Doing An SEO Audit Of Your Website? These are the Five Things You Must Check

1. SEO Audit
Of Your
Website
F R O M : M A R K E T I N G 1 0 1

2. Introduction
• Search engine optimization means optimizing the website as per the webmaster
guidelines so that whenever a website crawler covers the website, it would be easy for
the crawlers to navigate through the website structure and understand the purpose of
the website. This is referred to as indexing.
• To start Search Engine Optimization for any website, the first step is to perform an SEO
audit of the website.

3. What is SEO Audit of the
Website?
SEO audit is basically analyzing all the technical points of the
website to check whether it is search engine friendly or
not. There are plenty of tools available online to perform an
SEO audit but most of them have a lot of limitations. It is better
to do it manually to get a clearer picture of what needs to be
improved.

4. H e r e a r e t h e f i v e t h i n g s o n e
m u s t c h e c k w h e n d o i n g a n S E O
a u d i t .

5. Robots.txt
• This is the first file, which crawlers go through before entering into the website. It is
used to indicate those parts of the website, which the webmaster does not want to be
accessed by search engine crawlers.
• It is stored in the root folder of the website and can be accessed
via www.domain.com/robots.txt.
• An auditor should check whether every important section of the website is accessible
to the crawler or not, as some CMS’s automatically creates this file and it might not be
according to Google webmaster guidelines.
• Make sure disallow is not followed by “/” as this will block all web crawlers from
crawling the content.

6. XML Sitemap
• This is a file where the webmaster can list out all the web pages of a website to inform
search engines about the organizational structure of the whole website. This file is
basically an add-on for crawlers to crawl the site more intelligently and efficiently.
• It is stored in the root folder of the website and can be accessed
via www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
• An auditor should check if it the sitemap is present on the website or not. The
webmaster should also ensure that it contains only the most important URLs of the
website.

7. Cached version
• This is that version of the webpage which Google uses as a snapshot of the page.
Google examines this and stores this version as a backup. This version tells the
webmaster how the crawler has indexed the webpage.
• The header at the top of the Google cached version indicates when was the last time
that a crawler came on the website.
• An auditor should ensure that the cached version of the page should be exactly the
same as the original version. It can be done by cache:domain.com.

8. No of pages
• Creating a dense website with proper interlinking within the website is one of the key
factors in ranking.
• An auditor should perform a site:<website name> to get an overview of the number
of pages indexed by search engines from the particular domain and ensure that
irrelevant pages from the website are not being indexed.

9. Page load time
• It is the time taken to download and display the contents of the webpage in your
browser.
• This is one of the most important ranking factors and performance metrics, that
directly impacts user engagement and a business’s end-goals.
• An auditor should check the page load time of a few important pages on the website.
If the time taken is more than industry standards, the developers should aim to
minimize the load time as much as possible. This can be done by tools such as test my
site or page speed insight.

10. There are several other factors which determine the value
and ranking of a particular website in Google’s eyes. But
these five factors mentioned above are the five most
important factors one should consider while performing an
SEO audit.
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