The 18-Step SEO Audit Checklist By Backlinko

Introduction:

Improving your website’s SEO is a dynamic process that requires regular auditing to ensure optimal performance. Backlinko’s “The 18-Step SEO Audit Checklist” provides a detailed roadmap for conducting a thorough SEO audit in 2024, helping you identify areas of strength and opportunity for growth.

Key Highlights from the Checklist:

1. Organic Traffic Assessment: Begin by analyzing your organic traffic through Google Analytics to establish benchmarks and identify high-performing pages.
2. Full Site Crawl: Utilize tools like Screaming Frog or Semrush’s Site Audit to gather comprehensive data on your site’s crawlability, loading speed, internal linking, and on-page SEO.
3. On-Page SEO Optimization: Focus on optimizing your top 5 most important pages with targeted keywords, external and internal links, and SEO-optimized images.
4. Maximizing Internal Links: Enhance your site’s navigation and SEO by linking to high-priority pages and ensuring every page has at least one relevant internal link.
5. Optimizing for UX Signals: Improve your content to meet user expectations and boost UX signals that can positively impact your search rankings.
6. Featured Snippet Optimization: Increase your organic traffic by optimizing your content for featured snippets, which can dramatically increase visibility and click-through rates.
7. Page Rendering Check: Ensure your pages render correctly by using Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool and fix any discrepancies.
8. Mobile-Friendliness: With mobile-first indexing, make sure your site is fully optimized for mobile devices to meet Google’s standards and user expectations.
9. Indexing Verification: Confirm that Google is indexing your site correctly by checking for duplicate versions and implementing necessary redirects.
10. Site Speed Improvement (Core Web Vitals): Prioritize site speed as a ranking factor by cleaning up HTML code, compressing images, and considering a hosting upgrade.
11. Zombie Page Removal: Identify and remove unnecessary indexed pages that no longer provide value to users or contribute to your site’s crawl budget.
12. Indexing Problems Resolution: Use Google Search Console to find and fix pages that Google isn’t indexing and prevent users from accessing them.
13. Broken Link Fixes: Maintain a good user experience and avoid negative SEO impacts by finding and fixing broken links on your site.
14. Backlink Audit: Analyze your backlink profile to understand your site’s authority, identify referring domains, and disavow toxic links if necessary.
15. Competitor Analysis: Spy on your competitors to find opportunities for keyword targeting and understand what content works best in your niche.
16. Creating 10x Better Content: Enhance your content’s value by writing short intros, using subheaders, adding visuals, and ensuring it meets search intent better than competitors.
17. Structured Data Audit: Ensure your structured data is correctly implemented to help search engines understand your content and potentially earn rich snippets.
18. Keyword Rank Tracking Setup: Track your keyword rankings to monitor the effectiveness of the changes made during your SEO audit.

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