Free SEO Audit
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our SEO Audit template
What is a SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a report that analyzes the status of a website project from the perspective of its visibility on Google for the services or products that the business sells or offers. Depending on the type and size of the website, the audit will be more or less complex and/or extensive. An SEO audit is the starting point for any search engine optimization project for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and other businesses.
When to perform an SEO audit
The SEO audit of the website in question is conducted BEFORE starting an SEO project.
The audit marks the roadmap of the project and defines the line of work to follow for the following months in order to improve visibility on search engines.
What data an SEO audit includes
The different aspects that influence visibility on Google, such as the following, are evaluated:
- Website architecture
- Internal linking
- Headers
- Images
- Loading speed
How much does an SEO audit cost
The price of an SEO audit with us ranges from €200 to €1,000 on average.
The more difficult, competitive and larger the website, the more time and work will have to be invested. However, it is included in any monthly SEO consultancy.
Tools You’ll Need to Conduct Your Audit
CRAWLER
ScreamingFrog
The most complete and widely used SEO crawler. Many of the points we discuss are handled with ScreamingFrog.
CHROME EXTENSION
SEO Meta 1 Click
This Chrome browser extension will allow you to check most of your website’s metas and On-Page.
Tools from Google
Search Console & Analytics
These are the two basic tools for analysing the status of a website in terms of organic traffic.
CHROME EXTENSION
Web Developer
This Chrome extension allows you to perform browsing tests to detect improvements.
Online tool
Page Speed Insights
This is Google’s tool for measuring the loading speed of a website.
External tool
SemRush or aHrefs
They are two of the most powerful SEO tools. SemRush offers a 7-day trial period.
SEO audit template
#1: Website Server & CMS
First of all, we must check if the server and the content management system used are working optimally. In particular, we should check the following:
- SSL Certificate in use? If yes, do we suffer from mixed content?
- Redirects between with/without www
- Geographical location and IP address of the server
- On multilingual and international sites, is there a CDN active? If not, why?
- Website loading speed, and if it is slow, analyze the causes
- Server responses: count of errors 4xx and 5xx and 3xx responses
#2: Website Architecture
Web architecture means how content is hierarchised within the website itself.
An optimal website architecture will always be designed to help the user navigate the site. In this section we should check the following:
- How content about similar topics is clustered together
- How we make it easier for the user to browse between the different navigation levels
- How many navigation levels are there from the home page?
- How many clicks it takes to get to the last navigation level
- Are there very similar pages that talk about the same thing?
#3: Indexation
In the indexing section we will check what and how much Google has indexed from our site and the crawling frequency.
A large discrepancy (saturation) between the number of published URLs and the number of indexed URLs indicates several problems:
- If there are more indexed URLs than we have on our website, we’re experiencing cannibalization. The most common cause of this is a testing subdomain that ended up being indexed by Google because we didn’t take the proper precautions.
- If there are fewer indexed URLs than we have on our website, it’s because Google can’t crawl the site effectively or doesn’t do so frequently because it considers the site to be of low quality.
- Use of the noindex and nofollow tags: Are they correctly placed on pages that do not need to be indexed (such as legal pages, cookie policies, etc.)?
- Robots file, Google tools and XML sitemap
#4: SEO On-Page
On-page SEO is one of the most important pillars of any SEO strategy.
On-Page SEO refers to how SEO is worked at the level of the individual pages, and the following aspects are analysed:
- Uniqueness of the content
- Headers structure
- Nomenclature of the images
- Breadcrumbs
- Schemas
- Sintax of the URLs
- Internal linking
- Formatting of the pages
- Meta-attributes
#5: WPO
The abbreviation WPO stands for ” Web Page Optimization ” and refers to optimizing a website’s loading speed.
PageSpeed Insights is one of the most popular loading speed measurement engines, but you can also supplement the information with tools such as Pingdom Tools and GTMetrix.
In our case we use all three together to get a more complete picture of the performance of a website.
In addition to measuring a website’s speed and performance, these tools also provide tips for addressing the factors that cause poor performance.
#6: Backlink Profile
The backlink profile shows us how popular our website is within our niche market and within the relevant internet ecosystem.
In other words, the backlink profile lets Google (and us) know what other sites—as well as the broader community of websites, customers, and users who are directly or indirectly involved in our industry—are saying about our brand or website.
For this reason, having a strong backlink profile can greatly improve organic visibility.
For a correct analysis of a site’s link profile, it is highly recommended to use a specialised tool such as aHrefs or SemRush.
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SEO audit template
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