SEO

SEO audit checklist

Roughly copied from Chase Reiner’s

  • Primary Core SEO Issues – The most common SEO issues or mistakes include focusing on content quantity instead of quality, incomplete on-page SEO optimization, overlooking the importance of well-constructed URLs, and focusing on too many keywords.
  • Site Redirects To Preferred Version – You can check the documentation of your hosting provider to figure out how to set up 301 redirects to send your website visitors from the non-preferred URLs to the preferred version.
  • SSL Certificate Installed
  • Page Speed Faster Than 2 Seconds
  • Conversion Tracking Online and Offline – You can use Google Ads to track online and offline conversions. Google Ads shows the user what occurs after a customer interacts with an ad.
  • Two Call To Actions One Paid and One Free Opt In – You should have two call-to-actions, one that requires payment for opt-in and one that is free opt-in.
  • Robots.txt Exists – It can be checked with this Google tool (the website must be added to the Google Search Console first).
  • XML Sitemap Exists
  • XML Sitemap Submitted to Search Console
  • XML Sitemap Included in Robots.txt – Add your XML sitemap to the robots.txt file to make it easier for search engines to crawl through the index of all your webpages in a single place.
  • HTML Sitemap Created – An HTML sitemap is an HTML page that lists all the subpages of a website. The HTML sitemap should be visible and accessible to all your visitors.
  • HTML Sitemap in Footer – Typically, the HTML sitemap is placed in the footer of a website. The footer is considered the best location for an HTML sitemap and the footer is the first place your users will look in their search for the HTML sitemap.
  • Website Submitted to Search Console – To accelerate the process of Google crawling and indexing the content on your website, you can submit your website to the Google Search Console.
  • Website Is Easy to Edit – You should be publishing new content on your website regularly. It also necessary to make tweaks to your website to improve the user experience. Therefore, it is important that your website is easy to edit.
  • Keywords and Anchors Mapped Properly in Phase Two – Keyword mapping refers to the process of choosing different keywords for different pages based on research. Anchor text is the text that is clickable and visible for an HTML hyperlink.
  • Internal Links Pointing to Home Page on Main Pages – You should have internal links on the main pages pointing to the home page.
  • All Footer & Header Links Work?
  • Website Sandboxed – The Google sandbox explains why new websites under new domains rank poorly. A website can remain in the Google sandbox for six to eight months.
  • About Page Exists – One of the most important pages of a website is the About Us page. The About Us page is the best opportunity for your visitors to learn more about your company.
  • Contact Page Exists – The contact page is frequently the most visited page on a website. A well-designed contact page will help with the initiation of relationships with your clients and will improve the overall user experience.
  • Insecure Content Exists – Insecure content refers to any file that is linked to via an HTTP link instead of an HTTPS link.
  • Favicon – A favicon icon is an image that is displayed in the address bar of the browser. The favicon is associated with a particular website or webpage. There are many online tools that you can use to create a favicon image.
  • Terms of Service Page – The purpose of the Terms of Service page is to establish the rules for the use of your website. You are not legally required to have a Terms of Service page. However, it is still a good thing to have. In the event that a customer files a lawsuit against you, a Terms of Service page can help reduce your liability. A Terms of Service page can help preserve your rights to the content you publish.
  • Privacy Policy Page – If you are gathering the personal data of your users, you are legally required to have a Privacy Policy page. The purpose of a Privacy Policy page is to disclose to the website’s visitors what personal data you are collecting, how the data is collected, and for what the data will be used.
  • Automated Chat Funnels Created – Create an automated chat funnel to automate complex manual tasks like lead qualification and the scheduling of meetings.
  • Customer Data Extraction Functional – Customer data extraction tools can help you automate the process of extracting data about your customers from structured and unstructured sources.
  • Indexation – After your website has been crawled, it is up to the search engine to determine whether to index the content. Typically, if content is plagiarized, spammy, or low-quality, search engines will crawl but not index the content. Indexation determines whether content shows up in the search results.
  • Thank You Pages – No Indexed / No Follow – Add a noindex and nofollow tag to your Thank You pages. Users should only be able to land on your Thank You pages after filling out a form.
  • PDFs – No Indexed / No Follow – Add a noindex and nofollow tag to any PDFs if you want to maintain control over who is able to gain access to them.
  • Dates – No Indexed / No Follow – You can add a noindex and nofollow tag that tells search engines to not show a page in the search results based on the date.
  • Authors – No Indexed / No Follow – You can add a noindex and nofollow tag to author profile pages.
  • Post Tags – No Indexed / No Follow – Your post tags should have a noindex and a nofollow tag.
  • Product Tags – No Indexed / No Follow – Your product tags should have noindex and a nofollow tag.
  • Account Pages – No Indexed/ No Follow – Add a noindex and a nofollow tag to account pages.
  • WP Directories – No Indexed/ No Follow – Add a noindex and a nofollow tag to WordPress directories.
  • Media Attachments – No Indexed/ No Follow – Add a noindex and a nofollow tag to any media attachments.
  • Category Pages – No Indexed/ No Follow – Add a noindex and a nofollow tag to category pages, which is a page that groups web pages of a certain topic or theme together.
  • Thin Content or No Value Pages – No Indexed/ No Follow – Add a noindex and a nofollow tag to pages with no value or thin content.
  • No Meta Keywords – Many search engines ignore meta keywords, so they have little to no SEO value.
  • Categorized URL Structure – You should define a sitewide URL hierarchy for your website to allow for proper categorization of pages or posts.
  • Uncategorized Pages or Posts Exist – No uncategorized pages or posts should exist on your website.
  • 404 Pages That Get Traffic ->301 – You should 301 Redirect your website visitors from 404 error code pages that receive traffic.
  • 404 Pages No Traffic -> 410 – Use a 410 Gone for 404 error code pages that don’t receive a substantial amount of traffic.
  • 302’s – 302 Found is an HTTP response status code that is used to indicate that the requested resource has been temporarily moved to the URL in the Location header. This HTTP response status code is frequently used to perform URL redirection.
  • Are Multiple Keywords Competing For The Same Page? – If multiple keywords are competing for the same page, the keywords should be interchangeable. Single page targeting is ideal for keywords that are very competitive.
  • Correct URL – A correct URL is not broken, is well-structured, and SEO-friendly.
  • Sitemap Errors – Check your sitemap for common errors, such as 404 Not Found or 401 Unauthorized Request. Resolve these errors.
  • Any Manual Penalties? – You can determine whether there are any manual penalties against your website by checking your Google Search Console.
  • Goals Set Up? – You should set long-term and short-term SMART SEO goals for your website.
  • Schema Markup / OG Data – Schema markup refers to a type of code that will help search engiens crawl and index your content.
  • All Pages OG Data – All pages should have schema markup or OG data.
  • Organization Markup (National Sites) – Use organization markup to add structured data to your national site.
  • Local Business Markup – Use local business markup to add structured data to your local business page.
  • Blog Markup – Use blog markup to add structured data to your blog posts.
  • Bread Crumbs Markup – Use breadcrumb markup in the web page’s body to categorize the page’s information in the search results.
  • News Article Markup – Use news article markup to add structured data to your news articles.
  • Event Markup – Use event markup to add structured data to your event pages.
  • Open House Markup – Use open house markup to add structured data to your open house page.
  • Schema Errors – A schema error occurs when an issue arises with the order or structure of a file. An invalid character is also a common cause of a schema error. Can be checked with this Google Tester.
  • Multiple Categories – There are no SEO benefits that you will enjoy from adding multiple categories to posts.
  • Keyword Stuffed Title Tag – Google penalizes keyword stuffed and otherwise poor title tags.
  • Using Post Capability – Use post capability on WordPress to control which users are able to post on your WordPress blog.
  • Answering Questions – Be sure to answer questions from your website’s visitors promptly.
  • Using Promotions – Use promotions to advertise your products and services and improve your website’s ranking in serach engines.
  • 3x Services Photos – Include relevant photos of the services you provide on your website.
  • 3x Team Photos – Include photos of your team on your website.
  • Page Speed Optimization – Page speed optimization refers to the process of reducing the server response time to make sure the server is sending the pages to the browser quickly.
  • Result Scan Link – Check the security of your website. Scan for errors, malware, viruses, blacklist status, and software and plugins that are not up-to-date.
  • Hosting Name: + Server Speed – Run a DNS speed test to check DNS hosting speed and performance.
  • Overall Page Speed Timings and Requests – Analyze your website for overall page speed timings and requests.
  • Image Compression
  • Browser Caching – Browser caching stores the resource files of a webpage on the user’s local computer. The cache makes previously visted documents available to the user faster upon back or forward navigation through the website.
  • Gzip Compression – Gzip refers to the method of compressing files to make faster network transfers possible. Gzip is also the name of the format of the compressed file. You can provide your website users with smaller file sizes to increase page loading times by using Gzip compression.
  • JS and CSS Minification – Minification of the files of a website that contain Javascript, CSS, and HTML will allow the web browser to interpret them faster. Minification involves the process of removing unnecessary characters or space from code.
  • CDN – A content delivery network refers to a network of proxy servers and their data centers that are geographically distributed. The purpose of the CDN is to deliver web content like webpages to the user based on the content delivery server, the webpage’s origin, and the user’s geographic locations.
  • Mobile Friendly – A mobile-friendly website refers to a website that designed to work the same across devices with different screen sizes. No features or content should be unusable or inaccessible when the website is accessed on a tablet or smartphone.
  • Site Search – Site search refers to the functionality that permits users to search the content of a website or look through the product catalog with ease, speed, and relevance.
  • Breadcrumbs – A breadcrumb refers to a small text path that functions to tell the user where they are on the site. Typically, the breadcrumb is located at the top of the webpage. It also helps provide Google bots with a better understanding of your site’s hierarchy.
  • Social Media On Site – Include links to social media pages for your business on your Website.
  • CTA Above Fold For Highest Trafficked Pages – Above the fold refers to the part of a web page that is visible to the visitor without any scrolling. It is recommended that you position your call-to-actions above the fold on your highest trafficked pages for enhanced visibility.
  • Proper Navigation – Website navigation refers to the set of links that connects pages together. Proper website navigation will enable your visitors to find things easily on your website.
  • AMP (News Websites Only) – AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. If you are running a news website, you should create AMP versions of your articles. Otherwise, it will extremely unlikely for your articles to appear in Google’s Top Stories carousel when web users conduct a mobile search.

Useful Wordpress plugins

  • Smusher or other Image Compression – An image smusher refers to a tool that decreases the size of an image to reduce the cost of transmission and storage.
  • Broken Link Checker – The Broken Link Checker is a WordPress plugin that identifies broken links and displays them in a new tab of your WordPress admin panel.
  • 410 for WordPress – 410 for WordPress is a plugin that will return a HTTP 410 response in response to a request for a blog post that no longer exists on your WordPress blog. Each time you delete a page or post, the plugin will add the URL for the page to a list. When a request to an URL on the list is made, an HTTP 410 response is issued. You can also add or remove links from the list manually.
  • Simple Sitemap – Simple Sitemap is a WordPress plugin that will generate an HTML sitemap of your content to improve the SEO ranking.
  • WP Fastest Cache – WP Fastest Cache is a WordPress plugin that will help reduce your website’s page load time by creating HTML files that can be quickly rendered, stored, and accessed by multiple visitors.
  • Markup (JSON-LD) structured in schema.org – This WordPress plugin allows you to add schema.org JSON-LD syntax markup to your website.

Pages for local businesses

  • Google My Business Optimization (Local Only) – Use Google My Business Optimization to improve your local ranking in Google.
  • Physical Address – Your contact page and Google My Business profile should include the physical address of your business.
  • Service Location – Include the service location for your business on your contact page and Google My Business profile, if applicable.
  • Correct Hours – Your contact page and Google My Business profile should include the correct hours of your business.
  • Responding to Reviews
  • 3x Inside Location Photos – Include photos of the inside of your business location on your website.
  • 3x Outside Location Photos – Include photos of the outside of the business location on your website.
  • Citations (Local Only) – A local citation refers to any online mention of the name, phone number, or address of a local business.
  • Citation Count Low – A low citation count can negatively impact local search engine rankings.
  • Citations Inconsistent – If search engines encounter inconsistent citaitons, it can hurt local search engine rankings.

SEO Evaluations

Things to keep track of, to monitor and report

  • Organic traffic changes
  • Average ranking over time
  • On-site metrics
  • Backlinks
    • Topical Relevance
    • Brand/Value of the website
    • Traffic
    • Social Engagement
    • Link Footprint (where they are getting their links from, basically)

How to report on SEO

Create ranking reports for each of the following:

  • Target keywords
  • Changes in organic traffic
  • Impact on client’s business

Common metrics

  • Domain Authority
  • Page Authority
  • Keyword Ranking
  • Number of Backlinks

Engagement metrics

  • Conversion rate - how many times an action, like an email signup or a purchase, is done divided by the number of unique visits.
  • Time on page
  • Pages per visit
  • Bounce rate
  • Scroll depth - how far visitors scroll down individual pages.

Google Analytics

ChatGPT

A few useful prompts for ChatGPT to speed up SEO tasks.

  • Generate a list of x popular questions related to <keyword> that are relevant for <audience>
  • Classify the following keyword list in groups based on their search intent and add a list of keywords, obviously
  • Translate the following keywords from <source language> to <output language> and generate the results in a table with two columns, with the keywors in <source language> in the first one, and their translation to <output language> in the second useful to do multi-language SEO

Prompts for content optimization

  • Generate X unique title tags, of maximum 60 characters, for the following text. They should be descriptive and include the term <keyword> in them and add part of the page content to optimize
  • Generate Z unique meta descriptions, of a maximum of 150 characters, for the following text. They should be catchy with a call to action, including the term <main keyword> in them
  • Generate a list of X frequently asked questions based on the following content: to generate a FAQ section for an article
  • Generate a list of the top 10 facts, statistics and trends related to <topic>, including their source
  • Cluster the following titles into groups based on their semantic relevance: and include a list with titles of existing content

Link building and competitors researching

  • Recommend X popular blogs about <site area> that cover <topic>, along with their URLs