How to Do a Website Audit to Improve SEO and UX in 10 Steps

With our powerful SEO audit software, you can identify any issues that may be causing slow load times and take action to improve page speed for maximum impact. With SEO audits, you can discover new ways to improve the user experience (UX) of your website. For example, if your site features a ton of broken links, resulting in 404 errors, you’re providing a less-than-stellar experience for visitors. For more in-depth insights, a technical SEO audit is the next step. This audit assesses technical aspects, such as website structure, mobile-friendliness, and indexing.

A thorough SEO audit shows how well a site follows best practices. It highlights errors that prevents a website from reaching its full potential in search rankings. Doing an audit helps website owners create a plan for improvement, supporting long-term success in organic search results. Given you’re optimizing for search engines, it’s key to understand how much organic traffic you’re driving through them.

Covering the foundations of technical SEO, the crawling and indexing section of the audit makes sure that search engines can find, crawl, and index your content without challenge. As we created the audit, we realized that SEOs also want to check other traffic-impacting site issues that aren’t necessarily technical. Hence, we ended up with a more complete Technical SEO and beyond site audit — one that covers nearly every important SEO area with the potential to impact traffic and rankings.

Keyword research

If you’re looking for professional help, consider resources available through platforms like Shopify Academy to further enhance your skills. Delve into your analytics to gather data on user behavior, traffic sources, and conversion rates. SEO tools and AI are increasingly helpful, but they’re still just tools. Ultimately, your own human judgment, experience, and common sense remain the most critical factors in effective SEO. Meanwhile, fundamental aspects of SEO, such as strategic keyword targeting or on-page optimization, are completely missing since no tool can fully capture these nuances. A clear keyword map ensures every page has a defined role, which makes your entire SEO strategy more effective.

This harms their user experience and potentially drives them away from your website. Now that we’re done with preparatory work, let’s move on to the key steps of an SEO audit checklist. Before you embark on a technical SEO audit (of a newly bought domain or an existing one), check if it’s not under any search engine sanctions.

• To understand how well your site engages users, use tools like Hotjar to analyze behavior, such as where visitors click, how they scroll, and which sections they interact with the most.
• The goal of auditing your site’s user experience (UX) is to identify friction points and optimize them so users can effortlessly find what they’re looking for.
• Your pages gain more value, and you have the potential for people to click the link on the other page and land on your website.
• By addressing these, you improve visibility, drive more organic traffic, and make sure your website is optimized for search engines.
• You can check your incoming links using a backlink checker tool or the Google Search console’s ‘Links to your site’ report.

How To Perform An SEO Audit (in 15 Steps With Checklist)

If you’re an online retailer, our team has extensive eCommerce expertise and can deliver one of the most detailed and comprehensive eCommerce SEO audits available. The audit will help you be more prepared and eliminate unknowns when heading into a full comprehensive SEO campaign. To play on the safe side, you can automate technical SEO audits and set up alerts in WebSite Auditor. In the pop-up window, click Add and choose the Rebuild project option. To audit your site for JavaScript issues, you need to enable JavaScript execution in expert options when you create a new project (or rebuild an existing one). Though Google has no serious penalties for duplicate content, such pages can still ruin your position and reputation.

And Core Web Vitals is actually part of a wider ranking signal called “Page Experience”. In 2021, Google’s Core Web Vitals became an official ranking factor. But a good target is scoring 90+ in Google PageSpeed Insights (mobile and desktop), and a load time of under 2 seconds in GTmetrix. We’ve covered the topic in detail in this Page Speed Optimization Guide. But I will say that speeding up your site is something that’s worth spending time on. You can find the number of indexed pages for your site in Google Search Console’s “Coverage” report.

Step 2: Detect crawlability and indexing issues

In most cases, improvements to your site’s speed require your in-house or agency’s development team. For instance, an SEO audit reviews the title tags of your webpages, which relates to content marketing. For a quick refresher, title tags serve as the title of your webpage in search results.

Each page should have a unique title that includes the topic (or keyword) that that page is meant to target. Performing an SEO audit regularly SEO Anomaly helps maintain your website’s health and search visibility. Systematically checking indexing, technical performance, on-page SEO, and backlinks, helps you to address any issues before they affect your rankings. Implementing  practices makes sure your site remains competitive and well-optimized for search engines.

If you need to recrawl a massive amount of URLs, you can submit a sitemap instead of manually adding each URL to the URL inspection tool. To do this, in Google Search Console, submit the updated URL (or several URLs) to the URL Inspection tool and click Request indexing. With a list of affected pages, you can also check how Google renders a certain page in Google Search Console. Check Language Versions to see what language versions your website has. Additionally, review Pages with hreflang elements to get a list of URLs with those elements. If any of your pages have issues, check the platform recommendations and take relevant measures.