Proven 2022’s SEO Audit Checklist – History from 2010 to 2022

• ▶ Learn about Website’s Strategic Objectives:

  • Assess Website Goals: Find out the SEO strategy that works best for your company. To understand that, evaluate content performance, run market research, and do competitor analysis.

  • SET SMART Goals: To determine your business’s long-term goals you have to define your strategic objectives. And the objective/goal should be specific, measurable. Attainable, relevant, and timely.

• ▶ Find out Page Speed Metrics:

  • First Contentful Paint: It measures the time to render the first piece of DOM (text, image, video, or any other HTML content). Your page’s first contentful paint should be less than 1.8 seconds.

  • Time to Interactive: This metric displays how responsively a website loads and helps in identifying instances where a page appears to be interactive but isn’t. TTI should not exceed 3.8 seconds.

  • Speed Index: It assesses how quickly your above-the-fold page is loaded. The Speed Index constitutes 10% of the total Performance Score. According to Lighthouse, a good Speed Index Score must be less than 4.3 seconds.

  • Largest Contentful Paint: The length of time it takes for the largest content on your website to become visible within your visitor’s screen is measured by LCP. Websites should aim for an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less to ensure a pleasant user experience.

  • Total Blocking Time: Total Blocking Time (TBT) reflects the total period of time that a user’s access to your website was blocked. A TBT score of under 300 milliseconds is considered good.

  • Cumulative Layout Shift: Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a measure of unexpected movement of web elements during page rendering. A CLS score of 0.1 or less is good.

• ▶ Analyze Indexing and Crawling Issue:

  • Make sure the right site is crawlable: It’s possible that you have multiple versions of the site that are indexed by Google. To avoid any confusion, use the redirection property properly.

  • HTTPS vs. non-HTTPS: The difference between HTTP and HTTPs is that HTTPs employs SSL encryption, whilst HTTP is still in its infancy. As a result, an HTTPs site is far safer than an HTTP site.

• ▶ Find out the Robots.txt files:

  Robots.txt files play an important part in informing Google which parts of your site are crawlable and indexable. And which are not.

• ▶ Check Mobile Usability:

  • Analyze Mobile Traffic: The most basic and simple approach is to get an overview of mobile traffic. This overview helps you to analyze the comparison between desktop and mobile.

  • Check Mobile User Experience: This test helps you to better understand how a user sees your page on mobile devices..

  • Check Site Speed on Mobile: People always expect a faster and better experience on mobile. On mobile devices, we suggest a load time of 5 seconds or less.

  • Responsiveness check: Testing the responsiveness of your website design is a must. Check to see if your website fits and adjusts to different screen sizes, such as mobile, tablet, and desktop.

  • Mobile-Friendly popups: Popups are small boxes that appear on your screen. On mobile devices, you should use mobile-friendly pop ups to improve the user experience. When integrating popups, keep in mind the available screen space, format, and position.

  • Run a Mobile Keyword Strategy: You should develop two distinct SEO tactics — a desktop and mobile approach — to obtain an advantage over your competitors. A mobile-specific keyword approach focuses on those key phrases that are tailored to satisfy the unique requirements of mobile users.

  • Find out issues on Titles and Descriptions and optimize it for Mobile

  • Optimize Content for Mobile Users: Content that is more mobile friendly has a better chance of reaching a mobile user. Optimizing content for mobile use is both business savvy and required. It helps in delivering important information to the user or customer in a simple and straightforward manner.

  • Run technical SEO on Mobile

    • Viewport meta tag: The viewport is the part of the window that displays web content. Controlling layout on mobile browsers with the viewport meta tag.

    • Use Right URL Structure: Keep it brief and straightforward. Short and to-the-point URLs are ideal.

    • Specify canonical URLs.: When you have numerous versions of a page, you should use them to inform the search engines which one should rank. You want the mobile pages on your site to be optimum and indexable with this canonical technique.

    • Media Query Technique: Media query is a CSS technique that introduced the mobile-first approach. That means the style is applied for mobile devices.

    • Identify and Fix Redirect Chains: Unwanted redirect chains cause slow page speed, poor user experience. As a result, overall conversion rates on your mobile will suffer. So it’s important to find and fix all redirect issues.

• ▶ Find and Fix the Orphan Pages:

  Pages that do not have a link to them are referred to as orphan pages. It’s important to find all the orphan pages so it simply doesn’t create any crawling issue.

  • Detect Structured data errors: Structured data ensures that your site’s code is properly implemented. It improves the way your page appears in search engine results pages (SERPs).

  • Detecting Navigation error: The user’s browsing problem is evidently exacerbated by navigation errors. Make sure that there are no navigational errors and that the drop-down menus are working properly. The navigation ensures that the site is simple to navigate.

• ▶ Check out Competitors:

  • Identify Competitor ranking data: Using a keyword rank tracking tool, you can easily identify and find the keywords that your competitors use to rank. It simply strengthens your SEO data and strategy.

  • Examine Target Keywords: After you’ve done the competitor keyword research. Make a list of most-important keywords that they use to target. It will help you to develop your own keyword strategy.

  • Lookout Internal and External Linking Structure: A robust internal and external linking structure can help with SEO in many ways. Especially if they’re your SERPs competitors. It will help design your own and improve the SEO performance of your website.

• ▶ Target the Right Keywords:

  • Analyze Keyword Ranking performance: The Ranking Performance statistic monitors your keyword rankings to assess how well your SEO efforts are driving organic traffic. You can simply accomplish this by using a keyword rank tracking tool.

• ▶ Check out the Website Traffic Growth:

  Depending on the stage of the company and the target demographic, the rate of rise in website traffic will vary substantially. Google algorithm updates are crucial in this regard. Audit, compare, and scrutinize the traffic and efficiency of your website. Based on that, develop a solid keyword strategy.

• ▶ Improve On-Page SEO Issues:

  • Analyze basic On-page SEO Statistics

    • HTML Compression/GZIP: HTML Compression/GZIP is the most widely used data compression method for shrinking the size of HTML pages, stylesheets, and scripts on your website.

    • Frameset tag: The frameset element is defined by the HTML frameset tag. When you use a frameset, you divide a browser window’s visual property into numerous frames. Each frame contains its own data, which does not bleed over into the next.

    • Disallow Directive: Disallow Directive means it instructs search engines not to crawl a page. It’s done in the site’s robots.txt file. It’s handy to use if you have a lot of pages or files that aren’t valuable to readers or search engines.

    • Favicon: Browser tabs, toolbar apps, bookmarks dropdown, and search bar all of these places are using favicons. It’s handy when you’re looking for a specific website because it makes it easier to find.

    • Meta Refresh Tag: The meta refresh tag is an HTML element on a page that tells the browser to refresh the page after a certain amount of time has passed. It can be used to give the user the most up-to-date information.

    • Nested Table: When you combine a single-column table with a larger table, you can use nested tables to make SQL operations easier. It is not recommended to utilize them. As a result, that page takes longer to load.

    • Deprecated tags: When the same attributes can be achieved in a different way, the tag or attributes are deprecated or rejected. And you should avoid using such tags because they obstruct the rendering of your web pages.

    • Error request: It indicates such a request that has been malformed. In such instances, the increasing number of error requests degrades the overall performance of your page.

    • Total Words: Pages with a word count of more than 4500 to 5000 words are recommended. As a general rule, Google favors pages with a high number of words with relevant search queries.

    • Total Characters: Same as the total words counts, total characters of your page also play a significant role in SEO. A page’s character count should be greater than 10,000 on average.

    • Nofollow meta tag: Such tag placed in the HTML source code of a webpage to tell search engines that no link equity should be sent across any links on that page. It’s preferable to avoid using the Nofollow meta tag.

    • Noindex meta tag: Such tag used in the HTML source code of a webpage to tell search engines that page should not be included in their list of search results. It’s better to not have a Noindex meta tag.

    • Canonical Tag: A canonical tag (also known as “rel canonical” attribute) tells search engines that a given URL is the page’s master copy. The canonical tag prevents the appearance of duplicate or “identical” content.

    • Inline-style: Using CSS attributes, inline-style is used to impart a unique style to a specific HTML element. Avoiding Inline-style is a smart practice because it negatively influences how search engine robots view your site.

  • Analyze Page URL: For SEO purposes, study the structure of your website’s URL. An average URL should be between 50 and 60 characters in length.

  • Analyze all the 301 redirects: To permanently move a web page from one location to another, a 301 redirect is used. Despite the fact that they do not have a negative impact on SEO performance. However, it is preferable to use the 301 redirect correctly

  • Analyze Page Title: Title tags appear in search engine results pages (SERPs), crucial for site usability. Longer titles are usually cut off by Google if they don’t fit in the space available on the desktop or mobile screen. If your title is no longer relevant with page content, Google will replace it with a more relevant one.

    The length of a title tag should be 50 to 60 characters.

  • Analyze Meta Description: Meta descriptions are a bigger part of your SEO plan that helps you attract readers and improve your search rankings. The meta description, according to Google, should be between 150 and 160 characters long, including spaces.

  • Analyze Image: Optimize Image that improves the graphics on your website to make it more appealing to search engine crawlers.

  • Header Tag

    • Maintain Right implementation of H1 to H2 Tags: The hierarchy of header tags should be maintained across the page, which implies that H2 tags should come after H1 tags, rather than H3 or H4 tags. Although there is no length restriction. H1 tags, on the other hand, should be between 20 and 70 characters long.

  • Analyze internal links:Make sure your internal linking strategy is sound. Internal links help your website’s PageRank flow. They are hyperlinks that transport you from one page of your website to another.

  • Analyze external links:The trustworthiness of your website grows when you include trustworthy and relevant website links in your content. Furthermore, quality external links provide references to your readers, enhancing the authority of your website.

• ▶ Detecting the Content Gap:

  • Do Competitor Analysis: Research your competitors’ content to provide light on your own approach to content development. By doing so you can put maximum effort into such a topic that tends to generate interest in your target audience.

  • Run SEO Content readability check: Examine and improve your SEO content’s readability. Aim for a score of 60 or higher on this matter.

  • Refresh Old Content to meet user intent: Over time, content loses its impact. Search engines are built to identify the most accurate and useful information for users. Older content will gradually slip in the ranks as newer, more relevant information is prioritized. If you don’t update your old content, you’ll lose a lot of traffic, rankings, and conversions.

  • Implement Visual Content: Including relevant and high-quality photos and videos on your website will help it stand out and attract more visitors. Create intriguing content that says a lot without saying anything.

• ▶ Analyze the Backlink Profile:

  For building backlinks opportunities, the first step is to find the high-quality, relevant domain. To achieve this, competitor backlink analysis is the biggest source. Google is concerned whether the site referring to you is authoritative.

• ▶ Detecting and Fixing Broken Links:

  A broken link is a web page that a user can’t find or access for a variety of reasons. They degrade the consumer user experience on your site.

• ▶ Optimize your UX:

  Knowing your users better is the best way to improve the UX of your website. Users will spend more time on your site if the UX is good, rather than bounce back.

• ▶ Monitor and track the progress of website audit results.

What is an SEO Audit checklist?

SEO Audit Checklists are the single best way to be aware of what is happening to your website.

The purpose of it is to uncover all the potential unruly issues that stopped your website from performing its fullest.

The foundation of any SEO strategy is doing complete website analysis. It gives you a roadmap of what needs to be tackled. And after the foundation is established, the rest of the journey is like walking in the park.

SEO Audit Checklist offers a step-by-step guide to overcoming all the issues. It does not come with a handbook.

But by using SEO Audit Software, you will get a detailed overview of what to do next.

It’s also important to back up your website before making any major changes.

Since the beginning of SEO in 1997, search engine results have changed dramatically. Google is constantly replacing its specific performance metrics.

Our SEO Audit checklist evolves over time as a result of this.

Hence, we might never know the actual tale of Google’s revised history.

SEO Audit checklist changed the way and became the connecting force of our online existence with the search engines.

But how did this all start?

In this article, we’ve put together the notable journey of SEO Audit checklists timelines from 2010 to 2022. All of their main purposes were to find the root cause of the website’s degrading health. And make it accessible, human-friendly, and alignable with Search engines.

What’s your thought on SEO Audit Checklist Evolution from 2010 to 2022?

SEO Audit checklists have come a long way. We’ve just scratched the surface of the 12 years journey.

Amazing turns and stats have been found throughout history. SEO Audit Checklist history is inextricably linked with search engine algorithms. This journey involves the birth of new key metrics, the death of old metrics, and the emergence of new algorithms.

What remains true is the SEO Audit.

You’re just getting started here. Keep doing SEO Audits to make your website search engine likable.