Technical SEO: How to Perform an SEO Audit (Step by Step Guide)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
04
06
08
09
11
15
16
21
23
25
SITEPROFILE
CRAWLABILITY
HTML STATUSCODES
INDEXABILITY
ON PAGE CONTENT
SECURITY AUDIT
OFF PAGEAUDIT
MOBILE AUDIT
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
GLOSSARY OFTOOLS
04
22
11
16

SITEPROFILE
The first step in any auditing process is to know the monster you
are dealing with. Are we talking about a website that was set up
only last week, and is so still a virgin in terms of content optimiza-
tion and backlinks? Or are we talking about a website that is many
years old and has been worked on by many optimizers in the past?
While the latter helps you build a great SEO audit report, the pos-
sible work in SEO could be humongous too; especially if it in-
volves removing badlinks.
Anyway, you will first want to know how old the website is, how
big it is, in terms of the number of indexed (and unindexed)
pages, the level of authority the website has, etc.
My favorite tool in this regard is a Google Chrome
extension called Open SEO stats.
It gives you a generic idea about all the SEO aspects of any given
website – like the age of the domain name, the number of in-
dexed pages on Google, the number of backlinks, the traffic trend
on third party services like Alexa and Compete, social media pres-
ence, page loading speed, web host location, etc. Ilike it because
you get a complete picture of everything about the website in just
a couple ofclicks.
Build A Site Profile
The first step in any SEO assignment is performing an audit of the client’s website to identify the problem areas, areas of op-
portunity and a general sense of where you are and where you need to go. In other words, an SEO audit helps you chart the road
map for the work ahead. This is true irrespective of whether this is an inbound SEO prospect, or someone you identified as a lead
and have reached out to. This is a comprehensive guidebook on what SEO auditing involves and how you should go about it. I have
also included dozens of free and paid online tools available for you to perform this auditing more efficiently. So let’s get started.

CRAWL ABILITY AUDIT
The first thing to look at is what the robots.txt file say. For those
new to the game, this is a text file that contains information on
what kind of bots can access your several web pages. So for ex-
ample, if you have an admin panel on your website for internal
purposes that you do not want the Googlebot to access, you
could set this condition in the robots.txt file.
You could access this file by simply typing yourwebsitename.com/
robots.txt on the browser address bar. Sometimes though, what
appears okay on the robots.txt file could have unintended conse-
quences. Alternately, some robot accessibility restrictions may be
set at a page level in what are known as robots meta tags. To en-
sure you have only restricted access for pages you intended to, it
is a good idea to instead view the robot access information from
a tool like Screaming Frog SEO spider.
This is a free software that will instantly crawl through your entire
website and pull out all the HTML elements of your page. You may
however require a license if you work with large websites that have
more than 500pages.
Anyway, with this tool, you can get instant information on the
robot accessibility settings from all the pages on your website.
Use this tool to see what pages have robots set to ‘noindex’ or
‘nofollow’, and if this has been done deliberately to prevent
Google from crawling the page or if this was a mistake.
1. Robots.txt
So now you have a mental picture of the website you are dealing with, we can start with the first real step of the auditing
process which is to test the website’s accessibility features. Here, we mainly check the website settings that dictate who
can access the web page. Also, we check if the website standards are up to date and if web pages work as intended
when we request an access.

HTML STATUS CODES
Besides robots.txt, another factor that could tell you if there any accessibility
issues is the status codes. These are ‘responses’ that are delivered when a
request to access a web page is sent. The most popular one, of course, is
the ‘404 Page not found’ status. Here is a complete list of all the various
possible status codes one could receive from a web page.
You may want to know what the status code for the different
pages of your website is. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider
also gives you information on this. I typically sort the results
from SEO spider on the basis of the Status Code to be able
to see all the pages that are being redirected (301, 302), not
found (404) in one bunch.
200 301 302 304 404 500 503

INDEXABILITY
So now that you have studied the “crawlability” of your website, the next step is to know if the content is getting indexed
as desired on Google. If you are just starting out on SEO, one thing you should know is that what you see is NOT what
you get. You may have a pretty looking website, but that is not how Google could potentially be seeing your website.
While Google has been getting better at it, it is always a good idea to keep things simple. So here are some things that
you should look at.
Navigability
Is the website letting Google freely navigate through all the
pages? Does the website have an XML sitemap that dynamically
generates a list of all web pages from the website? Has this been
provided to Google through the Webmaster tools? Identify these
and include them in your audit report.
Site Architecture
How is your website organized? Is it one huge mass of a thousand
pages? Or, do you have all the content properly organized into
various folders and sub-folders. There are two components to the
auditing process while looking at site architecture. The first is the
URL architecture. Traditionally, it was considered a good habit to
demonstrate the organizational structure in the URL. For instance,
if you had a directory of various hotels across the country, you
would typically have a structure like website.com/state/city/hotel-
name.html
However, from an SEO perspective, what matters more is how eas-
ily can a user navigate from the homepage to any particular web
page they want to. Evaluate how the content is organized, and
how the various folders and sub-folders in the website are organ-
ized and inter-linked. Also, make a note of whether the URL struc-
ture is consistent among all pages under one organizational
folder.
1
2

INDEXABILITY CONT’D
Animation and Visual Content
As noted already, it is considered a bad idea to use elements like
Adobe Flash or Javascript to render content on your website.
There are modern technologies like HTML 5 that not only render
better to the visitor but is also more search engine friendly. Use a
tool like SiteCheckup to evaluate at least all the important pages
on the website for Flash elements. That website has quite a few
other useful auditing tools that you may check out.
3
4 HTML Markups
Wouldn’t you rate a news article that is full of spelling mistakes
poorly? The same goes for an HTML page that is full of syntax er-
rors and coding violations. In extreme cases, this can also impact
the indexability of your website. Run a markup validation check
using the W3C tool to identify errors that need to be fixed.

ON PAGE CONTENT
SEO Spider does agreatGoogle understand the context of the page better. The
job in providing this information from all the pages at one place.
Typically, you will need to check for the following:
1. Identify main elements through SEO Spider
Every web page needs to have a well defined title, header information, sub-headers. This helps
The next step is to understand if all the HTML content elements are in place on your website. While it is no longer
required to have elements like meta keywords on your website, others like Title, header elements, meta descriptions
and structured data are still important. I would recommend doing this process via the following steps:
Are titles succinct and less than 65 words in length?
Is the main headline on the page marked with the H1 tag and the
subsequent sub-headers marked with H2, H3, and so on?
Is there more than one H1 tag for a page? This is a big no-no
Are titles unique? A lot of websites tend to have the same page title across the website
Is the title overtly manipulated for SEO reasons? This is again forbidden
Does the meta description provide a good summary of the page’s content?
This is the content that Google search visitors read before clicking on to your link

ON PAGE CONTENT
2. Content Quality
The quality of content that the website delivers to its audience is paramount from an SEO perspective. But this is a pretty
subjective thing to do since what one calls ‘useful information’ is often an individual perspective.
At the outset, you will need to check for the following:
Is the content unique?
Siteliner is a good tool to help you identify content that may be
duplicate on your page. But do note that this only helps with
internal duplication. If you have plagiarized it from elsewhere,
this tool may not be of help. For such cases, you may use tools
like Copyscape.
Is it comprehensive enough?
The ideal word length is 300-500 words. But this is plainly sub-
jective and depends on your niche. No tool shall be able to give
you the right information for this question.What you could do
is do a competitive analysis of other websites in the industry and
see if your website has more in-depth analysis and information
than the others.
Does it provide useful, well-researched and verifiable information?
Again, this is subjective. A competitive analysis could give you
an idea of how good your website is compared to competition.
Is there a compelling reason why Google should rank your site
above the others? If not, note down these points in your audit
report.
Does it make for easyreading?
Depending on your audience, your content should make for
easy reading. This means that the content should not be riddled
with too many jargons and abbreviations. Generally speaking,
your website should be comprehensible to a student in the
eigth to tenth grade. You need not spend too much time on this
aspect and use a random sample of content from your website
on a tool like Rea Able to benchmark your website’s readability
factors.
Does the content seem manipulated for SEOreasons?
Self-taught website owners and amateur SEOs often place a lot
of focus on elements like keyword density. This typically ends
with a keyword-stuffed article that Google can easily make out
as a manipulated piece. Your SEO audit report should definitely
look into this aspect. The keyword analyzer from SEOBook does
a good job at this.

ON PAGE CONTENT
Are there grammatical and typographical errors?
Finally, is your content free from grammatical errors and spelling mistakes?
There are a number of spelling and grammar checking tools online. But if
you are a native speaker of the language, you may make do with your own
knowledge and the MS Word spell-check feature.e.
Are you targeting the right keywords?
This is an extremely crucial step. The website you are auditing may be the
best in business. But without the use of relevant keywords, you may not
be able to reach out to the right audience. Use keyword planner tool on
Adwords to identify the main keywords for the niche and study if the web-
site is optimized for all these important keywords.
The quality of content that the website delivers to
its audience is paramount from an SEO perspective.

ON PAGE CONTENT
3. Image Attributes
The SEO Spider does an awesome work crawling through all the images from your site and helps you identify those images that
have not been attributed with ALT tags. ALT tag is a textual reference provided for images. This is to help website visitors who
may not be able to view the image itself for various reasons and is thus an important SEO hygiene factor.
4. Hyperlinks
It is believed that hyperlinking to contextually relevant high authority publications tend to have a positive fallout on your own
web page’s ranking. Additionally, linking contextually to others part of your own website is a healthy way to improve navigation
and usability. While auditing the hyperlinks on your web page, there are specifically a few things to look into:
Broken Links :
Use a tool like W3C Link Checker to check for broken links in
your website. Remember to tick the recursive option so that you
can check across your whole website.
Link Quality :
This is again a very subjective aspect. The thumb-rule to deter-
mine the quality of the destination website is the kind of back-
links it has, the general level of quality of the website. Ideally,
you may want to perform a site audit of each of the websites
you are linking out to. But since that may not be practically fea-
sible, a quick way to assess the destination website is to see if
it links to, or is linked from an excessive number of spammy
websites.
Nofollow :
There has been a lot of discussion over the nofollow strategy
for websites. A lot of website owners tend to be pretty defen-
sive and thus nofollow all their external links by default. This may
be unnecessary and can also be counter-productive. Use nofol-
low if any links are sponsored or if you cannot vouch for the
quality of the end link. The nofollow Chrome extension auto-
matically identifies nofollowed links on any web page and is a
good starting point to audit the hyperlinks on any web page.
Anchor Text:
Apart from nofollow, this is another aspect that has been
abused by website owners. Identify the anchor text used to
point to various internal and external links and analyze if they
are either significantly promotional in nature or are stuffed with
keywords.

SECURITY AUDIT
Often times, websites are penalized by Google for not being secure enough. There are a few things you
may check out to evaluate how good the website is, in terms of security.
1. HTTPS
Google has recently announced that they now have HTTPS as
a ranking signal. While the non-deployment of HTTPS is not
likely to bring down your rankings anytime soon, it is a good se-
curity feature to offer your customers. Depending on what you
offer, consider the use of HTTPS on your website.
2. Malware Content
Websites are often hacked to host malware content. In some
cases, the WordPress or Joomla theme you download may con-
tain hidden malware that may be linking out to spammy niches
like casino or gambling. There are two ways to track such con-
tent. The first method is to check into your Google Webmaster
tools account to look for any malware content reported by
Google. The second method is to install the Avast Chrome ex-
tension that scans all the Google search results for spyware.
Once done, use the ‘site:website.com’ search operator on
Google to get a list of all your web pages and look for any po-
tential spamreports.
3. Neighborhood Analysis
Tools like SpyOnWeb give you a list of websites that are hosted
in the same IP network as you. Identify potential spam websites
on your shared hosting neighborhood that could affect your
search ranking.

OFF PAGE AUDIT
The off-page audit of your website has mostly got to do with backlink analysis. However, that is not all. You will also need
to benchmark the social profile of your website, local listing profile and the overall trustworthiness of your site.
Here isa brief on how you go about it:
1. Backlink analysis
This is one of the most important aspects of an SEO audit and
one could write an entire book on this topic. However, for the
sake of this article, here is a brief rundown of the various aspects
you should check out.
•Number and quality of backlinks : The Moz Open Site Explorer
is one of the most popular tools for backlink profile analysis.
This service not only gives you the tentative number of backlinks
to your website, but also provides a domain authority and page
authority rank for each of the inbound links. While this is in no
way the absolute measure of the link quality, it gives you a rough
idea of the kind of links that point to the website.
•Anchor text analysis: A natural backlink profile will have a
healthy mix of all kinds of anchor texts and not just the keyword
you are trying to rank for. BacklinkWatch is a free tool to take a
peek into the multiple backlinks that are pointed to your web-
site along with the anchor text used and nofollow parameters,
if any. Check out their raw export feature to download the back-
link file for any further processing
•Nofollow ratio: The BacklinkWatch analysis also gives you a
distribution of followed and nofollowed links. Typically, most hy-
perlinks to a website are follow in nature. However, the com-
plete absence of nofollow links can raise eyebrows. This, in
conjunction, with other parameters like anchor text keyword
stuffing, hyperlink from low trust websites, etc. is often an indi-
cator of bad backlink profile. In such cases, there is a good
chance of your website having received a penalty from Google.
Look out for any notifications on Webmaster tools for warnings
and penalty notifications.

OFF PAGE AUDIT
•Linking Schemes: It has been more than a decade since link
exchanges and link wheels went out of use. But you won’t be-
lieve the number of websites that still do it. Even if the site you
audit does not engage in such tactics, if God forbid, the web-
sites you have earned links from engage in such tactics, it is time
to make a note of such websites and potentially disavow them
later. The same is true for sponsored links. Even if your client
does not pay for links, getting backlinks from websites that do
is a risk factor and needs to be accounted for during your site
audit.
•Relevancy : Do a thorough analysis of all the hyperlinks to
your website and identify the context for each link. Hyperlinks
that are from websites with little context are risky and could po-
tentially impact your website ranking. This is a long drawn
process but it is recommended that you do this manually with-
out relying ontools.

OFF PAGE AUDIT
2. Local Listing Profile
If the website you are auditing is a local business, it is important
to separately audit its local listing profile. This includes the fol-
lowing things:
•Directory listings: Identify the major business listing directo-
ries for the geography the website being audited is based out
of and monitor its presence across all these listing pages.
•Local pack: Identify the major keywords that the website
should be ranking for and monitor its visibility in the local pack
of the searchresults.

OFF PAGE AUDIT
Google+ Page:
Does your business appear verified on the Google+ local list-
ings? Also, how is the engagement on this page with respect
to the images and videos added, reviews and followers?
Local SERPs:
How does the website rank for the various keywords relating to
the business. If possible, analyze these results with and without
including the location in the keyword. For example, if you are
auditing a carpet cleaning service in Jacksonville, map the
search ranking for both ‘carpet cleaners in Jacksonville FL’ as
well as ‘carpet cleaners’ – this needs to be done from a local IP
so as to measure the precise ranking positions.
Identify duplicates:
The Google My Business page might many times have
duplicate listings of the same business. While this could be
inadvertent, this is also a popular tactic used by blackhat mar-
keters to be visible multiple times inside the local pack. Make a
note of these duplicates in the audit report.
Check penalty:
Penalty in the search results is not the only concern. A local busi-
ness website may also be penalized from being shown in the
local pack. A good way to identify such penalty is by making a
search for the primary keyword on Google Maps (example: car-
pet cleaning in Jacksonville). The results are tagged in an alpha-
bet count – if your website is tagged with one of the top letters
like A, B, C,etc. and is still absent from appearing on the local
pack, then it is most likely due to a penalty. The reasons for the
penalty is multi-fold and is not within the scope of this article.

OFF PAGE AUDIT
Getting the categories correct:
Is your business tagged to the right category on the Google My
Business dashboard? Getting associated with the right category
is extremely crucial to ranking for the appropriate search terms.
Comprehensive profile information :
Assess the comprehensiveness of the business profile. This in-
cludes business description, right business name, address,
phone number, email, open hours, map location, photos and
videos.
Visibility on Apple and Bing Maps :
Make sure your business is listed on Apple maps and Bing maps
as well.
Structured data :
Use the Google structured data testing tool to verify that all the
important elements on your website have been marked up cor-
rectly. This includes any reviews that you may have since click
through rates are believed to be higher on the search results
when accompanies by star ratings.
While a lot of manual effort is required to accomplish all of the above auditing parameters, you could get started on this
using the BrightLocal local search report. Do note that this is a paid tool and some features are restricted to work with
USA based clients.

MOBILE AUDIT
No SEO audit report is complete without looking into the performance and health of the website on mobile search.
Here are some things to look into:
1. Webmaster Tools Report
If the website is already linked to the Webmaster
Tools, navigate to Search Traffic → Mobile Usability
and make a note of any issues pointed out by Google.
2. Mobile URL management
With smartphones becoming mainstream and data
plans more affordable, mobile versions of websites are
no longer mandatory. However, if you still have a sep-
arate mobile URL for each of the website links, check
for the following:
Proper redirection :
Are all the URLs redirecting to the mobile link from
a mobile phone?
Canonical:
Are all the mobile links set up with proper canonical
tags to help Google identify the right source link?
View desktop version :
Do you provide visitors an easy way to view the
desktop version of the website?
Vary HTTP header :
If your website serves different HTML code and design
from different URLs to the user based on the device
they access the website from, then check for the Vary
HTTP header on the source code.

MOBILE AUDIT
3. Responsive Design
While unique mobile version of the websites are no
longer used, it has become extremely critical to re-
place them with responsive designs instead. While au-
diting your website, make a note of how your website
renders on various mobile and tablet platforms.
4. DesignAudit
Usability plays a huge part in any SEO audit report and
this is all the more vital while looking at mobile SEO.
Make sure to assess the following:
Use of Flash elements :
Most mobile phones do not run Flash. Make a note of
such elements that are deployed on the website
Use of popups & popovers:
We are not talking just about ads (which are anyway
relegated to a miniscule percentage of websites these
days). Popovers are many times used to offer better
usability on the web. However, they may fail to render
correctly on mobileplatforms.
Use of multimedia :
If you render images and videos on your website, how
are these elements displayed on a mobile device?
Modern HTML5 based video players are lightweight
and render better on mobile devices.
Validation check :
Run a validation test on W3C mobileOK checker to
make sure all the design related aspects adhere to
standard guidelines.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
A thorough SEO audit includes benchmarking your website against what the competitors are doing. Typically,
one needs to assess all that we have discussed above for each of your main competitors. Broadly, this means the
following.
1. The on-page content and design audit
2. The backlink profile of the competitors
3. Their social profile and engagement
4. Performance on local SEO
5. Mobile SEO audit
This mostly completes the SEO auditing process. Is there something that I missed? Point out in the comments
and I will add them to the process above. Meanwhile, here is a brief list of different tools you can make use of
during your auditing process.

LIST OF TOOLS
Google Webmaster Tools
Google’s very own website auditing tool that
helps you identify the health and hygiene of
your website and SEO strategies.
Found SEO Audit
A free tool that helps you generate an audit
report for your prospects. Includes major error
and warning notifications.
MySiteAuditor
A white labelled SEO auditing service that you
may embed on your SEO agency website for
visitors to assess their websites. In turn, also
helps generate more leads.
SEOCopilot Audit Tool
Free online SEO auditing tool that scans your
website for over 50 SEO ranking factors. Also
provides side-by-side competitor assessment
report.
Zadroweb Site Auditor
Uses metrics from multiple sources including
SEMRush and Moz to prepare a well-refer-
enced SEO audit report.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
An absolute must-use for scanning all the var-
ious HTML elements on your website. Free for
analysis up to 500 pages.
UpCity SEO Report Card
Touches upon a number of significant SEO
aspects of the site. Requires user to input
email address though.
WooRank
Another must-try tool to prepare a site review.
Includes review of the mobile, social aspects
of the site. Also includes the homepage key-
words review.
FeedTheBot
Provides technical inputs on relating to HTTP
response headers, CSS and JS use along with
inputs on Google bot access, page speed and
image SEO.
Microsoft SEO Tool Kit
An important tool, simply because it’s from Mi-
crosoft. Helps you audit the website beyond just
Google guidelines and helps you look at the site
from the perspective of Bing, Yahoo and more.

LIST OF TOOLS
Visual SEO Audit Tool
A software that requires download. Enhances
your audit by helping you visualize the crawl
process, identify conversion deterrents
through screenshot management, visual XML
sitemap editors and a site analysis suite. Free
to download.
Removeem Anchor Text analysis
A tool to study your anchor text diversity and
helps identify potential risk keywords.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Helps identify broken links on your website
pretty efficiently.
Copyscape
Freemium tool to identify plagiarized and du-
plicate content on any web page
Urivalet
Nifty tool to check HTTP headers and page
load time.
Pingdom Speed Test
Popular tool to measure the web pageload-
ing time
SEO Bin
A pretty basic tool for title optimization. Pro-
vides inputs on various words and phrases
that may be included in your title.
Structured Data Testing Tool
A Google tool to validate the rich snippets
and schema on your web pages.
Sitemap Inspector
Helps you identify any potential issues and er-
rors with your existing XML sitemap and also
helps you generate a new one.
Fiddler
A useful tool for web developers to debug
traffic, test performance and test security.
SEOBIN
Sitemap Inspector

LIST OF TOOLS
Open SEO Stats
A Google Chrome extension that provides a
holistic overview of the website in terms of
website authority, traffic trends, link reports,
etc. A pretty good tool to begin your SEO au-
diting process.
Flash Checker
Want to be absolutely sure about your web-
site’s use of Flash elements on the page? This
is a good tool to go to.
W3C Markup Validation
A must-use tool for designers to identify
potential markup and validation errors on the
website.
Siteliner
A useful tool to identify broken links, duplicate
content on yourwebsite
SEOBook Keyword Analyzer
Identifies keyword density to help identify
over-optimization on your web pages
Read-Able
Know the readability of content on your web-
site using indices like Flesch-Kincaid and
Coleman-Liau.
W3C Link Checker
Recursively crawl your website to identify bro-
ken links
NoFollow Chrome extension
Instantly identify nofollow links on a web
page. Useful to assess over-optimization of
your hyperlinking strategy.
SpyOnWeb
Detect other websites on the same shared
hosting as yours. Helpful to know the IP neigh-
borhood ofyour website.
OpenSite Explorer
Get comprehensive reports about yourweb-
site.Paid tool
BacklinkWatch
Free tool to get an instant list of all backlinks
pointing to the site along with information on
anchor text and nofollow use.
W3C mobileOK Checker
Check the mobile friendliness of your website
using this freetool.
SpyOnWeb
Readability

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