This SEO On Page Audit guide explains the use of best SEO audit tools like Screaming Frog and google webmaster. This guide is inspired by practical methods and results to ensure that you can perform SEO audits for your website yourself.

1. SEO Audit Guide
2018
Madhura Chaudhuri, Marketing Consultant
madhura.co

2. This guide explains the best methods of ensuring the technical
elements of your site are up to scratch.
What technical elements you should be keeping an eye on
How to find out what is wrong or not working properly
Utilising mark up, rich snippets and schema
There are a number of critical and technical issues that any good
webmaster should review in order to improve the on-page SEO of their
website.
Introduction

3. Tool
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows you to quickly crawl, analyze
and audit a site from an onsite SEO perspective. It’s particularly good
for analyzing medium to large sites, where manually checking every
page would be extremely labour intensive (or impossible!) and where
you can easily miss a redirect, meta refresh or duplicate page issue.
The SEO Spider allows you to export key onsite SEO elements (url,
page title, meta description, headings etc) to Excel so it can easily be
used as a base to make SEO recommendations from

4. zCrawl the site using screaming frog

5. Export it toExcel

6. Look at the HTTP Statuscodes

7. HTTP
Status
codes 200Everything’sGood

8. HTTP
Status
codes 301Permanent Redirect

9. HTTP
Status
codes
302Temporary Redirect
• Not Good
• Usually the defaultredirect
• Change to 301Redirect

10. HTTP
Status
codes
404Page Not Found
• Usually Not Good
• Redirect to the newversion
• Fix any links to thesepages

11. HTTP
Status
codes
500Internal Server Error
• Not Good
• Alert Programmers

12. Look at the Meta Robots field

13. Meta Robots
Tag
noindex
Disallow search engines
from showing this page in
results
• Don’t use unless there is a good reason
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex”>

14. Meta Robots
Tag
nofollow
Don’t follow any of the links
on the page
• Don’t use unless there is a good reason
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex,nofollow”>

15. Content Review

16. Look at Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, Headings

17. Are there any duplicates, missing?

18. Look for Canonical Issues (Duplicate Content)

19. First, look for duplicate title tags

20. Then, check for different URLs

21. How do you fix this?
Remove the pages
Block the pages
Suggest a default page
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.rei.com/" />
Duplicate Content

22. Titles and Descriptions
Meta Description should have
• 150-160 length
• Avoid Duplicate and missing descriptions
Here are the rough guidelines you should use for your title tags:
• Roughly 50 to 65 characters in length.
• Be unique to that page (don’t use the same title tag on multiple pages).
• Use the keyword of that page twice if space permits (once at the start, followed by
separator such as a colon, hyphen, or pipe, and then once again in a call to action).

23. Heading Hierarchy
H1 – There can be only one
H2 – Multiple, Related to H1 H3
– Multiple, Related to H2

24. Headings Example
<h1>Cars</h1>
<h2>American Cars</h2>
<h3>Ford</h3>
<h3>Chevrolet</h3>
<h2>Japanese Cars</h2>
<h3>Toyota</h3>
<h3>Honda</h3>

25. Check that the URLs for each page are unique &
properly formatted

26. URL Structure
For example: This is a non-optimized URL:
‘http://www.example.com/12/badformattedurl/121358898
This is a good URL: ’http://www.example.com/good-formatted-url’
Good URLs include keywords (but they are not keyword stuffed), include
hyphens (‘-‘) to separate the keywords, are unique for each page and are
less than 255 characters (including the domain name).

27. Check internal links

28. Internal Linking
Linking your pages together is useful to both search engines and
users. The more you link within your own site, when relevant, the
easier it will be for search engines to crawl your whole site.
That you are not only using keyword anchor text for the internal
links but you use both the full page title and non-keyword anchor
text.
The pages you want to rank better in search have the greater
number of internal links.
The pages you want to rank better in search are linked from your
home page.
You have between 2 – 10 internal links per page.

29. Check image text and alt texts

30. Image text & Alt text
For the benefit of search engines, code compliance, and
visually impaired users, every image MUST have an ALT tag.
The ALT tag should accurately describe the image and contain
a keyword relevant to your website (but only if the keyword is
relevant to the image as well).
Image file names should be descriptive words, not numbers or
query strings. They should accurately describe the image, and,
if relevant, should also use the keyword. If an image is used as
a link, then the ALT tag functions in place of anchor text.

31. Tool
Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a no-
charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters
to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites.

32. Site Dashboard
Look For:
Messages – unnatural link messages,
googlebot can’t access, etc).
Crawl Errors – Do you have a large amount
of server errors? Not founds?
Search Queries – How are we trending?
Sitemaps – URLs submitted vs Indexed?
Close? Way off? Major change? Warnings?
Questions to ask:
Anything “jumping off the page?”
Which “version” of the domain is in the
GWT account (i.e. root? www? sub-
domain?).

33. Site Messages
Look For:
Are there any messages or alerts?
Were there messages that were deleted?
Alerts? Who are the users/owners?
Site messages can reveal a lot about what’s
been going on. That is, of course, they
haven’t been deleted.
Major messages to watch for:
Googlebot can’t access your site
Disavowed links updated
No manual spam action found (indicates
reconsideration request submitted).
Increase in not found errors
Possible outages
Your site was hacked

34. Structured Data
Any structured data being reported? If so,
what kind and is it appropriate. Any errors?
A couple to usually check:
Person – authorship? are pages good
candidates for authorship or is it just
“sitewide” authorship spam?
Publisher mark up?
Breadcrumbs – implemented correctly?
broken links?
Reviews – make sure not review spam,
marked up correctly, no errors.
VideoObject
Local Address

35. HTML Improvements
Big area to check!
Check for:
Duplicate / Missing / Long / Short meta
descriptions –
Duplicate / Missing / Long / Title tags –
Non-indexable content – Intentional?
If not, why?

36. Search Analytics
One of the best uses for GWT is identifying
pages with SERP CTR problems and coming
up with solutions to improve SERP CTR.
Links to Your Site
Find out which domain links your website
the most. Which content is most linked?
& How your data is linked?

37. Internal Links
Helpful to understanding overall site
organization. I prefer Screaming Frog for
this analysis.
Again, helpful to see your site how Google
sees it.
Mobile Usability
Most users use mobile devices to view sites
so its important that your site is mobile
user-friendly.
If there are issues then study and resolve
them.

38. Manual Actions
ALERT: Important one is there’s anything in
here, needs to be addressed promptly.
Hopefully, it always says: No manual
webspam actions found.
If you do get a manual webspam action,
make sure you understand which type and
what Google recommends in terms of
addressing the problem.
If you work with someone to remedy
manual webspam action, make sure they
have experience getting these issues
resolved. If their first recommendation is
“disavow all the links,” they don’t know
what they’re talking about.

39. Index Status
What is indexed? Anything indexed that
shouldn’t be? Anything blocked that we
want indexed?
As we add new pages is Google adding
them to index? Is our indexed page count
flat-lined? Going down?
Blocked Resources
Resources that the crawler is blocked from
indexing of the site

40. Remove URLs
Look For:
Usually use other means (robots.txt, meta
robots tags, etc.) for URL removal.
One exception: site hacks. Good way to
block entire hacked directories quickly.

41. Crawl Errors
Essential to identifying site problems.
Especially when checking for:
Server errors
Missing pages
Stuff getting crawled that shouldn’t be.
Make sure that you fix as many of these
errors as possible
Crawl Stats
General “Google site EKG.” Looking for major
increases or decreases in any of:
Pages crawled per day
Kilobytes downloaded per day
Time spent downloading a page
Fluctuations here aren’t necessarily dispositive of
major issue, but Google crawlers are telling you
“something happened” when there are big
swings in these metrics.

42. Look at the Robotzs.txt file

43. Robots.txt
File
Disallow
Disallow search engines from
showing this page in results
• Pop-up Pages
• Cart
• Checkout
• PPCLanding Pages
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

44. Robots.txt
File
Don’t Block:
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Images
Disallow: /css/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /img/

45. Check how
Google
renders
your page

46. Sitemap
Some people have dismissed sitemaps as less
useful these days. I still think they’re very helpful
in auditing site performance. Especially when
trying to determine what should be in/out of the
index. Some webmasters will “kill pages” but fail
to remove from sitemap which can confuse
crawler.
Security Issues
More sites are“hacked” recently. This is
where you can identify whether Google has
found a hack. However, I wouldn’t rely on
this section as your “hacked/not hacked”
gauge. By the time Google finds the hack, it
might be too late to head it off at the pass.

47. Page Load Speed
Identify ways to make your site faster and more
mobile-friendly.

48. Thank You
Looking for SEO audits?
Say “hello@madhura.co”