SEO Audit

It means the pages which are internally or externally linked to the site but are returning errors. The website has different DNS errors, server connectivity errors, robots.txt fetch errors, server errors, etc., creating obstacles for a search engine to crawl inside.

For example, A site might have URLs in the site crawl that are returning 4xx HTTP header statuses. This message might indicate either the page URL isn’t found or the content from that page has been removed intentionally. Audit mentions all these kinds of errors with their solutions.

It contains a list of the essential pages with a site structure that Google should crawl. A search engine must be able to go through all of the web pages and links to your website. You should update your sitemap and set down all the pages which are canonical, or non-canonical, returning a non-200 HTTP header status. 

The auditing process mentions and correctly discusses XML sitemap crawl issues. It distinctively states URLs you should list, URLs you should remove, canonical PDF URLs you should add, subordinate blog pages you should remove, etc.

This tag is responsible for unveiling the content of a page to the search engine. It is directly used in the head section of the HTML code. The part of the code informs the search engine crawlers about something important in your website.

The robots in the meta tag refer to a crawler that allows search engines to access the web page and index it. A site must check these meta tags for different web pages like blogs, accounts, users, etc. For example, the Robots Meta tag can use attributes like “noindex” to hide the webpage, which is important.

Content is a prominent part of the website, and it is essential to maintain this section correctly. The content part includes examining the title, headings, meta descriptions, primary body copy, etc., of all site pages and optimizing them accordingly.

For example: Let’s say there is a site that is going under auditing. While processing the content, it checks the titles first as it is the first that anyone sees about the site in the SERPs. The excellent title is precise, relevant, and clickable. 

It processes whether the page has a title or not, the length of the title, keywords in the title, and distinctive titles for each page, and matches the searcher’s intent. The exact process goes for meta descriptions, headings, and body copy for all the pages.

Canonicalization is having duplicate content or page for a site. A page is upright if it returns an HTTP status code of 200 and contains a self-referential canonical meta tag.  

If not, it generates various SEO issues that affect the traffic density and crawling activity of a site. Therefore, all pages like the homepage, category page, product page, product listing pages, etc., should have canonical tags pointing to URL directories or self-referential canonical tags. 

Auditing plays an important role to enlist and deal with various canonicalization issues of the site.

Robots.txt is a file that tells a search engine which page is accessible and which isn’t.

It has the list of the following items:

• Pages that are blocked
• Pages that aren’t blocked,
• Sitemap auto-discovery directive,
• Errors/warnings,
• Site navigation,
• Indexed pages, etc.

It controls and manages the crawler traffic. It also lets the search engine know about the pages it can crawl. Audit for this file is to improve the traffic, control the access request number, and give necessary access to search engines.

Structured data is data with the standard format that search engines can easily understand and markup.

There are various structured data on the site, and some of them are below:

• Blog posts and articles,
• Videos,
• Images,
• Product structured data,
• Rich snippets,
• Breadcrumbs,
• Sitelink search box,
• Knowledge graph
• Logo,
• Contacts, 
• Social profile links,
• Product feeds,
• Social Rich Snippets 
• Twitter cards, etc.

Several tools can check the effectiveness of these structured data in site visibility. 
The main objective is to check whether the implementation of these structured data is correct, and after that check, they are optimized appropriately.

A site should render web pages duly so that users can have a great experience while going through the site’s content. It affects HTML rendering when the pages have error resources. Errors resources can be internal or external. A website might often have code issues related to HTML, CSS, or JS, considered internal error resources.

If that is so, the site should have used a hreflang tag attribute to let a search engine know that it has different language versions and which languages are in it.

It is used in different ways, such as in the head section of HTML with an hreflang attribute, hreflang link in the HTTP header, and the XML sitemap within an XHTML namespace.

The website becomes international, more like global, once it goes live on the internet. The site might become multiregional or multilingual, having an international audience with an hreflang attribute. A site should check the use of hreflang tag in localizing the content of the page. 

Internal links are the connectivity for the pages within site. The total number of pages in the sitemap is noted, along with the pages having the most internal links.

The site must have mobile compatibility. The font size, structured data display on the mobile, speed of page load on the mobile, etc., matter for the site as most users are mobile users nowadays. It is always better when elements which user has to click aren’t together. Every site’s content shown in the desktop browser must offer the same range on the mobile.

It is best if the content fits the screen of the device. There should be a standard implementation of the viewport tag so that a site’s visual on different devices is adaptable. Audit examines the performance of the mobile site, speed, and other compatibility factors.

HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. It executes the authentic and secure protocol for the users and the web browsers, ensuring security. A search engine may flag some web pages, stating that it’s not secure, or sometimes a message may pop on the screen saying that there is no DNS CAA on the site. It appears because the place isn’t safe.

HTTPS built trust and security in users, increasing traffic and conversions. Therefore, it is very necessary to check HTTPS and solve the issues that may arise related to it.

Keywords are the terms through which search engines find and rank the website. Keywords guide the search engine to find the website with relevant and organic content for the users. Keywords used in the site should be according to the user intent based on the topics so that site can add quality content, get more leads, grow the traffic, build valid links, etc.

Competition exists among the sites based on keywords used, but if they aren’t used carefully, they won’t get any rank in the search engine first, which means less traffic and fewer conversions. There can be more issues like keyword stuffing, cannibalization, keywords difficulty, etc.

According to Google’s algorithm, the site should implement the keywords and their variations in appropriate numbers in those parts of the keywords. The audit report examines and mentions detail information along with the issues related to keywords
.

Competitor analysis takes notes on a competitor’s website and analyzes it for SEO weaknesses.

This process helps you see where your competition is ranking, what they’re doing better than you, and how you can improve your own website’s ranking. It will help you get ahead of the competition and rank higher in search engine results pages (SERP).

Backlinks are those links that turn the path of the visitors from other websites to your website. More backlinks mean more traffic and lead, but it also depends on the quality of the backlink. It matters that the backlink comes from a genuine and valid site. Google forfeits spam and unnatural links automatically. It would be best to be mindful about picking out the site to put up the backlink. 

Various good practices create genuine backlinks like a guest post, question/answer, image sharing, business listings, blog commenting, etc.

The backlinks to the own site and backlinks to competitors are also important. Audit will guide to make the link-building strategy for the site after it checks and gives report on the backlinks.