In my experience, SEO audit checklists tend to be organized by categories rather than priority. This approach might work if you have endless time to work on clients’ websites, but SERPS change every single day and time is a luxury we don’t have. Therefore, it’s crucial to prioritize SEO tasks. Not all SEO issues are equally common, and fixing them won’t have the same effect. Also, not all SEO issues appear equally with the same frequency. Resolving five relatively minor SEO issues in an hour can have a more substantial impact than spending an entire day on 1 problem that may seem more critical. Don’t overlook simple SEO wins!.
To prioritize this SEO audit template I had to make some big assumptions:
CMS is WordPress or pure HTML files
(assuming that pure HTML files can be downloaded with FTP so they can be parsed programatically)
I will have access to site’s Google Analytics and Search Console
Site contains only 10 pages with 5 important pages.
This is typical for a small business site that would only want a limited prioritized SEO audit. For larger sites I would likely automate fixes programatically, which would affect “Ease of Implementation” for any content related item and its priority.
Criteria for values
- Category: All of the items could fit in multiple categories, but I chose to classify them by the first place where I would typically look for the problem
- Ease of implementation: The difficulty level to fix the problem (with assumptions mentioned above). 5 being the easiest.
- Direct impact on rankings How likely is it that providing a remedy will have a positive effect on rankings? This is mostly based on tests I performed, tests that other SEOs whom I trust conducted, and/or my observations. Usually this is not based on Google’s official statements or sentiment around SEO forums. 5 having the relatively highest impact.
- Non ranking usefulness: How likely is it that addressing the problem will have a positive effect on general usefulness of the site, user experience, conversions, but not directly on the rankings. Even the perfectly optimized website for SEO is useless and won’t convert if it has a bad user experience
- Likelyhood of a problem: How likely are we to run into this issue while auditing a WordPress or pure HTML site. Numbers are relative to each other, so 5 doesn’t mean that 100% of the sites will face this issue, only that it is more likely to show up than an issue marked with 4.
Prioritized SEO Audit Template
| Category | Ease of implementation | Direct impact on rankings | Non ranking usefulness | Likelyhood of a problem | Procedure |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | 4 | 4 | 4 | 3 | Add optimized description to Google Business Profile Listing (if appropriate). It is a factor in local rankings and is relatively easy to implement. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Find the questions that people are searching about your brand name and make sure to answer them. Look for question words in the query report. This is great for reputation management and for SEO by filling in content gaps. |
| Server Response | 3 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Check for pages with 301, 302, 404, meta refresh redirects or other redirects and status codes. Make sure that is still the proper code to display. |
| Links | 3 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Do important pages get internal links from other related pages? This could be easy to implement with a plugin such as Link Juicer. It could also be performed manually by searching Google for pages within your site that are relevant for the main keyword and then linking back from them to that page. |
| Other | 3 | 4 | 3 | 5 | Scan the site with Screaming Frog while connected to Google Search Console and Analytics. Decide what to do with pages that have no traffic or links (redirect, delete, merge). This is one of the most important steps in any SEO audit |
| Images | 5 | 2 | 4 | 4 | Compress image file size. This doesn’t have a direct impact on the rankings, but it is easy to implement automatically. This is important to address as large images often impact the speed of the site. |
| Content | 2 | 5 | 3 | 5 | Conduct the content gap analysis on the most important pages. Look for the related keywords that should show up along with the main keyword. This process should ideally be automated if you have your own keyword database. Use Ahrefs, Page Optimizer Pro or Semrush for a manual approach. |
| Google Search Console | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Check the Google Search Console for keywords that you are ranking for, but do not make sense in the context of the page. Removing them (if it makes sense) could change and increase relevancy of the page and its ranking (as some tests show). |
| Header | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Audit for pages with very long, very short or title tags, and fix if appropriate. Long titles may not be a problem by itself, as Google will index them. However on occassion they may indicate a problem which is why the full SEO audit is important. Short titles are usually a wasted oppportunity. |
| Architecture | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Audit if the most important pages linked from the homepage? This is very easy to implement and makes a difference in ranking of those pages. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 4 | 3 | 4 | Check for keyword canibalization of most important pages (use Google data studio/Looker plus Google Search Console to see what pages rank for the same words). Then decide what to with problematic pages (redirect, delete, merge…) |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 4 | 4 | 3 | Find pages with high impressions but low CTR, edit page titles and descriptions to attract more click |
| Mobile | 4 | 3 | 4 | 3 | Audit for mobile friendliness and check the rendered screenshot. Fix sitewide or prioritize most important pages. Usually can be fixed sitewide with CSS or content can be edited programatically. |
| SERPS | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Audit SERPS for dates of posts ranking on the first page to determine if freshness could be a ranking factor. If you determine it to be a factor, make sure that Google associates your important pages with a recent date. |
| Header | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 | Audit for pages with missing titles. |
| SERPS | 4 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Analyze top SERPS for words included in title tags, make sure to include them in your titles when it is appropriate to do so. |
| Google Analytics | 3 | 2 | 5 | 4 | Properly set up important GA4 settings such as bot filtering, enhanced measurement, outbound clicks, site search, video engagement, file downloads, Google signals data collection, data retention, Reporting attribution, model, goals completion. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Check for pages with high rankings, but low impressions. This could indicate that it is easy to rank for the main word and one should try to include keywords related to the main keyword to increase visibility and traffic. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 5 | 2 | 4 | Find all the keywords that the important pages are ranking for, but aren’t present on those pages. This includes synonyms. Prioritize them by search volume and add them where appropriate for an easy ranking boost. |
| Architecture | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Does every category have a practical name and purpose? |
| Content | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Audit for thin content. If lots of pages have a few words, it could indidate low quality or even a hacked site. Decide if thin content pages have to exist, if not decide to delete, merge, improve, redirect or block them. |
| Header | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Check for pages with duplicate titles. |
| Header | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Do titles include current year or even current month? Audit the SERPS to see if other results have current year in titles. If appropriate add them for a decent CTR boost. |
| Links | 3 | 3 | 4 | 3 | Check if internal anchor text is relevent, but it is important to ensure that it is not too keyword stuffed. Anchor text should not just say “click here”. |
| Links | 3 | 3 | 4 | 3 | Identify 404 pages that have external incoming links. If links are good quality redirect or revive these pages to reclaim “link equity”. |
| Url | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Audit for tag pages, staging URLs and other junk pages for better crawl budget management. |
| Architecture | 4 | 3 | 4 | 2 | Assess if the site uses breadcrumbs? Do they point to the proper canonical version? |
| Content | 4 | 3 | 2 | 4 | When it is appropriate to do so, check the industry related sections on major sites (like Reddit). Extract the popular topics and make sure to add them on your site. |
| Content | 3 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Audit for duplicate or near duplicate content. Then decide to keep, redirect, merge, or delete them. |
| Google Business Profile | 4 | 2 | 4 | 3 | It is important to respond to reviews on GBP. |
| Google Search Console | 4 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Check Google Search console for keywords and pages that used to rank, but don’t rank anymore (compare dates). Add those words to your content where appropriate for an easy boost. |
| Header | 4 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Audit if title tags include the important entities about the topic |
| Header | 4 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Does the site use a favicon? It can appear in some searches. |
| Headings | 3 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Check if H1-H6 headings are unique, descriptive but not too keyword stuffed. |
| Headings | 4 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Assess if H1 headings include target keywords. |
| Robots.txt | 4 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Dissalow wp-admin pages, thank you, login, cart pages… |
| Server Response | 3 | 2 | 4 | 4 | Audit for pages with 301, 302 or similar response being linked to internally and fix the links. |
| Server Response | 3 | 4 | 4 | 2 | Check for pages with 500 errors, usually related to hosting issues or coding problems |
| Content | 5 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Does the main keyword appear in the first 100 words of content. This is importaint as research shows that this feature gives a ranking boost. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Audit Google Search console for keywords that don’t rank on the first page but have lots of views. Then optimize pages for those words for more traffic. |
| Images | 3 | 2 | 5 | 3 | Resize images to their proper display dimensions for speed boost. |
| Speed | 3 | 2 | 5 | 3 | Check for response times of all pages. Ideally time to first byte should be below 0.5 seconds. Try to fix sitewide or prioritize individual pages |
| Content | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Audit if above fold has unique content. Ideally this should be on all pages, or if that is not possible, on most important pages. |
| Google Business Profile | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | To get more reviews, ask customers if they were happy with the purchase process or service, if not, take them to feedback form. If the answer is yes, take them to Google Business Profile reviews. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Check Mobile usability issues in Google Search console. |
| SERPS | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Audit Google cache of important pages if links and content show up normally. |
| Links | 2 | 4 | 2 | 5 | Check for internal linking opportunities to most important pages, then link them from appropriate related pages. |
| Sitemap | 5 | 4 | 1 | 4 | Review if the sitemap is pinging Google after new content is added? This makes a big difference in how fast the new content is indexed. |
| User Experience | 4 | 2 | 5 | 2 | Assess if the links look like clickable links? Don’t keep visitors guessing if they are looking at a workable link. Does not have impact on SEO, but important for UX. |
| Research | 5 | 4 | 1 | 4 | Was keyword tracking enabled? The most reliable way to set it up is with Looker/Google Data Studio connected to Google Search Console. 100% free and more reliable than any paid solution. |
| Error | 5 | 1 | 5 | 3 | Does a 404 page look useful, does it link to other useful resources on your site? Plain 404 page is a wasted opportunity. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 5 | 5 | 1 | Audit Google Search Console for security issues. |
| Architecture | 3 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Check website structure for crawl depth of all pages, make sure the more important the page, the closer it is to the homepage. Ideally this should be achieved in 3 clicks. |
| Content | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Is there internal search? It is always better for visitors to search on your site then go back to Google to search. |
| Content | 2 | 3 | 4 | 3 | Find a list of questions that people are searching on your internal search and make sure to answer them. It is better to answer them yourself than to let the competition give the answers. |
| Content | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Is the site WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) & ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) Compliance. Could help you avoid lawsuits. |
| Google Analytics | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Audit traffic acquisition and most visited pages. This will give you an idea of who is linking to you. Also good idea to visit linking pages for brand management. |
| Google Search Console | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Check all the external backlinks on Google Search Console. If external links are not showing, or few internal links are showing, site could be under the algorithmic penalty. |
| Header | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Find pages with missing canonical tags or tags pointing elsewhere, and remedy the problem. Even if it is not causing any issues now, you can’t assume that you will always have the perfect site architecture or properly targeted incoming external links. |
| Header | 4 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Carefully test checkmarks and other emoticons in description when appropriate. Tests show it increases CTR. |
| Headings | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Match H1 to title tag. |
| Htaccess | 4 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Check how many redirects are from HTTP to HTTPS. All redirects should have one hop, instead of non-www-http->www-http->www-https and so on… |
| Images | 3 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Check if image alt attributes are missing and if they include helpful and important keywords. |
| Links | 3 | 3 | 2 | 4 | Audit if any page has too few links pointing to it (or none at all). |
| Links | 3 | 3 | 4 | 2 | Check for pages with a large number of external links. Is there is a good reason for that? It is important for SEO to audit this feature as too many external links could mean that the page hacked or spammed. |
| Links | 3 | 3 | 4 | 2 | Do all the navigation links work when Javascript is turned off? |
| Links | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Review if the site links out to low quality spam sites? |
| Logs | 4 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Check server log files. |
| Security | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Audit if there are pages with mixed secure and unsecure content. Try to make all content secure. |
| SERPS | 2 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Look at the featured snippets for all the major keywords. See what Google likes and try to copy the format, but improve what the competitors already have on their pages. |
| Serps | 3 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Do the homepage and other important pages show up for branded search? |
| SERPS | 3 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Check site:domain.com intitle:last year, to update old content. |
| Sitemap | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Check if the sitemap file is including all the URLs, and displaying proper dates. |
| Speed | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Audit if CSS and JavaScript are minified, compressed and deferred when appropriate. This will improve core web vitals significantly. |
| Speed | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Check for “first contentful paint”, “time to interactive” and “cumulative layout shift”. |
| User Experience | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Check for instrusive popups, ads and interstitials. May have affect on SEO as well as UX. |
| User Experience | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Does the site have too many ads above fold? This one too my have affect on SEO as well as UX. |
| User Experience | 3 | 3 | 4 | 2 | Is the header part of the content too big (for example the top image)? |
| Videos | 3 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Are important keywords surrounding videos? Could help with video search. |
| Header | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | Meta description should match the first paragraf. Tests show that this increases the change of it being used in SERPS. |
| Headings | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Audit for pages with missing, duplicate or multiple H1 tags. |
| Links | 4 | 2 | 4 | 2 | Check outgoing social media links if they still point to working pages. |
| SERPS | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Usually Google treats plural version of an entity the same as singular. If that is not the case (Audit the SERPS to compare), make sure to include the plural version on important pages. |
| Google Analytics | 5 | 2 | 3 | 2 | Check the language, countries, devices of visitors, time spent. By themselves none of these are a problem, but can give you clues for what to look into further. |
| Images | 2 | 2 | 5 | 3 | Implement “Lazy Loading” of images. No direct SEO benefit but important for speed. |
| Content | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Check if pages have issues when CSS and JavaScript are turned off. |
| Conversions | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Are bullet forms too long? May not have impact on SEO, but important for UX. |
| Header | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Check for pages with duplicate meta descriptions. Descriptions may not be a ranking factor, but are very important for CTR. |
| Links | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Identify missing 404 pages with internal links and remove those links. |
| Links | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Try adding your site on data syndicating sites such as Wikidata. |
| Links | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Audit for competitors’ new links. It may make sense to get a link from those sources. |
| Links | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Implement brand monitoring with Google Alerts. It could be a great opportunity to get a link if they are not already linking to you. |
| Logs | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Look at log server files for crawling stats, to find bad bots, and see what response codes Googlebot is getting. |
| Other | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Check archive.org to see what was on the site previously. |
| SERPS | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | If the site lost traffic and/or CTR is small, check if SERPS changed and added new features like video, snippets, images, GBP. Try to add those elements to your most important pages. |
| Server Response | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Check for infinite redirects. |
| Speed | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Set up monitoring of important URLs for their speed and server responses. |
| Url | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Check pages with an ad blocker and without ad blocker to see if something is missing. Something could be missing just because it was named the wrong way and incorrectly detected as an ad. |
| Url | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Check if any URLs use query parameters? And are those parameters they necessary? (could be crawler traps) |
| Conversions | 4 | 1 | 4 | 3 | Limit on screen Calls-to-action to one |
| Google Analytics | 2 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Implement site search in Google Analytics to see what visitors are searching for. If the site doesn’t have that content, add it where appropriate. |
| Google Analytics | 2 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Check out funnel and path exploration to get a better idea of how users interact within the site. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 4 | 1 | 4 | In Google Search Console, identify keywords with a low CTR and a high position. Improve title and description tags on those pages. |
| Header | 3 | 2 | 4 | 2 | Check for pages with missing meta descriptions. Descriptions may not be a ranking factor but are very important for CTR. |
| Header | 2 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Check if meta descriptions have the most important info in the first 150 characters, and less important info add after that. They need to be an effective advertisement and entice the user to click through to your page, but without soudngin click-baity. If meta descriptions contain important keywords, they may be bolded in SERPS. Descriptions used less than 30% by Google, but CTR improvement could be worth it. |
| Htaccess | 4 | 1 | 4 | 3 | Are bots that are slamming the site properly blocked? |
| Links | 4 | 1 | 4 | 3 | Check if links to external sites open in a new window (when appropriate)? |
| Links | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Add the site to all the obvious linking sites (Yelp, data aggregators…). Then make sure that search engines know about those pages by linking to them and pinging the links. Otherwise it could take search engines too long to detect those important links. |
| Links | 4 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Are there any internal links with a nofollow attribute? Check if they need to be nofollow. |
| Links | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 | Check if there are links to internal search. This could be a crawler trap. |
| Schema | 3 | 2 | 2 | 4 | Check if the structured data is valid. |
| Schema | 2 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Check if other types of structured data can be added to the website. Prioritize schema that can enhance SERPS with rich snippets (such as breadcrumbs and reviews). |
| Security | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 | Check if the SSL certificate is recognized by major web browsers. |
| SERPS | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Check SERPS to make sure Google didn’t index any unusual URL parameters. |
| SERPS | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Check for duplicate homepage with inurl:index |
| Url | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Check if pages are all either www or non-www. Fix with implement redirection and canonical. |
| User Experience | 4 | 1 | 4 | 3 | Do forms ask for too much personal information? This will usually reduce conversions. |
| User Experience | 4 | 1 | 4 | 3 | Do you offer free shipping? Studies show that adding shipping cost to total price and then offering free shipping can significantly improve conversions. |
| Videos | 3 | 2 | 2 | 4 | Check if videos have proper schema. |
| Google Analytics | 3 | 1 | 5 | 3 | Are conversions properly tracked? This would greatly help with prioritizing important pages. |
| Sitemap | 5 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Check if the sitemap file is submited to Bing and Google. |
| Conversions | 2 | 1 | 5 | 4 | Test different call-to-action formats and wording. |
| Google Analytics | 4 | 1 | 5 | 2 | Check if Google Analytics/Tag manager are properly triggering and collecting data. |
| Google Search Console | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Check Google Search Console for manual actions. Make sure to fix the issue and file reconsideration request when appropriate. |
| Htaccess | 5 | 1 | 4 | 2 | Is directory indexing disabled? This could be a big security flaw if it is left open. |
| Robots.txt | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Check robots.txt and make sure you are not disallowing anything you want crawled, and blocking anything you don’t want crawled. |
| Robots.txt | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Make sure robots.txt is not blocking JavaScript and CSS that Google needs for rendering. |
| Content | 2 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Check if the site has paginated content? Does it make sense to keep it paginated? |
| Content | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Check for pages containting only one media, such as images. Sometimes CMS create them automatically and this can increase your site’s useless page count significantly. |
| Content | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Check for unnecesary plugins. |
| Error | 3 | 2 | 3 | 2 | Check for major HTML validation errors and CSS errors. HTML validation is not a ranking factor, but an improper HTML could confuse search engines and CSS errors could cause rendering issues. |
| Google Analytics | 3 | 1 | 4 | 3 | Google Analytics can tell you what social media pages the visitors are coming from . This can help you prioritise your social media campaigns. |
| Google Search Console | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | Check if the host had any problems. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Check the crawl stats for issues, response codes and unusualy large percentage of images, CSS and other file types. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Check the enhacements section for possible issues. |
| Google Search Console | 4 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Check sitemaps section inside Google Search Console. Pay attention to “last read dates” and discovered URLs. |
| Header | 4 | 1 | 3 | 3 | Check for open graph tags and implement them when appropriate. |
| Header | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Check for words that are repeated within the same title tag. Some repeats are ok, but too many could look spammy. |
| Headings | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Check if there are multiple H1 headings. |
| Images | 2 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Check if images have unique alt attributes. |
| Links | 2 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Search for your brand name to see who is mentioning your business. Ask for a link if they are not already linking to you. |
| SERPS | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Has the site been scraped? Most people recommend Copyscape to check this issue, but their bot can be blocked. To be safe, check Google for text unique to your important pages. |
| Sitemap | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Check if sitemap contains functioning URLs that we want to keep out of index. |
| Sitemap | 4 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Make sure that the sitemap file is valid. |
| Url | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Check for URLs that are too long or have non standard characters, excessive paramaters, spaces and multiple slashes. |
| Url | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Check if URLs have consistant capitalization. |
| User Experience | 3 | 1 | 4 | 3 | Does a landing page have too many options where an user can go? Check the most important pages because this will reduce conversions. |
| Conversions | 2 | 1 | 4 | 4 | Check if subheadlines align with the headline and convert attention to interest. |
| Google Search Console | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Check “Removals” section for a list of pages that may have been accidently or purposly removed. |
| Headings | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Check if pages have too many headings compared to content. |
| SCHEMA | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | If Google favours pages with a certain type of schema on them, try to implement that schema. At the moment schema is not a direct factor, but could be in the future. |
| Security | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Check if the site correctly redirects to HTTPS? Try to test some pages with just HTTP:// and look at HTTP headers. |
| SERPS | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Search site:domain.com -inurl:https, or -www to find junk pages. |
| Conversions | 2 | 1 | 5 | 3 | Does an important landing page answer where a visitor is, what they can do and why they should do that (within 5-10 seconds ideally) |
| Robots.txt | 5 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Check robots.txt for errors. |
| Bing | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Do all the same checks in Bing Webmaster Tols that we did in Google Search Console. Organic traffic from Bing is much lower than from Google, but is still worth looking into. |
| Header | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Make sure internal search results have: meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”. |
| Sitemap | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Check if the sitemap contains 404, 301, 302 pages. |
| Architecture | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Review any category pages if they have too many or too few items in them. |
| Content | 1 | 2 | 4 | 3 | Check if every important page has something interesting at every scroll. |
| Conversions | 4 | 1 | 3 | 2 | Check if the site contains unsubstantiated claims. |
| Htaccess | 4 | 1 | 3 | 2 | Is POST method limited only to admin’s and editor’s IP. This is not always appropriate to implement but helps greatly with security. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Check if Google picked the same canonical that you did for the most important pages. |
| Google Search Console | 2 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Check “Pages” section to see what is indexed and what is not indexed yet. Check reasons for not indexed, particularly “crawled not indexed”, “Page with redirect”, “excluded by noidex tag”, “Not found (404)”, “Alternate page with proper canonical tag”, “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”. If it stays “Discovered – currently not indexed” for a long time, it could indicate not enough internal links. “Crawled – currently not indexed” could indicate not worth being indexed yet. |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Check Bing performance compared to Google performance. If they both went down it could be a technical issue. This saves lots of time when diagnosing. |
| Header | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Check the robots meta tags in HTML headers and X-Robots-Tag in HTTP headers. |
| Header | 4 | 1 | 2 | 3 | Does the site use RSS? Implementing this could help some visitors access your content. |
| Links | 2 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Search for competitors’ brand and look where their reviews and mentions are coming from. Try to list your site there. |
| SERPS | 2 | 1 | 4 | 3 | Check all results for your brand and address all the negative mentions. |
| Server Response | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Check HTTP headers to see if non-existing pages will actually return 404 instead of 200. |
| User Experience | 2 | 1 | 4 | 3 | Audit if landing pages contain large walls of text that are boring. Does not impact on SEO, but important for user experience. |
| Content | 5 | 1 | 4 | 1 | Does the site have clear contact info, privacy policy, copyright, GDPR, terms of service… |
| Htaccess | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Check if MIME types have proper expiration time. |
| Images | 1 | 2 | 2 | 5 | Are main keywords included in easily read text inside images? Google will read them and this helps with image search. |
| Security | 5 | 1 | 2 | 2 | Fix common security issues by editing htaccess. Not directly related to SEO, but can have serious consequences. |
| Sitemap | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Does the site have a video and image sitemap. Add them when appropriate. |
| Sitemap | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Audit if there is a link to the site’s sitemap in their robots.txt? |
| Google Search Console | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Check if Google thinks some pages are soft 404 pages. |
| Header | 3 | 2 | 1 | 3 | Check for non self referencing canonicals. |
| Images | 2 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Audit if image file names are descriptive. This makes a difference in image search SEO. |
| Links | 3 | 2 | 1 | 3 | Check if outgoing external links, (especially ads) have rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” when appropriate. |
| SERPS | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Audit for staging versions of the site. Search for terms from your site -inurl:site.com |
| Url | 3 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Do URLs consistently forward to the trailing version. You could use Screaming Frog regular expressions to find pages with slash/no slash |
| Content | 2 | 2 | 4 | 1 | Check for spam comments. |
| Header | 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 | Audit if the site’s language is properly declared in the HTML tag. |
| Robots.txt | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Check if robots.txt is blocking any pages that it shouln’t block |
| Sitemap | 4 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Sitemap size should be no larger than 50mb, and no more then 50K URLs |
| Content | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Audit if there is important content that is only loading with Iframe or JavaScript. That is not a reliable way to display content, especially not for SEO. |
| Google Analytics | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | Check Google Analytics for pages with unusual engagement/bounce rate compared to other pages. By itself this number may not matter too much for SEO, but could indicate a problem especially if it significantly changed for any one page. Compare them to pages with low bounce rate to see if you spot any difference. Audit incoming queries and make content above fold more relevant for those queries. |
| Header | 2 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Check for HREF LANG when appropriate. Also check if the return links and x-default are missing. |
| Robots.txt | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Audit if there are pages or folders that should be included in robots.txt? |
| Server Response | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Do duplicate pages with parameters do 301 redirect to the original page? This is important even if they have a canonical, because case studies show that 301 is somewhat better than just a canonical. |
| Url | 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 | Keep words in URLs in the same order that users would search for. |
| Sitemap | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Make sure the sitemap file is valid. |
| Google Search Console | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Check the “Disavow file” for links or domains that may have been accidently or purpously put there. |
| Headings | 2 | 1 | 1 | 4 | Are headings in order? Ideally they would be, but this won’t make any practical SEO difference. |
| Robots.txt | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Check if robots.txt is blocking something that is already indexed. |