Back in 2011, I wrote a technical site audit checklist, and while it was thorough, there have been a lot of additions to what is encompassed in a site audit. I have gone through and updated that old checklist for 2015. Some of the biggest changes were the addition of sections for mobile, international, and site speed.
This checklist should help you put together a thorough site audit and determine what is holding back the organic performance of your site. At the end of your audit, don't write a document that says what's wrong with the website. Instead, create a document that says what needs to be done. Then explain why these actions need to be taken and why they are important. What I've found to really helpful is to provide a prioritized list along with your document of all the actions that you would like them to implement. This list can be handed off to a dev or content team to be implemented easily. These teams can refer to your more thorough document as needed.
If you'd like to download a PDF version of the checklist, you can find it here.
Quick overview
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Check indexed pages
- Do a site: search.
- How many pages are returned? (This can be way off so don't put too much stock in this).
- Is the homepage showing up as the first result?
- If the homepage isn't showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty or poor site architecture/internal linking, affecting the site. This may be less of a concern as Google's John Mueller recently said that your homepage doesn't need to be listed first.
Review the number of organic landing pages in Google Analytics
- Does this match with the number of results in a site: search?
- This is often the best view of how many pages are in a search engine's index that search engines find valuable.
Search for the brand and branded terms
- Is the homepage showing up at the top, or are correct pages showing up?
- If the proper pages aren't showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty, in play.
Check Google's cache for key pages
- Is the content showing up?
- Are navigation links present?
- Are there links that aren't visible on the site?
PRO Tip:
Don't forget to check the text-only version of the cached page. Here is a
bookmarklet to help you do that.
Do a mobile search for your brand and key landing pages
- Does your listing have the "mobile friendly" label?
- Are your landing pages mobile friendly?
- If the answer is no to either of these, it may be costing you organic visits.
On-page optimization
Title tags are optimized
- Title tags should be optimized and unique.
- Your brand name should be included in your title tag to improve click-through rates.
- Title tags are about 55-60 characters (512 pixels) to be fully displayed. You can test here or review title pixel widths in Screaming Frog.
Important pages have click-through rate optimized titles and meta descriptions
- This will help improve your organic traffic independent of your rankings.
- You can use SERP Turkey for this.
Check for pages missing page titles and meta descriptions
The on-page content includes the primary keyword phrase multiple times as well as variations and alternate keyword phrases
There is a significant amount of optimized, unique content on key pages
The primary keyword phrase is contained in the H1 tag
Images' file names and alt text are optimized to include the primary keyword phrase associated with the page.
URLs are descriptive and optimized
- While it is beneficial to include your keyword phrase in URLs, changing your URLs can negatively impact traffic when you do a 301. As such, I typically recommend optimizing URLs when the current ones are really bad or when you don't have to change URLs with existing external links.
Clean URLs
- No excessive parameters or session IDs.
- URLs exposed to search engines should be static.
Short URLs
- 115 characters or shorter – this character limit isn't set in stone, but shorter URLs are better for usability.
Additional reading:
Best Practices for URLs
URL Rewriting Tool
mod_rewrite Cheat Sheet
Creating 301 Redirects With .htaccess
Content
Homepage content is optimized
- Does the homepage have at least one paragraph?
- There has to be enough content on the page to give search engines an understanding of what a page is about. Based on my experience, I typically recommend at least 150 words.
Landing pages are optimized
- Do these pages have at least a few paragraphs of content? Is it enough to give search engines an understanding of what the page is about?
- Is it template text or is it completely unique?
Site contains real and substantial content
- Is there real content on the site or is the "content" simply a list of links?
Proper keyword targeting
- Does the intent behind the keyword match the intent of the landing page?
- Are there pages targeting head terms, mid-tail, and long-tail keywords?
Keyword cannibalization
- Do a site: search in Google for important keyword phrases.
- Check for duplicate content/page titles using the Moz Pro Crawl Test.
Content to help users convert exists and is easily accessible to users
- In addition to search engine driven content, there should be content to help educate users about the product or service.
Content formatting
- Is the content formatted well and easy to read quickly?
- Are H tags used?
- Are images used?
- Is the text broken down into easy to read paragraphs?
Good headlines on blog posts
- Good headlines go a long way. Make sure the headlines are well written and draw users in.
Amount of content versus ads
- Since the implementation of Panda, the amount of ad-space on a page has become important to evaluate.
- Make sure there is significant unique content above the fold.
- If you have more ads than unique content, you are probably going to have a problem.
Additional reading:
How to Write Magnetic Headlines
SEO Copywriting Tips for Improved Link Building
The Ultimate Blogger Writing Guide
Tips to Earn Links and Tweets to Your Blog Post
Duplicate content
There should be one URL for each piece of content
- Do URLs include parameters or tracking code? This will result in multiple URLs for a piece of content.
- Does the same content reside on completely different URLs? This is often due to products/content being replicated across different categories.
Pro Tip:
Exclude common parameters, such as those used to designate tracking code, in Google Webmaster Tools. Read more at
Search Engine Land.
Do a search to check for duplicate content
- Take a content snippet, put it in quotes and search for it.
- Does the content show up elsewhere on the domain?
- Has it been scraped? If the content has been scraped, you should file a content removal request with Google.
Sub-domain duplicate content
- Does the same content exist on different sub-domains?
Check for a secure version of the site
- Does the content exist on a secure version of the site?
Check other sites owned by the company
- Is the content replicated on other domains owned by the company?
Check for "print" pages
- If there are "printer friendly" versions of pages, they may be causing duplicate content.
Accessibility & Indexation
Check the robots.txt
- Has the entire site, or important content been blocked? Is link equity being orphaned due to pages being blocked via the robots.txt?
Turn off JavaScript, cookies, and CSS
- Use the Web Developer Toolbar
- Is the content there?
- Do the navigation links work?
Now change your user agent to Googlebot
- Use the User Agent Add-on
- Are they cloaking?
- Does it look the same as before?
PRO Tip:
Use
SEO Browser to do a quick spot check.
Check the SEOmoz PRO Campaign
- Check for 4xx errors and 5xx errors.
XML sitemaps are listed in the robots.txt file
XML sitemaps are submitted to Google/Bing Webmaster Tools
Check pages for meta robots noindex tag
- Are pages accidentally being tagged with the meta robots noindex command
- Are there pages that should have the noindex command applied
- You can check the site quickly via a crawl tool such as Moz or Screaming Frog
Do goal pages have the noindex command applied?
- This is important to prevent direct organic visits from showing up as goals in analytics
Site architecture and internal linking
Number of links on a page
- 100-200 is a good target, but not a rule.
Vertical linking structures are in place
- Homepage links to category pages.
- Category pages link to sub-category and product pages as appropriate.
- Product pages link to relevant category pages.
Horizontal linking structures are in place
- Category pages link to other relevant category pages.
- Product pages link to other relevant product pages.
Links are in content
- Does not utilize massive blocks of links stuck in the content to do internal linking.
Footer links
- Does not use a block of footer links instead of proper navigation.
- Does not link to landing pages with optimized anchors.
Good internal anchor text
Check for broken links
- Link Checker and Xenu are good tools for this.
Additional reading:
Importance of Internal Linking
Internal Linking Tactics
Using Anchor Links to Make Google Ignore The First Link
Successful Site Architecture for SEO
The SEO Guide to Site Architecture
Information Architecture and Faceted Navigation
Technical issues
Proper use of 301s
- Are 301s being used for all redirects?
- If the root is being directed to a landing page, are they using a 301 instead of a 302?
- Use Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin to check 301s.
"Bad" redirects are avoided
- These include 302s, 307s, meta refresh, and JavaScript redirects as they pass little to no value.
- These redirects can easily be identified with a tool like Screaming Frog.
Redirects point directly to the final URL and do not leverage redirect chains
- Redirect chains significantly diminish the amount of link equity associated with the final URL.
- Google has said that they will stop following a redirect chain after several redirects.
Use of JavaScript
- Is content being served in JavaScript?
- Are links being served in JavaScript? Is this to do PR sculpting or is it accidental?
Use of iFrames
- Is content being pulled in via iFrames?
Use of Flash
- Is the entire site done in Flash, or is Flash used sparingly in a way that doesn't hinder crawling?
Check for errors in Google Webmaster Tools
- Google WMT will give you a good list of technical problems that they are encountering on your site (such as: 4xx and 5xx errors, inaccessible pages in the XML sitemap, and soft 404s)
XML Sitemaps
- Are XML sitemaps in place?
- Are XML sitemaps covering for poor site architecture?
- Are XML sitemaps structured to show indexation problems?
- Do the sitemaps follow proper XML protocols?
Canonical version of the site established through 301s
Canonical version of site is specified in Google Webmaster Tools
Rel canonical link tag is properly implemented across the site
- Make sure it points to the correct page, and every page doesn't point to the homepage.
Uses absolute URLs instead of relative URLs
- This can cause a lot of problems if you have a root domain with secure sections.
Site speed
Review page load time for key pages
- Is it significant for users or search engines?
Make sure compression is enabled
Enable caching
Optimize your images for the web
Minify your CSS/JS/HTML
Use a good, fast host
- Consider using a CDN for your images.
Optimize your images for the web
Additional reading:
Google Page Speed Insights
Best Practices for Page Speed
Mobile
Review the mobile experience
- Is there a mobile site set up?
- If there is, is it a mobile site, responsive design, or dynamic serving?
Make sure analytics are set up if separate mobile content exists
If dynamic serving is being used, make sure the Vary HTTP header is being used
- This helps alert search engines understand that the content is different for mobile users.
- Google on dynamic serving.
Review how the mobile experience matches up with the intent of mobile visitors
- Do your mobile visitors have a different intent than desktop based visitors?
Ensure faulty mobile redirects do not exist
- If your site redirects mobile visitors away from their intended URL (typically to the homepage), you're likely going to run into issues impacting your mobile organic performance.
Ensure that the relationship between the mobile site and desktop site is established with proper markup
- If a mobile site (m.) exists, does the desktop equivalent URL point to the mobile version with rel="alternate"?
- Does the mobile version canonical to the desktop version?
- Official documentation.
International
Review international versions indicated in the URL
- ex: site.com/uk/ or uk.site.com
Enable country based targeting in webmaster tools
- If the site is targeted to one specific country, is this specified in webmaster tools?
- If the site has international sections, are they targeted in webmaster tools?
Implement hreflang / rel alternate if relevant
If there are multiple versions of a site in the same language (such as /us/ and /uk/, both in English), update the copy been updated so that they are both unique
Make sure the currency reflects the country targeted
Ensure the URL structure is in the native language
- Try to avoid having all URLs in the default language
Analytics
Analytics tracking code is on every page
- You can check this using the "custom" filter in a Screaming Frog Crawl or by looking for self referrals.
- Are there pages that should be blocked?
There is only one instance of a GA property on a page
- Having the same Google Analytics property will create problems with pageview-related metrics such as inflating page views and pages per visit and reducing the bounce rate.
- It is OK to have multiple GA properties listed, this won't cause a problem.
Analytics is properly tracking and capturing internal searches
Demographics tracking is set up
Adwords and Adsense are properly linked if you are using these platforms
Internal IP addresses are excluded
UTM Campaign Parameters are used for other marketing efforts
Meta refresh and JavaScript redirects are avoided
- These can artificially lower bounce rates.
Event tracking is set up for key user interactions
This audit covers the main technical elements of a site and should help you uncover any issues that are holding a site back. As with any project, the deliverable is critical. I've found focusing on the solution and impact (business case) is the best approach for site audit reports. While it is important to outline the problems, too much detail here can take away from the recommendations. If you'd like a downloadable PDF version of the checklist, you can grab it here.
If you're looking for more resources on site audits, I recommend the following:
Helpful tools for doing a site audit:
Annie Cushing's Site Audit
Web Developer Toolbar
User Agent Add-on
Firebug
Link Checker
SEObook Toolbar
MozBar (Moz's SEO toolbar)
Xenu
Screaming Frog
Your own scraper
Inflow's technical mobile best practices
Hi Geoff,
Great check list!
I noticed that you have not mentioned about the robots.txt file. Although spiders might not necessarily follow the file instruction, it is good practice to check if we are blocking a section or folder and even the whole site through it. I have come across situations were a developer have left (unintentionally) robot files with instructions to stop on crawling and in consequence pages are not getting indexed.
I do agree with Raul Reyes, You just missed about the robots.txt file as its important to inform search engine robots not to crawl webpage or dont appear web pages in the search results...overall It's such a Excellent check list..
You're right - there was a section on accessibility and indexation that accidentally got cut while I was editing the post. The section should be added in shortly.
It's now there.
I see it now, fyi.
Hi Geoff,
Great list! I didn't see anything about checking for schema markup, which may be especially useful for ecommerce sites.
I was just sitting down to start a site audit this morning. Thanks for super charging my morning!
How awesome would this list be as a Google drive spreadsheet? Very awesome. Then anyone could make a copy / modify etc. Also, checklists lend particularly well to the spreadsheet format. ;)
Great suggestion!
I have this as a Drive spreadsheet, well the old one, with a few modifications. I use it as a basis for all my technical audits, it's brilliant :) Going to have to update it now!
Richard Barrett shared it 3 posts above.
Great summary, thanks for sharing! PS the "pro tip" link "bookmarklet" is not working.
Sorry about that, the bookmarklet has been updated now.
Hi Geoff Kenyon,
Nice post. These two point are very important for website audit.
1) IP Canonical
2) Hosting Server
It is true. Sometimes, the hosting server is the main problem. You can have an optimized website, but if the hosting is not correctly configured, you will have a lot of problems and you never up your website in the rankings.
*Duplicate content*
~Copyscape is a great way to make sure you haven't been scraped & a useful tool for locating scraped content on other sites. Scraped content is duplicate content -- on your domain, or someone else's. Panda isn't afraid to cross domains and come get you because someone else decided your copy was better than theirs & stole it.
~~~
You've got a great list here, but I need to add one thing to it:
*NAP Consistency*
Make sure you use something like Moz Local, Yext or BrightLocal to check your citations & ensure you have a consistent NAP across your major citations & in the aggregators.
Hell of a checklist otherwise. Nice share.
Thanks Scott. Copyscape is a good resource, thanks for bringing that up. And you're right, NAP is really important for local efforts.
Geoff, great post -- this updated checklist is going into my set of bookmarks for technical audits!
I just had one question. You wrote these two points:
However, in my experience, a site: search returns a number that is always far higher than the actual number of page because image files, documents, and other media files are counted separately in the SERPs. (For example, if you have five pages with two images each, you may have around 15 listings in the SERPs -- five pages plus ten images.) Of course, this depends on one's indexation settings.
Just a thought to throw out for people to keep in mind. Thanks again for the updated information!
The site:search is a bit of a wildcard. It's a good starting point, but the number of organic landing pages in analytics is a much better view of indexed pages. One thing I've found is that if you actually click through the pagination, the number of indexed pages will change :/
Yeah - I totally loved this checklist Geoff, but use of the site: search and of the results numbers it returns is one area I'm skeptical of. Have you found a real correlation between the results for that query and what's actually on a site. On smaller sites, I've seen it work OK (at least be in the ballpark). On larger sites, it looks almost random (and as you click through results, the number will sometimes change by a full order of magnitude!).
Rand, for bigger sites, you're right it tends to be off but it seems to be closer to reality - enough that I'd leave it in the list. You guys are right though, GA, and WMT index reports are more useful tools.
agree. Big sites show extrange results. Better to crawl site with screamingfrog or auditmypc or directly go to top urls in GWT
+Rand would you use site:domain.com/* to get % of thin content?
Hello Geoff,
Can you please tell me a good plugin to minify HTML/CSS for wordpress, I have tried some but they usually end up with causing slow down to website. I know by minifying HTML and CSS we can speed up the load time but a slower website can also derail the progress of your conversions.
W3 total cache. You can knock off all the other page speed optimisations too.
Nice list, Geoff! Always a good idea to go back to previous content and give it a refresh and update, especially in our industry.
I wanted to ask you about your statement early in the post referring to not writing up the issues or problems with a site, instead getting right to the solutions (and then an organized, prioritized list for developers, content teams, and others).
While I'm totally on-board with the two latter suggestions, I was just curious to your reasoning for leaving out what's wrong, what your analysis showed, etc. It shouldn't be the focus of your deliverable, but I've always wanted to stress the importance of identifying the errors first and explaining why the site falls short, is improperly structured, or whatever the audit revealed (and then following up with the solutions, of course).
Just curious... if you could expand on that statement. But a great post!
A couple things here. The first is that I said the document shouldn't be about the problems, but rather the solutions and benefits. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't state the problem, but rather, I've found it's best (especially with non-technical clients) to state the problem as simply as possible and really focus on the impact of the problem/solution and tell them how to fix it.
Unless you have a technical audience for your report, it is unlikely that diving into technical details is going to motivate them to do something. And the more technical a document gets, the more likely people's eyes will glaze over.
It all comes down to getting interest and buy in to get stuff done and knowing your audience. You should show them the version of the report that will get stuff done. I've found more often than not, focusing on outcomes and solutions rather than problems is best at getting recommendations implemented.
Gotcha. Yeah, that second explanation sounds a little more familiar to me :)
Great checklist, Geoff!
P.S. This would make a great PDF!
I'm working on creating something to accompany the checklist, but didn't have time before the post deadline unfortunately. I'll make sure this gets updated when I'm done.
Hi Geoff
I have copied the headings into a spreadsheet to make a checklist for a site audit - if this will help
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WiBLgL5OpbT929bZmLDJgovu2HkAfybAFQnetfwP9TQ/edit?usp=sharing
Hey Geoff,
Even if this is a rehash from work you did previously, there is nothing like staying up-to-date in this industry. I know you have helped many people do that with this release, and I wanted to thank you personally for providing this checklist as a go-to resource.
There are some minor missing points which have already been brought up in the comments (robots.txt, Headings, etc.) but overall I think you have done a spectacular job with this.
Thanks for the insight and look forward to future work from you!
Best regards,
Rob
There was a section missing that I accidentally edited out which had some of this in there; it's back in now :) Thanks Rob
Great list. The only point I'd add is checking the site for soft 404 errors. Many websites return a custom error page with a 200 HTTP code.
This was included in an accessibility and indexation section that I accidentally edited out :) It's back in there now. Good catch.
If you change the title of the page, you can also run a report of pages with title "error page" and then check it with the actual 404 from Google Webmasters / Bing Webmasters.
Quote:
"In addition to search engine driven content, there should be content to help educate users about the product or service"
There's so many interpretations you can make of this sentence, not necessarily the right ones.
Another point to add when checking the robots.txt file is to ensure all CSS and JS files are accessible as Google's indexing system now renders webpages like a modern browser. I've actually seen a positive impact from this where I tested the site with Google's fetch and render and specific elements on the site were missing. After allowing access to the JS and CSS in the robots.txt file, these appeared and we saw a lift in rankings, albeit a small one.
"Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings."
great post
Hi,
List helpful. Thanks!
My concern is how it affects have activated adwords campaign.
I recently read a real case of a substantial improvement in the positioning for a domain, to activate Adwords in that domain.
Nowadays we maintain Adwords for only one keyword, our domain...just in case...
Great checklist here Geoff! What about structured data (schema)? I feel like structured data should be included on this list.
The most important thing about to optimize images is the size. You must control the image for don't be a size more 100Kb. The best oline tool to reduce the size of an image (PNG and JPEG) is https://tinypng.com/ . With this tool you can reduce the size of your images with all quality.
Hello, I opened my business in March 2013, and started a an online ecommerce website, but still now I have no presence on Google, I'm reading a lot about marketing and seo, I need some advice on how to get my website going....
www.adhelectricalsuppliesltd.co.uk
Any info or help will be good
Thanks
andrew
Great checklist, super helpful. I'll be keeping this in mind when working on my site, Telematic!
Hey Geoff,
Thanks again for the awesome audit. You know, I printed out your earlier audit checklist & pinned at my desk for auditing. Now, I've to replace that with this :)
Well, I just wanted to add some more points from my end, which are
Apart from above, also I want to know, like you said above in your post, that your homepage should link to category > sub-category > product page etc. Does it matter if you take longer than the actual page to appear? I came across this, when Steve Webb of Web Gnomes audited one sports site & he found that you should not keep the landing page more than 5 clicks. Just curious :)
Thanks Again :)
In the editing process, I accidentally took out a section on accessibility and indexation which had a section on the robots.txt :) The post has been updated and this is now included.
While W3C errors and 404 pages are good projects to work on, I didn't include them in here as I've typically seen them yield minimal gains. But like I said, they are still good projects that improve the user experience.
As far as the number of links to homepages go, the answer is usually the shorter the path the better. As a general rule, I try to keep the path under 5 clicks from the homepage for all important pages. There are always exceptions though, typically with large ecommerce sites we'll find that there are pages that are further than we'd like but it can be difficult to fix.
In addition to your checklist, it should be useful:
- spellcheck and grammar correction
- make sure compression is NOT enabled for images (assuming that the images are optimized)
This is an awesome list. Thanks for the update. The mobile section has become crucial today. It may not officially be part of the algorithm yet, but I'm sure it will be soon.
Hey Nick,
I saw that this came out today: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-fix-mobile-usa...
Looks like Google is making mobile a bigger priority :)
high ranking factory is changing now, i think its getting link with customers exerpeince and their feedback.
Awesome Checklist Geoff. The one thing I wanted to discuss is the "Printer Friendly" one which might cause a duplicate content issue. I am completely un-aware and couldn't get the crux of this issue. Need more inputs on this Geoff.
I can't speak for Geoff, but he probably means that when there are both a website page and a printer-friendly version of that page , then only one should be marked as "canonical." Usually, the printer-friendly version will be set to no-index and have a rel=canonical tag that points to the original.
Thanks Samuel & Geoff for your inputs!!
Thanks Samuel, you got it. Here's an example:
https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/19/us-iran-oil-idUSKBN0KS1A120150119
https://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USKBN0KS1A...
Thanks for the list. Seems that there is a few things that i have been missing! Will keep me busy over the next few weeks then!
The list is really good, but if you work in media the things are different.
Example:
Great check list !
Thanks
Geoff- do you see that content and/or links served via JS is being crawled these days? I am, so the checklist items under "technical issues: use of javascript" seem confusing, especially given Google's post in Oct about allowing JS crawling in robots.txt.
Insane post :) Thanks very, very much!
Great List!!
You say: "Your brand name should be included in your title tag to improve click-through rates." Why is that? What if people don't know my brandname, will it still improve the click-through rate?
My brand name is 19 characters long so I then I will have to make short titles to do that.
Isn't it better to make good large titles without the branding name?
Further compliments for the great article!
Great article! Bookmarked to use during the prep work for an upcoming migration project, so should come in handy!
Many thanks.
Hi Geoff, Nice check list it is. I think you cover all the possible areas from SEO and technical point of view. The way you shrink the points is really tough one. Many of the experts forget some points while Auditing. So this will help them as well. And at the end, i want to say "Good Job"!
A good checklist. Every SEO Executive must check his site for Technical SEO. We have done it for CouponzPoint
[Link removed by editor.]
Hi Geoff,
Great list! you have covered all most everything in the list. but i think you can add about schema markup that is most important for ecommerce sites.
Very comprehensive post! Thanks for taking the time to do that!
We're going to be rolling out a new version of our website this year and have not been able to find someone to work with us on the all of these technical things, particularly site structure and internal linking strategy. We're an Ecommerce shop and want to nail down all of these things before we get too deep into the design process! Does your company or others that you know of, work with smaller ecommerce companies for consultation? FYI, we're on Magento. Thanks again for the post!
Great post / thanks for this step by step guide.
I tend to get my websites audited often since I found it to be really effective especially when it comes to increasing conversions to a website that has already a decent audience/traffic. I am using Webaudit (https://www.webaudit.co) for the past 3 years and as much as I'd like to run the audits on my end, it's best to leave the design / SEO / development audit to experts.
Money well spent on an audit vs CPM campaigns that end up, most of the times cost a lot more than we actually benefit from it.
Long life to those web audits, this is one of the next web revolution!
Nice detailed seo checklist but moz blog is still not responsive or mobile optimized.
Thanks, always good to know what to check for. Reminds me of the seo grader tool, would be nice if that could include all of these too.
brilliant! many of these tasks can do with the tool of Google webmaster tool
Regards my friend
Its good to get knowledge from MOZ. Every post is informative like this.We came to know that how technical audit can increase traffic of your site.Thanks and regards
Could you set this up as a e/book or free standing, so we can print it and use it. Rather then having to copy and set it up. Kind Regards
One can recognize years of careful work in your checklist Geoff. It's great you share it for a slightly better Internet! Especially as I was revamping mine ;)
I add Number of HTTP requests before CSS/JS minimizing in Page Speed/Responsiveness. That can really slows down a website, not talking of mobiles high latency connections :} Also spellcheck and grammar correction which Stelian Mezin already talked about.
Thats very informative article, appreciated your efforts.
Damn helpful list!!
I was skipping few points before in onpage but now I have the complete list.
Hi Geoff,
I am new to Digital Marketing and had a doubt on point 2. You have mentioned to cross check indexed pages through google analytic but what if we dont have authority to access website through analytics? Is there any other way to cross check?
Geoff, I run about 30 sites. Your checklist and recommended tools help me solve issues I did not even realize I had! Hidden things that I would have never found by reading raw code.
Truly appreciate your article. Thanks for the work you put into it.
Nice checklist.
Some of the factors are too heuristic so is better to focus in a samller list that can be more easyly evaluated with tools.
For example, mobile friendly can be condensed using Mobile Friendy Test from Google, if it reports problems BAD or 1-5 evaluation.
For factors like Headings, title, etc. is better to define a set of urls to scan. Around 50 and the use screaming frog to evaluate.
You mention key pages, but what is key pages? a good aprox is to use home and those that appear un sitelinks so you have 5-7 urls to scan deeper.
About size of site using command site: for big sites is not very exact and we can use landing pages from GA or top urls from GWT. It helps as well to get number of pages with site:domain.com/* to get off suppementary results (not very accurate in big sites)
Truly amazing checklist. We're still amazed at how many sites are still missing the non-www to www redirects.
Nice post. Got hired as copywriter but somehow got task for site audit.
As a newbie, the request to "site audit" sort of confusing.
Hopefully this post will help me get through with it....
Very helpful post.
Can anyone expand on the Keyword Cannibalization check for someone who is fairly new to SEO.
Keyword cannibalization
If I use moz as an example should I be typing in site: keyword cannibalization orkeyword cannibalization site:https://moz.com/ into Google?
Any feedback on how the above method helps to identify keyword cannibilization would be great and also any tips on how to resolve if I find any.
Thanks
David
To test keyword cannibalization for the phrase shoes:
site:https://moz.com/ (shoes)
The site identifier narrows it to just your site, then you have your URL, then in brackets the keywords you want to search your site for. If you want to search for more than one keyword put a pipe (|) between them, for example:
site:https://moz.com/ (shoes|boots)
Great checklist, Geoff!
Very helpful.Thanks....
Geof first of all thanks lot for such an organized and helpful post. I feel glad by knowing all facts in clear way that has helped me in updating myself as well as my clients.
I appreciate your writing skills and look forward for your next post soon.
Very excellent checklist ! Thank you Geoff.
Great post Geoff !! really useful checklist to practice technical seo. Thanks a lot for sharing.
Wow! I will actually follow this today for a client, it will be an awesome presentation.
Thanks Geoff, please consider adding something on schema markups, it's so important at this age and with the mobile first trends, it will become more and more relevant...
Really I became your fan Geoff Kenyon. By this article I got more information.
This us super.
You could also:
1. Add a UX audit checklist to this one (using content analysis tools, heat map, click map and A/B testing tools)
2. Create a Word Macro or editable PDF
3. Create a conversion page for your services, i.e. get people to leave their data in return for the freebie.
I'd be the first to sign up for the download :)
Very useful check list to follow. And congrats on being one of the top post for 2015
Thanks Geoff, Nice checklist to audit the website as per the lates trends by SEs. You covers amost sections like Technical, On-Page, Content, Architecture, Analytics & Mobile optimization to easily check and update thme for accessibility.
I love the checkmark boxes so the non-tech crowd can print and check them off : ) Great article! I love this place for the blend of science and art they produce every month...
Great list Geoff! There are a million things that can be added to that list yet a couple of things that would be a must would be to verify if page content is visible. Many time clients sites are mostly built with shortcode or importing feeds which is NOT crawlable to spiders. Then I would make sure that your content respectably contains proper focus keyword density.
Thanks for all your hard work!
Hello Geoff,
I have one question regarding in the Analytics section about excluding internal IPs.
I think that is important so it would not skew the data.
What if we hire someone (outsource) in other country, like Philippines where users commonly have a dynamic IP address?
How do we exclude his/her ever changing IP?
By the way, nice update...
Excellent share, Can you please tell me the importance of back-link analysis in the audits?
Savita, just so you know -- this post focused on technical (or "on-page") SEO. Backlinks are part of an "off-page" SEO audit, which is a separate issue and deserving of its own post entirely. But yes, backlinks are very important to analyze and consider.
Thanks Samuel, now i am looking forward with new post of "off page" SEO Audit tips and this is really an excellent share for beginners.
Hello Geoff Kenyon
This is an awesome information about technical side of any website. I have just checked my website www.bannerbuzz.com with use of this list and really very pleased with the result.
Thank you so much for provided such great technical things.
Hi Geoff, this is a great Technical Seo check list. Tools and other referrals are also much impressive..thanks! Krishna
I asked some of the guys at Mozcon if this list existed, and the booth folks didn't seem to know that it did. I AM HAPPY TO KNOW THAT IT DOES. Thank you for posting and updating!
Great post!
Fantastic post Geoff, very thorough!
Hi Geoff
Great post, im just wondering how crucial do you consider the 150 words of content on a homepage? More and more these days I am coming across websites which are highly image or video led with little to no content on the homepage. If the website clearly gets its message across to a user without content would you still consider this an issue for search engines?
While design trends are very image heavy and tend to not include content, I think that having a significant amount of content on every page is really important for helping Google form topical associations. Google can probably make due with less, provided there are a lot of other elements helping form topical associations, but I'd fight pretty hard for content.
I'll throw in on this one... The more content the better. If you're sitting with 150 words on your home page, like Spanish Garden Inn's site... you're not going to rank in a competitive vertical in comparison to someone who has 500 words on their home page that are all relevant to the site's topic.
~Less is NOT more in SEO. I highly recommend more than 150 words.
***At on-boarding, when we had this client, they INSISTED they didn't care about SEO performance, ranking or traffic and they INSISTED on less than 150 words for the home page content. 12 months down the road, they were screaming, whining, moaning and throwing a fit because their site wasn't performing -- and they still wouldn't let us add any content to it. Don't be that guy...
Really, Scott?
"If you're sitting with 150 words on your home page, like Spanish Garden Inn's site... you're not going to rank in a competitive vertical in comparison to someone who has 500 words on their home page..."
Static text on the homepage is a minor tick-box in terms of overall SEO performance. There's so many examples in the eCommerce sector of sites that choose design over placing text on the homepage (farfetch.com, asos.com - first two I looked at and both of these sites rank for a lot of phrases and have little to no homepage text).
"12 months down the road, they were screaming, whining, moaning and throwing a fit because their site wasn't performing -- and they still wouldn't let us add any content to it. Don't be that guy..."
Disconcerting to see SEO's describe clients (even ex clients) in this way. Did you not think about the millions of other things you could have done apart from adding text to the homepage of a design centric website...? (which I would bet wouldn't have made a damn difference anyway)
I can understand if you're only just learning about this stuff but promoting misinformation with an ego is a bit much...
Hi Geoff,
Very nice article, as a Technical SEO I also have a check-list but your list is great. You missed some very important things. For example some of them are:
Can you provide checklist in form of excel template sheet? Or any usable format.
Hi FalM
I copied this over to Google Docs for my own use but feel free to use it/copy it etc
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WiBLgL5OpbT929bZmLDJgovu2HkAfybAFQnetfwP9TQ/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks Richard! Very helpful, much appreciated!
Thanks Richard
use scrape similar to get the list
The link seems broken:
Don't forget to check the text-only version of the cached page. Here is a bookmarklet to help you do that.
This is updated now.
Great list indeed!
I recently wrote one SEO Audit Checklist but I missed some of the points that you mentioned above.. Going to insert them RIGHT AWAY!
Thanks for sharing for this ultimate list ! :)
Hi Geoff, great checklist - this is great to have for reference and a guideline.
Nice update for the 2015. Now I use this and spread the love to all the websites I audit for my clients.
Best Regards
Wow, very detailed and well thought through. Wish you had this as a printer friendly version.
Cheers
Fantastic and comprehensive list :) great read
Thanks for this - I wish this was an app I would tick items off, but I've printed it now anyway... Im sure I can live with the guilt.
Hey @Geoff Kenyon, Thanks For Sharing this article very useful. In google seo world 2015 to be secure and safe from #Penguin and #Panda attacks we need to follow that checklist.Thanks
Great checklist!
One question.
Regarding: noindexing goal completion pages to prevent direct organic visits from showing up as goals in analytics.
I understand your point but do you really want to noindex all goal pages? Would you say this is a blanket policy or does it depend on the situation? What does Google say about this?
It was mentioned in the robot.txt area, I believe, to make sure that they are not covering up poor site architecture within the robot.txt file. This happens so often instead doing the heavy lifting and fixing the problems where they actually exists, they undertake a coverup appraoch.
I loved this checklist. We have recently developed our own internal checklist for site structure, however, we are continuing to find areas to expand and improve. With the continuing change of the industry, it is important to keep up with it. I will be using this! Thank you!
Nothing much to say..its just wonderful.
Though most of these are basic on page factors, and some of these get missed lots of time.
Hierarchical presentation is excellent.
Just one thing, what that person has found in this post to mark it as thumbs down :)
I know that you are joking but I do not understand why the thumbs down either. Although I made a legit comment and I believe I was respectful with the author my comment got marked down too. Cheers
Am i? Not at all. I am quite serious..see my face :).
Anyways for that thumbs down for your comment, i have given a thumbs up. Hope this compensated to some extent.
Cheers
Awesome post. I will be coming back again and again.
Good summary, thanks for share this!
Thanks for sharing, not for my site, but in the future is ok
Really helpful post. Quite detailed but worthy reading, thanks.
Nice Post! Thanks for share.
Very useful and thorough checklist. I couldn't find anything missing.
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Super SEO checklist, i liked it very much and going to share with friends.
Great article and thanks for sharing this site audit information and i used this tips in my work. martin hall
Nice post
@geoffkenyon - super post mate, nice one. I'd add more but you covered most of the basics.
Cheers
Virginia
This is great - is there anyway you can download this as a checklist? I'm sure it'd be a useful resource to use on-going for people.
Thanks!
I made this as a simple checklist that you can copy/print, hopefully its useful and I am not just annoying people!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WiBLgL5OpbT929bZmLDJgovu2HkAfybAFQnetfwP9TQ/edit?usp=sharing
Awesome! Thanks very much
Hi Geoff
Great checklist ! explained very nicely.
Learned many new thing from this posts .
Thanks !
At the danger of sounding rude once again, only 30% of this needs to be done (i.e., tells you anything about why a site is ranking or not or will be in the future) and there are other, more efficient ways to get that data that don't waste the time manually checking does. Although I do applaud the author for giving people free information :-) Ok, get to work voting down my comment people... ;p
Not everything that should be done to a website is for high rankings.
"Needs to be done..."
~That's really a subjective statement. In some verticals, you can rank with a crap website you built on Vista Print yourself. In some verticals, you have to truly put 100% of the website puzzle pieces in the correct place in order to rank. So.... only 30% of this needs to be done? Well... that really depends on your competition, doesn't it?
Great post Geoff Kenyon! Useful! I am coming back to SEO, after more than a year.
Good article, Site Audit is the 1st major step in SEO.
really very good article
Mohamed Diab
Fantastic post Geoff! Thanks for the time and effort you put into it.
Very nice checklist, thanks for such great post, but some points are missing in this..
If you think some points are missing, I'm sure the author would love to hear what specific suggestions you would add to the list.
What points were missed?
schema markups, robots.txt file...
Amazing...very helpful.
Thanks :)
Nice Post Geoff Kenyon Really a Informative post.....
I've learn so much things from it.