Perform SEO Website Audit in Just 15 Minutes

 Perform SEO Website Audit in Just 15 Minutes [Guide]

Today, we are going to discuss how to do seo website audits in just 30 minutes. I’ll share a free website auditing checklist with a detailed explanation.

After reading this quick guide of site auditing, you can easily audit your website and perform required steps to enhance your website performance for the search engine.

One more thing, you’ll get an audit report template at the end of this guide. So that you can share a professional audited report with your clients.

1. TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT

Here’s the quick checklist of technical seo auditing which will help you to find out development issues which directly affect your seo performance. 

Image Optimization

Images play an important role in website designing process. It gives a better experience and straight message to your readers.

Google also gives deep focus on image optimization and sends direct traffic to your website through Google images. You can optimize your images in the following ways.

ALT Attribute Optimize: 

Identify: You have to check all <img /> tags of the webpage. Is there any empty alt=”” attribute found or not.

Fix: You have to use LSI keywords or related keywords in ALT attributes. It helps Google to understand about your image. ALT text increases visibility in Google search images. 

you‘ll also see an increase in organic traffic on your website which directly comes from Google Search Image.

Title Attribute Optimize: 

Identify: You can easily identify title=”” attributes of <img /> tags by searching them. 

Fix: You can also use focus keyword or related keywords in title=”” attribute to optimize your image. It will improve the website’s structure according to W3 org guidelines.

To learn about the benefits of title attributes. You can read the Moz article on title attributes and its seo benefits.

Image Size:

Now we encounter most essential optimization techniques which directly affect your site speed and page size of websites. Large numbers of images on a web page increase your server requests. 

Big-sized images increase your page size and leads to increase in page loading speed. We have to fix both these findings and boost site speed for better ranking.

I was doing many things from the last 5 years to decrease server requests and page size to upgrade site speed for seo rankings.

Identify: You can use GTMetrix tool for identifying your total server requests and size of your all images at one place. So that you can optimize as per your convenience. 

Fix: Here are multiple steps to be taken to optimize your images for better performance.

1. Image Compression: You have to compress the size of your images as GTMetrix tells you to do. It will decrease page size and increase site speed of your web page. 

Kindly do not keep any of the images in MB size. Reduce all the image sizes into KB. But, don’t distort the quality of the image because user experience matters the most.

You can use  CompressJpeg or CompressPng tools to optimize your images size.

Combine same sized images: If you are using multiple icons in your website design and all are in the same size. So you can combine them into a single image and reduce server requests for every image. 

You can use CSS Sprite Generator to combine your icons into a single image and can implement into the website.

3. Remove unwanted images: Scan your website layout and try to keep it simple. There is no need to keep your design complex and clutter with unrelated images.

Ask your designer to remove some unrelated images and redesign the same portion of the website in a more efficient way.

4. Rename Images: Yes, you are thinking right. I’m asking you to rename all images used in your web page. 

I know it will not increase your site speed or improve page size. But, it will help search engines to rank your images higher in image searches.

Your image name becomes your image url structure. Image name used by search engines to identify about your image. 

Identify: Do right click on your image and select ‘open image in new tab’. You can easily see your image name in the url structure.

Fix: Use focus keyword or LSI keywords to keep your image name into the website. It will boost your image’s ranking in search engines. 

Also helps search engines to understand your page with these keywords and increase the ranking of web pages.

Remove Commented Code

Most of the developers skip this activity before final delivery of the website. They left some piece of commented code. 

While rendering  your website on browser, commented code does not execute or do not affect any module of your website.

But, it increases your page size and load every time when your web pages get loaded.

Identify: You can use [ctrl + u] to check the page source where you can find commented code highlighted in green color.

Fix: So, it is important to ask your tech team to remove commented code from the website before uploading on the server.

CSS & JS Optimization

Not a single website can design without using these two files. So, it is our prime job to focus on these two files too. 

.CSS files used to design your website which contains all styling properties of your website. .JS files used to develop your website which contain all animation scripts.

Identify: Ask your tech team to recheck these files and perform required action to optimize them. You can identify by yourself by doing [ctrl + u]. 

Find .css or .js extension files in page source. Click on those links to check commented code or repeated code.

Fix: Remove all commented code and repeated code from these files. Kindly use a minified version of these files. Minified files are less in size than original files. It reduces total page size and increases site speed.

Try to combine .css/ .js files or keep less number of files. You can reduce total server requests while rendering your website.

Anchor Tag

Anchor <a href=”” /> tag is used to link from one page to another. Anchor tag plays a vital role in any website designing process. Anchor tag is divided into two parts i.e. anchor text & title attributes.

Anchor text:

Anchor text is the text at which we click to redirect to another page. Use of focus keyword or relevant keyword as an anchor text. 

Anchor text relevancy helps search engines to understand about redirected web pages.

Trying to avoid using read more, learn more, click here kind of anchor text. These keywords do not provide any relevance to search engines while crawling your web page.

Title Attribute:

Use title attribute same as anchor text. It increases the relevancy of linked pages by any search engine while crawling through your website.

404 Error Page

Every website needs to have this 404 error page. It helps you to protect your website from the negative impact of broken links and your customers will not have any bad experiences.

Identify: Open any url which is not linked with your domain. You are redirected to the unwanted or any broken page. It means your website is missing 404 error pages.

Fix: You have asked your developer to design a 404 error page and fix redirection in case of a broken link. You can link your services page, best articles or any resource in the 404 error page. 

So that users don’t try to leave your website instantly and he can redirect to your best resource from the error page. It improves user experience and decreases the bounce rate of the website.

Favicon

It is also known as a favorite icon. Favicon shows at the tab of the browser. It is just a simple icon. It provides better user experience and authenticity to users i.e. this website is not fake.

Identify: You just have to look at the tab of the browser. If you find no icon at the left of the tab. 

Fix: Ask your developer to fix favicon for your website. Favicon must be in square shape. Try to keep only 1-2 letters of your brand name or iconic image of your brand logo.

Keep your favicon simple and easy to remember by users.

Internal CSS/JS

Using internal CSS or JS is bad practice for coding standards. Ask your developer not use internal CSS or JS.

Identify: Press [ctrl + u] to open the page source of your website. Press [ctrl = f] to search style attribute [style=’’’]. If you find css code into the style attribute. It must be fixed.

Fix: Ask your developer to fix all internal CSS or JS throughout the website.

Social Media Connection

Social media links help your users to find out and follow on your social handles. It helps you to grow your social handles and can engage with regular content.

Identify: You can find social handles at the top header or footer of the website.check your social handles by clicking them. Whether they are redirecting at correct urls or not.

Fix: You have to provide social links to your developer and ask him to link to your website

Total Request

It is the total server request that occurs while rendering your webpage. Every image and files count in request.

Identify: You can use network of your console or GTMetrix tool to know total request of your web page 

Fix: You can combine css or js files. Use css sprite generator to merge images and reduce total image request. Remove unused files from your web page. It’ll help you to load pages quickly.

2. WEBSITE AUDIT USING TOOLS

Site Speed

User will stay at your website or not. This all depends on your website speed. 

1 second delay in page response can result in 7% reduction in conversion.

Identify: You can use GTMetrix or pingdom tool to check your page speed. 

Fix: For improving your site speed you have to perform various activities including reduce total requests, compress image, remove commented code, reduce page size & upgrade your server configuration.

GZIP Compression

It compresses your file size and helps the server to load websites faster than usual time.

Identify: Test your website at GTMetrix tool. It will tell you whether your website has used GZIP compression into the .htaccess file or not.

Fix: Use given below code into the .htaccess file

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

# Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent

</IfModule>

Expires Headers

Less people focus on this parameter. It helps you to reduce http requests while communicating with the server. Browsers use cache files which was stored on first time load.

Identify: GTMetrix test also shows whether an expires header is  implemented into the .htaccess file or not.

Fix: Paste below code into the .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_expires.c>

ExpiresActive On

# Images
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/webp "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"

# Video
ExpiresByType video/mp4 "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType video/mpeg "access plus 1 year"

# CSS, JavaScript
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 month"

# Others
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month"

</IfModule>

Page Size

Speed of your website majorly depends on the size of your web page. You always have to track your size of every page. So that website takes less time to load.

Identify: You can use GTMetrix tool to get your page size.

Fix: I have already shared some steps which help  you to decrease page size of your website such as image compression, remove commented code, remove unwanted images & uss minified version of css and js files.

GTMatrix Score

Whenever you run a test on GTMetrix tool, you will get a page speed score in percentage. GTMetrix score will not help you to get a higher ranking in search engines. But, it will show you vital steps to be taken to improve your score. 

I covered some of those issues in this guide which will definitely help you to achieve a better GTMetrix score for your web page.

YSlow Score

GTMetrix also shows YSlow score for your website. YSlow contains some other parameters which helps you to enhance your website performance.

Google Insight Score

Google also provides its own tool which helps you to know about your website performance and major issues that need to be fixed.

Google PageSpeed Insights provides scores for both mobile and desktop users separately.

Identify: Run a test on Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

Fix: Ask your developer to go through those issues and fix to improve your web page performance. 

3. COMPATIBILITY CHECK

Browser Compatible

There are several browsers available on the internet. And, you cannot push your readers to use one browser while using your website.

You have to make your website browser compatible which runs smoothly on all the available browsers. Here is the screenshot which shows the number of users per browsers.

Identify: Download and Install all browsers into your system and run your website to check their compatibility. Here is the list of mostly used browsers with download links.

1. Google Chrome
2. Safari
3. Mozilla Firefox
4. Opera
5. Microsoft Edge
6. Internet Explorer
7. AOL Explorer

Fix: Your developer will fix those identified issues in different browsers. You also can ask your tech team to develop your browser compatible website before signing a project with them.

Device Responsive

Desktop users decreasing day by day. More than 60% of users search on Google with mobile phones. Google launched its algo which focuses on mobile friendly websites. 

Google will not rank your website, if your website is not mobile friendly. Google wants to give the best experience to their users with all devices. Here is the quick list of devices where you need to check responsiveness.

1. Desktop
2. Laptop
3. Tablets
4. Ipads
5. Iphone
6. Mobile Devices
7. Other screen size devices

Identify: You have to use your website on multiple devices. I can understand nobody can have such a huge list of devices.

You can use your browser to perform this device test for your website. Here are the steps to check device compatibility on multiple devices.

1. Do [Right Click] on your website.
2. Open [Inspect] of your browser.
3. Press mobile icon in the top left corner
4. Your website will open in device responsive format
5. You can change devices from top of the device.

Fix: ask your tech team to fix responsiveness issues and make your website mobile friendly.

Image Quality

Quality images provide better user experience while scanning your website. High quality images keep your users engaged with your website and increase probability of lead conversions. 

Do not use someone else’s copyrighted images on your website. Try to use free stock images or shutterstock paid images. You will never get in trouble with paid images.

Identify: Scan your website from top to bottom. Check every page of the website. You can ask for feedback from your family or friends. Collect all the issues and send it to your tech team.

Fix: Ask your tech team to change copyrighted, low quality or unwanted images from your website.

4. GOOGLE TOOLS AUDIT

Google Analytics

As you know about Google Analytics, it shows website’s traffic, traffic from sources, real time visitors data and analytical reports. Your website must be connected to Google Analytics. So that you can regularly get real time data about your website traffic.

Identify: Login to your Google Analytics account from your connected Gmail ID. if you are receiving data into your dashboard on a regular basis. It means your website is connected to your analytics account.

Fix: Ask your developer to paste Google Analytics script into the head of your website.

Google Webmaster

Google webmaster is used for your website’s health, link indexing, keywords rank and lot more. Webmaster tells you average keyword position, total number of clicks and broken links status.

Identify: login to your webmaster account and check whether you are receiving data or not.

Fix: Ask your marketing team to register on webmaster and verify its authentication. 

Bing Webmaster

You need to register your website on Bing Webmaster to get indexed in Bing search engine. 

You can submit your weblinks to get indexes quickly in search engines. Bing also shows traffic reports of the website.

Identify: Login to your bing webmaster dashboard. Dashboard starts showing traffic updates for the website.

Fix: Ask your marketing team to register and provide you dashboard access to the webmaster. So that you keep yourself updated with website performance.

5. DOMAIN AUDITING

SSL Certificate

It provides secure connection between your browser and server. Your data is sent to the server in encrypted form. You are thinking that, how it is useful for seo.

Https with your domain name shows that your website is secure and authentic. This authenticity increases trust in the eyes of users and Google as well.

Secured sites get higher ranking than unsecured sites.

Identify: look at your top left corner of the url structure. You’ll see a padlock with https.

Fix: if you don’t find https in your website’s url. Ask your developer to connect the ssl certificate with your domain name.

Duplicacy in URLs

In designing a website, the index page is redirected to the main domain of your website. Here, I’m sharing a list of similar links for any website but different for search engines.

1. www.domain.com/
2. http://www.domain.com/
3. https://www.domain.com/
4. https://domain.com/
5. https.www.domain.com/index.html/
6. https.www.domain.com/index.html/

Identify: You can open your website with examples and check whether they are redirecting to the same url or not.

Fix: Ask your tech team to redirect them to the same url. Given below paste into your .htaccess file and check whether they are redirecting to the mentioned url.

Domain Authority

It is the score which is given to your domain on calculating by multiple factors. Domain authority is developed by moz which tells you how your website is ranking in search engines.

Identify: you can use any of the tools available on the internet. I would recommend using opensiteexplorer or smallseotools to calculate your current domain authority.

Fix: As your website starts getting high quality backlinks and organic traffic. you‘ll start seeing improvement in domain authority. Majorly focus on building quality backlinks.

Page Authority

Page authority also invented by team moz. It will tell you how your specific page is ranking in SERP. These rankings are calculated from 1 to 100. 100 is the best ranking you ever achieved.

Identify: Opensiteexplorer and smallseotools both are the page authority checker tools. You can check your current rank on your web page.

Fix: Create unique content which your audience loves and build high quality links. You will definitely get a boost in your page authority.

6. ON PAGE AUDIT

Meta Content Optimization

Meta is the HTML tag which provides information about your webpage. Keep your meta content up-to-date so that search engines can know exactly about your web page.

Identify: Do [ctrl + u] and open page source or your webpage. Search for meta tags in your head tag of the web page. Here is the list of examples which need to be in your website.

Fix: Ask your marketing team to update your meta content into your website. 

H1 & H2 Tags

Use your focus keyword in H1 tag and related keywords in H2 tag. Google gives high priority to H1 and H2 tag in website structure. 

To rank your web pages higher in search engines, don’t forget to use the focus keyword in <h1> tag or you can use your post title in <h1> tag.

Identify: Open page source and search for <h1> & <h2> tag into your web page. Check weather proper keywords used for both tags or not.

Fix: Ask your marketing team to do keyword research and share keywords with the developer. So that he can implement it into the website.

SEO Friendly URLs

URL structure plays a vital role in search engine results. The best way to use your url structure is keep it short and focused. Kindly use the focus keyword in your urls. Here some comparison between url structure

Service Page:

Wrong: www.domain.com/service.html

Right: www.domain.com/website-designing-service.html

Blog Post:

Wrong: www.domain.com/bpost1

Wrong: www.domain.com/7-quick-tips-to-optimize-article-for-better-ranking

Right: www.domain.com/optimize-article-for-better-ranking

Identify: Firstly, do a keyword research and make a list of keywords at which you want to rank your website.

Fix: Share those keywords with your developer and ask him to use them in your url structure.

Open Graphs & Twitter Cards

This is also used as meta content for the web pages. Open graphs are developed by Facebook and twitter cards are developed by twitter and used to update snippets of both of them respectively.

Identify: Open page source [Ctrl + u} and search for og:title and twitter:title in your head tag of website.

Fix: Update title, image, description, url into your meta tag of open graphs and twitter cards. Below image shown to open graphs and twitter cards tags

Content Duplicacy

Google never ranks those websites which have duplicate content, adult content or any kind of harmful content.

Identify: Content duplicate checker tools available over the internet. You can use smallseotools or copyscape to check your content’s uniqueness.

Fix: Hire a professional content writer and rewrite your all content. By using these tools, check whether new content is unique or not. After that post content on your website.

Broken Links

Broken links can harm your website upto 60-70% in ranking as well as in traffic terms. Google never gives bad experience to their users that’s why Google never ranks those websites which have broken links.

Identify: Use online free broken links checker tools to identify all broken links. Google webmaster also shows reports of broken links into their dashboard.

Fix: Ask your tech team to remove those links from the website or design new pages for those links. Also ask your marketing team to remove those broken links from search engine results. So that your website doesn’t get penalised from Google.

Keyword in Content

Optimization of content is very important to rank your website in search engines. Google crawl your website and scan your content and check the density of your keywords.

On the basis of keywords, Google ranks your website for the same keyword. So try to use your related keywords among your content in a proper manner. Never try to over stuff your content with keywords.

Identify: Make a list of keywords and search into your content. Check frequency and relevancy of keywords used into the content.

Fix: Ask your content writer to use researched keywords while writing articles or service content for the website.

Sitemap

It is a kind of map which is used by search engines to crawl your website and index your web pages into their results. Sitemap contains links of all pages, videos, articles and other files. 

Sitemap helps search engines to navigate to all pages of your website and crawl them properly.

Identify: Open this link www.domain.com.sitemap.xml. You will find the sitemap of your website at the same link. Your sitemap must contain all the links of the website.

Fix: You can use an online free sitemap generator to generate your own updated sitemap. Ask your tech team to upload your sitemap with server files and submit it to Google webmaster and Bing webmaster. So that search engines can start tracking your web pages.

Robots TXT

It is just a simple txt file which gives permission to search engines about crawling. You can protect some pages by mentioning them disallowed in robots.txt file. 

Identify: Open this url robots.txt. You will find your robots.txt file and check your allowed and disallowed links.

Fix: Ask your developer to upload robots.txt with server files. You use below code to develop your robots.txt file.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /blog/wp-admin/ 

Allow: .js 

Allow: .css 

Sitemap: https://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

Sitemap: https://www.domain.com/sitemap-blog.xml

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are launched by Google to provide relevant information on the search engine itself. You also can use micro data or schema.org to register your content into featured snippets.

Identify: Open page source [Ctrl + u] of your web page and search for these keywords schema.org , itemscope or json/ld. Below image provides reference to featured snippets.

Fix: Ask your marketing team to update your web pages for featured snippets. You also can generate featured snippets for services, products, organisation, local business and websites. 

After generation of json/ld script, paste it in your code. Google has provided  structured data testing tools to perform online test.