I just had to audit one of my websites, and while it was a long and painful process (as always), I’ve discovered and fixed many problems I didn’t know existed.
There are a number of reasons why you might want to audit the SEO health of your own site. Maybe you own the site and you haven’t checked in a while, and you’re looking for a DIY solution rather than an expensive external audit.
Maybe you just bought the website and you want to make sure everything is in order before you proceed with your plans. Maybe you’re the third-party auditor and you’ve been contracted to check on the health of a client site.
No matter the reason, there will be a lot of factors to check, and you have to be comprehensive. Missing one factor can be a hit to SEO moving forward, and an old, lingering problem can compound if left alone. Here’s what to check, and how to check it.
Author Note: This is all about SEO on your own site. For off-site SEO or competitive analysis, you’ll have to check other guides.
Check for Broken Links with Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog will provide you with a lot of information that will be useful for a number of other steps on this list as well as this one. For this particular step, you just want to run a crawl of your site and check on the integrity of your links. Any link on your site that points to a page that doesn’t exist needs to be changed or removed. Find an updated version of the previous destination, or remove the link entirely.
Check Sitemap Integrity
Your sitemap is essentially a list of every page you want the search engines to find on your site. You need to make sure it’s well-formed and lists every page on your site. There are a few ways to do this, including Xenu Link Sleuth. The exact process can be a little complex, so you have two options. Your first option is to follow this protocol to check your current sitemap. Your second option is to just generate a new sitemap, preferably once the rest of your audit is complete and any changes have been made.
Check for 404s in Google Webmaster Tools
Assuming your site is linked to your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can go to your Crawl -> Crawl Errors report. This report will show you any point where the Googlebot has attempted to crawl a page only to find that the page doesn’t exist. If the page does exist, the error may be old, or you may be blocking the bot. If the page doesn’t exist, it’s a good opportunity to either create a real page for that spot, or to redirect to the page it should be loading.
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