A Free SEO Audit Tool by Ahrefs
Tools lack the ability to understand context and strategy in the way that SEO professionals do. They usually can’t “connect the dots” or assess the real significance of certain findings. Even after getting those basics right, link building should never be random or reactive. These straightforward steps are often enough to achieve SEO success, yet many overlook them while searching for complicated shortcuts. This isn’t busywork; it’s the foundation of a solid SEO strategy. Next to each URL, there should be the main keyword that the page should target, plus a few related synonyms or variations.
- Study after study outlines the importance of page speed (especially for mobile) and how it can affect your rankings and conversion rates.
- But if you already created a project without enabling expert options, no worries.
- I run a Screaming Frog audit for most of my clients and take it to the bank, it finds one or two (or more) issues every time.
- There are hundreds of factors an SEO audit can cover, which is why audit tools are so important.
- “SEO Site Checkup will assign your site an overall letter grade and identify the most important fixes to help you improve.”
- Many websites rush straight into link building, generating hundreds or even thousands of low-quality backlinks with exact-match anchor texts, before laying any SEO groundwork.
Best SEO Reporting Tools (Free & Paid Options)
Ready to conduct a competitor analysis but don’t know which tools you can use to check website traffic? For example, a page providing instructions for how to tie a friendship bracelet that’s missing instructional images and essential keywords will rank poorly. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool includes a page experience factor that considers both page load speeds and UX. If your site has long loading times, visitors may become frustrated and navigate away from your page to seek a better experience from competitors. SEO and online presence are deeply interconnected, so improving site performance is a bit of a circular challenge.
As a business owner, you need to ensure your backlink profile is healthy and high-quality to achieve (and keep) high rankings in the SERPs. Your meta title is the text that appears as the blue link in search engines. An optimized meta title can improve your organic rankings and increase the CTR for users. Each page should have a unique title that includes the topic (or keyword) that that page is meant to target. Performing an SEO audit regularly helps maintain your website’s health and search visibility.
Analyze Your Organic Traffic
Broken pages occur when a resource on your website ceases to exist. Sometimes, these resources still have internal links pointing to them or have backlinks from other sites. If you’re not using either of those tools, try the Top Pages report in Ahrefs Site Explorer. This shows the pages on your website sorted by estimated search traffic they receive (from high to low). How your business chooses to utilize social media has SEO ramifications. Google and other search engines pay attention to your social media presence, followers, and engagement.
Step 8: Run page speed analytics
This is why it’s crucial to look out for such errors during an SEO audit and fix the broken links that caused them. An SEO audit is a process that evaluates all aspects of a website that impact its performance in search engines and identifies opportunities for improvement. For a full deep dive on internal linking check out our internal linking wiki page and our guide on how to optimize your website’s internal links. Once, my client in the home care industry was hit with a content penalty back in 2019. SEO Anomaly I was shocked because we weren’t churning out low-quality content on the website.
