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A successful website goes beyond just having a nice design—it’s about smooth functionality and strong SEO performance. But how do you know if it’s truly working at its best?
If you’re unsure where improvements are needed, this website audit checklist can help. This guide, built on insights from our SEO team, will help you analyze your site’s performance, identify problem areas, and provide strategies to fix them.
Make a copy of our free site audit template to stay organized throughout the website audit process.
Time to learn more about website audits and how to use these resources.
A website audit is a detailed analysis of your site’s health, typically focusing on areas like SEO, user experience, technical aspects, content, and backlinks.
By auditing a website, you can identify opportunities for improvement, make sure your site is working efficiently for better SEO results.
We recommend to audit your website once a month to keep things running smoothly. Regular checks help you spot problems before they become big issues.
Noticed a drop in traffic or keyword rankings? That’s your sign to run a site audit. The cause could be anything from a site issue, a Google update, or even competitors catching up.
In other words, auditing a website helps you identify what’s causing the drop and gives you a plan to get back on track. Our website analysis checklist can help you during the process to ensure you’re covering all the important aspects of your site’s performance.
There are several key areas we focus on during an audit to make sure everything is running seamlessly and your site is optimized for SEO.
Let’s take a closer look at two main types of website audits:
This audit looks into the technical side of the website, checking for issues that could affect functionality. It includes identifying broken links (404 errors), server error pages, and slow page loading times.
These problems can impact user experience and hurt SEO rankings, so it’s crucial to address them quickly.
Unlike traditional content audits that mainly assess relevancy and quality, at SayNine, we focus more on identifying duplicate content issues (which can confuse search engines) and keyword cannibalization (when multiple pages target the same keywords).
During the SEO content audits, we also focus on the small details that make a big difference for both SEO and user experience. More specifically, we review meta titles and descriptions, as well as if images and headings are properly optimized.
Getting these elements right helps search engines understand your content and gives visitors a better, more enjoyable experience.
Further reading:
Content Audit Guide
Content Optimization for SEO
If you’re looking for a hands-off approach, our monthly SEO audits can help ensure your site is always performing at its best, so you can focus more on growing your business.
Here’s a breakdown of the essential technical checks to keep your site performing at its best.
Page speed refers to how quickly a web/mobile page loads and displays content. It’s a critical factor for user experience; slow loading times can frustrate visitors and increase bounce rates.
But more importantly, page speed is also a ranking factor for Google, a change they introduced back in 2010. Moreover, Google introduced the “Speed Update” in 2018, making page speed a ranking factor for mobile searches too.
So, even if your content is compelling and backlinks are excellent, slow page speeds can hurt your SEO efforts.
To check and analyze your site’s speed, consider using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool:
Simply enter your website’s URL and click “Analyze.” Then review the diagnostics to identify areas for improvement in your page speed.
If your page speed score is low, you’ll need to dig deeper to identify the root of the issues.
Red diagnostics are priority areas that need immediate attention.
For example, when we analyzed SayNine using PageSpeed Insights, one of the key red issues for mobile optimization was the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This element is often the heaviest file on your site, and improving this can significantly enhance load time.
This is just one of the many factors that can affect page speed, and while it’s crucial to address higher-priority issues, even the less urgent ones should be fixed to ensure optimal site performance.
The faster your site, the happier your users (and Google).
Non-indexed pages are web pages on your domain that haven’t been added to Google’s search index.
Why is this an issue? These pages aren’t eligible for search rankings and won’t show up in search results. So, non-indexed pages hold no SEO value, making it important to identify and resolve them without delay.
To identify non-indexed pages, we use Google Search Console (GSC):
Step 1: Open GSC and click “Pages” from the left sidebar
Step 2: Scroll down to “Why pages aren’t indexed” to check the reasons.
Step 3: Click on each reason to gain insights into the specific issues preventing your pages from being indexed.
For example, a “Not Found (404)” error indicates a broken page that Google eventually removes from its index after crawling it again.
We also use Screaming Frog to find non-indexed pages. All you need to do is:
Step 1: Run a crawl of your website using the tool.
Step 2: Check the response codes to find non-indexed pages and their status.
Once you resolve non-indexed pages, you’ll be one step ahead to improving your site’s SEO.
A sitemap is like a map for Google, including all the URLs on your website that you want to be indexed. It helps Google easily find and understand your site’s important pages.
Think of it as a guide to help search engines know which pages matter most to you, which can lead to better visibility and improved rankings over time.
It’s also worth mentioning that every website has a “crawl budget,” which refers to the number of pages Google can crawl within a given timeframe. A well-optimized sitemap can help increase this budget.
When auditing a website, we check a site’s sitemap using three methods.
Note: If you’ve added a “no index” tag to any pages, they’ll be automatically removed from your sitemap.
If your site has a sitemap, it will be here.
Sign in to your GSC account and click on “Sitemaps” from the left sidebar.
Here, you can find information about when your sitemap was last crawled, when it was submitted, and monitor its status.
So, keep your sitemap fresh, and Google will love crawling your best pages!
A robots.txt file is a tool that helps you control which pages Google and other search engines can crawl and index on your website.
When Google visits your site, the first thing it checks is your robots.txt file. This tells Google which pages are a priority for crawling and indexing.
Without it, Google might crawl and index all pages, even the ones you don’t want, which could negatively affect your SEO.
To check any site’s robots.txt, we use two methods.
Here’s what your robots.txt looks like, but let’s explain some of the terms in the screenshot.
The next method is using Google Search Console:
Sign in to your GSC accounts and head to “Settings “ from the left sidebar.
By properly setting your robots.txt, you can ensure Google focuses only on the right pages and avoids those that aren’t meant for indexing.
Understanding how to do a website audit means uncovering content-related issues like duplicate content and keyword cannibalization.
So, follow these must-do checks to ensure your content is optimized for better search rankings.
Duplicate content refers to pieces of content that appear in more than one place on the web, either within the same website or across multiple websites.
While having duplicate content doesn’t lead to penalties, it can still harm your SEO. For instance, Google may struggle to decide which version of the content to rank higher. This can lead to lower rankings, reduced traffic, and even deindexing of duplicate pages.
We recommend using Siteliner to check duplicate content on your website. Here’s how:
Simply enter your domain into Siteliner and review the list of pages that contain duplicate content.
As you can see in the screenshot above, Saynine.ai has 3% of duplicate content, which is low.
When you click on any URL, you’ll be able to see which other page(s) share the same content. Any duplicate content will be highlighted in red for easy identification.
But what to keep in mind when it comes to duplicate content?
If you find that your site has duplicate content, we suggest doing the following:
Taking care of duplicate content means clearer, more effective SEO that won’t be slowed down by redundant or competing pages.
Keyword cannibalization is when multiple pages on your website target the same or very similar keywords.
Instead of helping each page rank better, these pages end up competing with each other, which can confuse search engines like Google, resulting in lower rankings for both pages.
To check if your site is suffering from keyword cannibalization, we suggest using Google Search Console and following these steps:
But how to avoid keyword cannibalization? We highly recommend to:
Avoiding keyword cannibalization will enable your website to achieve higher rankings, make better use of your content, and provide a more seamless experience for both search engines and users.
Meta tags, which are your meta title and meta description, are HTML elements that help search engines and users understand the content of your webpages.
A page title, or meta title, is an HTML component that indicates the title of a web page, which you can see highlighted in the screenshot below.
Meta descriptions, on the other hand, are short summaries of a webpage’s content, typically displayed under the meta title in search engine results.
Why they matter, you may ask?
However, meta tags can be imperfect too, and doing regular checkups can help you reveal issues like missing meta titles or duplicate meta descriptions.
What we recommend is to:
By keeping your meta tags in check, you make sure your pages are more visible and clickable in search results, leading to both increased rankings and user engagement.
Heading tags play a crucial role in your content’s structure and SEO performance, which is why we make them a priority during content audits. They serve as a roadmap for readers and search engines, helping both understand the hierarchy and main points of your page.
When auditing a website content, we check for:
Headings might seem minor, but, in fact, they’re a major player in your content’s success. So, keep them concise, structured, and SEO-optimized to make an impact.
Images play a crucial role in SEO. They not only make your content visually appealing, but also improve accessibility and help search engines understand your pages better. However, poorly optimized images can hurt your site’s performance.
When conducting an SEO audit, here’s what we pay attention to:
Our recommendations:
By following these steps, you ensure that images contribute positively to your SEO strategy without negatively affecting performance.
Both internal and external links are critical elements of an SEO strategy.
Internal links connect different pages within your website. They improve navigation, lead to more helpful content. They also play a crucial role in indexability—if you’ve published new content, linking it internally helps Google find and index it faster.
External links, on the other hand, are links leading to a page outside your website. They’re also crucial for indexability—when you link to an external source in your article, Google can discover your content even if your blog hasn’t been indexed yet, thanks to the external link pointing to your page.
To ensure you’re using internal and external links effectively, we use Ahrefs during the audit. Here’s how we and you can also check your links:
Step 1: Sign in to Ahrefs and select your project under “Site Audit.”
Step 2: Click on “Links” to review both internal and external links.
Step 3: Click on “Issues” to learn more about any internal or external link problems on your site.
As shown in the screenshot, this site has minor issues (e.g., orphan page) that still need to be addressed for proper indexing.
Here’s what we recommend when it comes to internal and external linking:
Optimizing your links is a small task that comes with big SEO rewards—so, keep them strategic.
Let’s walk you through a real example of auditing one of our client’s site for duplicate content using Siteliner.
The site’s overall duplicate content percentage is 10%. While this may seem a minor problem, a closer look reveals a page with a 100% match, which is definitely a red flag.
By clicking the URL, we confirmed the content was entirely identical to another page’s content.
In this case, we can offer three solutions:
This approach ensures better SEO health and avoids penalties.
Take a look at our top picks, all tried and tested to ensure your website’s success.
Siteliner is a website analysis tool that allows to identify key problems affecting your site’s performance and search engine rankings.
We love it, as it’s easy-to-use and the valuable insights about duplicate content or broken links it provides with one click.
Key Features:
Pricing:Free for sites up to 250 pages; Premium version is also available, allowing up to 30,000 pages with more frequent analysis. Check out their website for more pricing information.
A must-have tool for tracking your website’s performance on Google’s search results.
We use it primarily for tracking search performance of our clients’ important pages, as well as, for identifying non-indexing issues.
What makes this tool great? Let’s take a look at its main features.
Key Features:
Pricing: Google Search Console is free.
Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool offers powerful website audits and helps us identify issues like broken links, indexability issues, duplicate pages, content issues, etc.
The tool’s user-friendly design is great for beginners. Plus, it offers accurate data and plenty of features for advanced users.
We also love how Ahrefs continuously improves its tool, keeping us updated with new features and alerts.
However it comes with other features too, which you can find below.
Key Features:
Pricing: The Lite package starts at $129/month. Ahrefs also offers Standard, Advanced, Enterprise packages, as well as solution for beginners. Check out their website for more pricing info.
Screaming Frog is a popular desktop app and a great website audit tool for identifying SEO issues such as broken links, redirects, and missing metadata.
What we love about this tool is that it helps identify important technical issues and get suggestions on how to fix them.
Key Features:
Pricing: Free (up to 500 URLs). Paid plans start at $259 Per Year.
SEMrush offers a range of SEO audit tools, including Site Audit tool, which helps us conduct site performance checks.
What we love about it is its accurate data and how it presents audit results in a visually appealing way, which makes analyzing complex data much simpler.
Apart from its Site Audit tool, you may also want to check out some other features of SEMrush.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans start at $139.95 monthly.
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) evaluates the user experience of a webpage on both mobile and desktop devices and offers helpful suggestions to enhance its performance.
Its user-friendly interface makes it easy for us to find page speed issues, understand core web vitals, and implement all the necessary changes for a smoother and faster browsing experience.
Key Features
Pricing: PageSpeed Insights is free.
Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking visitor behavior on your site and getting insights into performance metrics.
It goes beyond what Google Search Console provides by offering detailed information about where clicks come from, for example, and how users engage with your site.
Key Features:
Pricing: Google Analytics is free.
Let’s wrap up all the essential things you need to know about website audits.
And don’t forget to download our free template to make the website audit process even simpler!
Thanks for reading!
A website audit typically includes assessment of technical elements, on-page SEO, content quality, link structure, website speed, and user experience.
To do an SEO audit, you’ll need to review your site’s technical performance, content quality, backlinks, and device optimization using tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, or SEMrush.
It depends on your website’s size. A small website usually takes 2-3 hours for a full audit of health and performance.
A website content audit is a review of your site’s content to see what’s working, what’s not, and how it can be improved for SEO and your audience.
To create a website audit report, assess key areas like technical and content issues, use a checklist or template to organize findings.
Check site speed, crawlability, and indexing issues using tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog. Fix broken links and optimize load times for better SEO.