Linking to other websites is a great way to provide value to your users. Often times, links help users to find out more, to check out your sources and to better understand how your content is relevant to the questions that they have. If there are no robots meta tags on the page, search engines consider that as index, follow, meaning that they can index the page and crawl all links on it.

Since we’ve already started discussing the importance of mobile-friendly websites in previous sections, let’s focus on it further. To rank higher, your content must be relevant and cater to your target audience’s interests and needs. As evaluating relevance can be subjective, many SEO experts use engagement metrics, such as bounce rates, to determine whether published content is relevant to the audience’s needs.

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Experienced SEOs will often instinctively have a good idea of the search landscape and terms being searched for, but this can usually be built upon with solid research. If you’re in any doubt as to the value that content audits can offer, just have a read of Curt Storing’s piece on ‘How my Content Audit Process Secured a 6-Figure Sale of my Website’. A loose definition would be to say that it covers everything within the website property. But that doesn’t tell the full story as some areas (such as the on page content) aren’t typically analyzed in the same way as they would be with a more specific audit (e.g. a content audit). Our SEO team leaves no stone unturned to help your business’s website — or your clients.

Free SEO Audit: An SEO Pro’s Guide to Identifying & Fixing Site Issues

Start by using tools like Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights to benchmark current page load speeds and metrics like TTI and FCP, then diagnose areas for improvement. The first step is undoing actions causing manual penalties, as simply identifying them won’t improve visibility organically. Customize project settings like page depth and priority levels, then initiate the crawl from fresh or existing data. Larger sites may require sampling pages versus a full crawl due to processing time. Of course, sufficient auditing will require a mix of paid and free tools.

SEOptimer is better than other Website SEO Checkers through it`s super fast SEO analysis execution, JavaScript rendering and breadth of features. Additionally we provide a clear, actionable, prioritised list of recommendations to help improve. “SEO Site Checkup will assign your site an overall letter grade and identify the most important fixes to help you improve.” Get in touch with us to sign up for an SEO audit and experience the Hennessey Digital difference. This audit must discuss the most recent algorithm updates and how they have changed SEO overall, including how they apply to your site.

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• If Google is flagging issues with your website, then it’s usually safe to say that these are worth prioritizing.
• Semrush’s Site Audit tool checks your website for more than 140 on-page and technical SEO issues, including crawlability and indexability issues, redirect issues, and broken links.
• An enterprise SEO audit will also review your content’s overall quality and organic value.
• These SEO tools also make auditing and optimizing large websites or multiple sites with hundreds or thousands of changing web pages and content much more manageable.
• From product pages to blog posts, you want to optimize your content for search engines and users to get the most value from it.
• Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that assesses your page’s Core Web Vitals, which measure user experience and are SEO ranking factors.

If you spend $10 per month on hosting, don’t expect fast loading times. But Google is also continuously adapting how they assess your site’s speed. Which measures how fast your website responds to user interactions. Many in the SEO industry have thought this was the case for a while, based on RankBrain. Which is part of Google’s overall ranking systems, and was introduced in 2015. A free Semrush account lets you audit up to 100 URLs with Site Audit.

Some people might refer to a ‘website SEO audit’ as a technical audit, yet others would argue that only a small portion of the elements covered would qualify as ‘technical. Needless to say it’s a contentious subject, but what’s important is that when carrying out your own audits, the scope is well documented and understood by all stakeholders. The most comprehensive website for teaching the fundamentals of search engine optimization. Keyword stuffing is an important item to check during an SEO audit. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get carried away when crafting content and inadvertently overdo your keyword usage if you’re not paying attention to this SEO factor. H1 tags are the main headers on your pages, providing valuable information to search crawlers and helping users determine if your content is relevant and valuable.

Site Audit will let you know if GoogleBot can crawl and index your site. Using a backlink analysis tool will help you compare competitors’ backlink sources against your own domain and SEO Anomaly compile lists of referral sites not currently linking to you. Carefully structuring internal links helps distribute authority to elevate pages’ ability to rank well in search results. For user retention and rankings boosts, follow all mobile friendliness and page experience guidance highlighted in audits. Having your site properly indexed is critical for organic ranking.

As mobile continues to dominate search traffic, a responsive design is a cornerstone of SEO audits in 2025. Fixing mobile usability issues directly improves both bounce rates and dwell time—important engagement signals for ranking. The first step in any SEO website audit is running a crawl using tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Ahrefs Site Audit. These tools simulate how a search engine bot scans your website and reveal issues that can affect your indexation and performance. From tools that can assist with SEO audits, to link building and content marketing, Semrush has a comprehensive suite of SEO tools suite that can help you accomplish a ton while saving you a lot of time.

Surfer also has a new tool called Grow Flow that uses your Google Search Console data to identify biggest gaps in your content strategy. It’s also important to recognise the difference between the resource it takes to carry out an audit, and turnaround time. This may seem like common sense, but when dealing with clients or other stakeholders it’s critical that these sort of expectations are managed. You’ll need to consider business type, historical performance, competitors and other specific circumstances. By the summer of 2016, ‘Penguin’ had evolved to become part of Google’s core algorithm, and consequently run in real-time rather than the periodic updates we’d seen previously. This meant that the consideration of toxic links became more of an ongoing activity, and as a result the demand for standalone link audits reduced.