block the crawlers. This means that Google won’t be able to display your site upon search. You must check Google Analytics for such pages, as there will be a huge disparity between the pages you see on Google search vs Google Analytics. By comparing and deleting these files, you will be able to rank a lot higher as more of your pages will be indexed. 

Tip: You can type “robots.txt” at the end of your URL to see pages that are blocked. So if your website is http://www.yourURL.com then you can type “http://www.yourURL.com/robots.txt” or you can also command site:yourURL.com on Google.

Have a go and let us know! Our 2021 SEO Checklist is now done. Hope it was useful for you and can help you optimize your SEO!

Source of Information

- https://www.webfx.com/internet-marketing/seo-audit-checklist.html

- https://backlinko.com/seo-site-audit#uxsignals

- https://hitwise.connexity.com/070116_MobileSearchReport_CD_US.html

- https://www.briantracy.com/blog/sales-success/motivational-sales-quotes-for-success/