The Ultimate SEO Audit: Fix Your Website’s Optimization Problems

You probably signed up for this lesson because a) you are tired of spending endless amounts of time sifting through the endless onslaught of SEO advice on the internet, b) you may not understand SEO fully, or c) your business simply isn’t receiving the amount of traffic you would like.

Well, you’ve found the perfect solution. This lesson is literally a step-by-step process on how to optimize your website and get it onto the first page of Google for the world to see. Follow these steps below, and your website will be primed to receive endless amounts of traffic for years to come.

If you’re running a business, it’s important to make sure that your website is as search engine friendly as possible. A comprehensive SEO audit, such as the one you are about to embark on, can help you identify and fix any potential issues that might be hindering your site’s performance in search results pages.

With over five years of experience, dozens of business projects under my belt, and sheer trial and error, I’ve been able to synthesize the complexities of SEO down into four audit phases and the most impactful 15 points. Many SEO experts out there on the web will claim to have 25, 50, or 100-point checklists, but these extras tend not move the needle very much and only make things more complicated in an attempt to get their readers to throw their hands up in frustration and beg for help.

My goal in this lesson is to make the SEO audit process impactful, easy, and understandable enough for you to complete it on your own and at your own pace.

If you would like a bit more guidance, or if you would like me to fix your website for you, visit my agency site and let me know how I can help.

Until then, let’s dive right in!

The Four Phases of an SEO Audit

If your house is your physical property, then your website is your digital property. In order for your house to maintain its stability, it needs a strong foundation upon which to stand. Similarly, in order for your website to gain stability and thrive, it too needs a strong foundation. This is what an SEO audit provides for you.

Search engines like Google and Bing have what are termed “crawlers” that scour the internet to index every available page (which allows pages to show up in search results). These crawlers are constantly making their rounds, checking websites for new and updated pages. If your website is a mess and lacks structure, it makes it more difficult for these crawlers to do their job, causing your website’s searchability to suffer before it ever makes to a reader’s eyes.

To ensure that you give your website every chance to perform well in search results, first, you need to satisfy the crawlers. And to do this, there are four phases you must focus on in the auditing process: technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and general SEO. But before we get into the details of these, lets set up the one SEO tool you will need to make this process as seamless as possible.

Screaming Frog: The All-in-One SEO Audit Tool

Carrying out an SEO audit requires you to have access to a lot of information. From page titles to meta descriptions, from headers to response codes, from internal to external links, and so much more, this is enough to make anyone’s head explode. Fortunately, we have been graced with a wonderful tool called Screaming Frog, which brings all of this information together onto one screen in a simple and understandable way. Oh, and it’s totally free!

As you can see, there is a TON of information on just this single tab on this single screenshot. But imagine having to cobble together all your website’s information manually…can you say…misery? To get a full understanding of everything Screaming Frog offers, browse around their website before you do anything. We will be relying on this software throughout the audit process, so here is how to download it:

1. Go to screamingfrog.co.uk
2. Hit the bluish “Download” button under SEO Spider Tool.
3. Follow the prompts to set it up on your computer. (Note, if your website has more than 500 pages, you may want to think about upgrading to a paid plan to have access to all of your site’s analysis. Under 500 pages? You won’t have to pay a dime!)

Once you are set up, open the software, type your website in, and hit start. The tool will take a few minutes to complete its crawl depending on how big your site is. Once it finishes, you’ll have access to an immense amount of information about your website. Take some time to explore and get familiar with the layout.

Now that you’ve run your first crawl, it’s time to move into the first phase of your audit.

Point 1: HTTPS or HTTP?

The first optimization problem you need to address is to ensure that only one version of your site exists. What do you mean by that, Joe??

Well, I’m glad you asked! Whenever you type in a website’s URL, there are four possible ways to do it:

1. http : //
2. http : // www.
3. https : //
4. https : // www.

Whether you have a “www.” at the beginning of your domain name is your choice. But you never ever want to have both “http” and “https” pages show up on your site. Only one should be accessible on the internet, and any others should be redirected to the correct version. For optimization purposes, we want to aim for either #3 or #4.

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which has been the foundation of communication on the internet since the 1990’s. HTTPS, which is Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, has become more prevalent in recent years as it protects page authenticity, secures accounts better, and keeps communications, transactions, and identity private. To give you an idea of why this is important, this is what a hacker might see for a transaction:

HTTP – John Doe, 123 Fake St, Springfield, MA 01020

HTTPS – njflafuichaoiuewy4789pfuhefiuhpuwhqpo9w847urp8fuqehehqwvpq983y4pfquherpgfq48yp98gf3prghpur58ypkJIJOJHIUbgeuhdUHUHpehdu8vyuy9842huhqolwhdcuwir3o78t4owfhwergtfow784h5o87ghwqopho457y27goo47g5oh2y75o2gp4y875ytgf7hviovhqwoiu43777yIUGGogyyGOIFRFGI

I’d say HTTPS is pretty useful and necessary in this day in age. Make sure your website uses it, as the little padlock (shown below) will build trust with your customer/reader, and it will certainly give you a ranking boost in Google.

What you need to do is set up an SSL certificate with your web hosting company if it isn’t set up already. WordPress automatically does this with every website, and all versions are redirected to the HTTPS pages. By sorting the list of your internal pages on Screaming Frog, you can easily see if there are any pages that are lacking HTTPS. If this is the case, contact your hosting company and they can fix and redirect them for you.

Point 2: XML Sitemap

The sitemap is one of the most underappreciated and underutilized aspects of a website, and is one of the most common optimization problems for websites. The good news is that it’s free, it takes all of 2-3 minutes, and it gives a ranking boost to your site, as it makes the indexing process much easier for Google’s crawler.

An XML sitemap is a page on your website that lists out every indexable page on your website. It may vary, but if you use WordPress or any other major platform, it’s likely that there is already a sitemap created for your site. With that said, follow these steps to ensure that your site has maximum visibility:

1. Check to see if you have a sitemap by typing in (yourwebsite).com/sitemap.xml
2. If you do not have one, consult this resource from Google on how to generate a sitemap.
3. Once you do have a sitemap, go to Google Search Console, confirm ownership of your website, and go to “Sitemaps” on the left-hand side.
4. Copy the URL of your sitemap, and paste it into “the “Add a New Sitemap.” Hit submit and Google will now have a direct copy of your sitemap from now on.

To check whether there are any missing pages:

1. Still in Google Search Console, go to “Pages” on the left-hand side.
2. Under “Why Pages Aren’t Indexed,” you want to pay attention to the “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag.

3. If you see any pages there that you think should be visible to search engines, go into the back end of your site, find the page you want to fix, and there should be a setting regarding search result visibility.

4. Once that is fixed, go back to Google Search Console, and click “Validate Fix”

When you are finished, the website pages that are most important to you should be fully visible and indexable to Google, increasing your visibility in search results.

Point 3: Website Speed

Page speed is an ultra-critical aspect of search engine optimization and can be a serious problem if not addressed immediately. Why is this so important? Think about the last time you went onto a really slow website. You may have been anywhere from impatient to a bit frustrated, which certainly detracted from your experience on the site. Google penalizes slow websites because it wants to ensure that people have access to the best experiences when clicking on their search results.

There are two tools you can choose from to check your website’s speed: Page Speed Insights by Google or GT Metrix. I prefer GT Metrix simply because it gives you the ability to change locations (page speed can vary depending on where you are in the world), and it gives you much more detailed suggestions on how to speed up your website.

As a rule of thumb, you want to make sure your website loads in under three seconds. As you can see below, my website does just that at 1.6 seconds. I get a 68% overall grade because my website is heavy on images and CSS code, which can have a negative impact on speed. But overall, if your website clocks in at less than three seconds, grades don’t really matter after you graduate high school.

Once you have run your speed test, I suggest running it two more times since you may get different results each time. Take the average time in order to have an accurate understanding of your site’s performance. Take some time to explore the issues and suggestions GT Metrix proposes. If fixing these is beyond your abilities or patience, you may want to consult a website developer to help you.

To simplify things a bit, there are four main things you want to focus on to speed up your site manually. These, above anything else, will do the most to improve page speed:

1. Reduce image sizes
2. Reduce HTTP requests
3. Minify Javascript and CSS files
4. Use a cache plugin

If you use WordPress, here is a useful guide that can walk you through all things “page speed.”

Also, you want to prioritize your page speed for the mobile version of your website, in addition to desktop. Typically, desktop versions load faster than mobile, but you still want to keep the 3-second rule in mind. You’ll definitely want to pay particular attention to how your website shows up on different devices. Which leads us to…

Point 4: Mobile Friendly Test

Google operates on a mobile-first index, which means that all of it’s rankings account for the mobile version of your site first. Mobile friendliness is one of the most common optimization problems, and is one of the least acknowledged by website owners. There is a lot of opportunity to outrank your competition here, which is why mobile friendliness is so important.

Fortunately, it is very easy for us to check this. Take your website’s URL and paste it into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

If you’d rather see your mobile version manually, either check it on your phone to see if your website loads properly, its images resize, etc., or you can right-click on your website’s desktop homepage and click “inspect.”

You can then hit the “Toggle device toolbar” button to the left of “Elements,” and this will allow you to view your website with almost any mobile phone or tablet size.

If you find that your site is not mobile friendly, I won’t get too much into the web development weeds in this lesson, so here is a useful place to start. If you use a theme on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or any well-known platforms, your website will most likely already be mobile friendly. If your theme is not, it should be very easy to switch to a theme that is mobile friendly.

Point 5: Optimize URLs

WARNING: This section is useful for everyone, however, the solutions suggested here are only good for new websites. You do not want to change the URL of a website or page that has established links to other pages and other websites, or else you will lose all the rankings and progress you’ve made. If you have a website older than one month or if you have posts that are already doing well on Google, you may be best served to focus on points 6 through 12.

When handling on-page SEO, the first area you want to look at is your website’s URLs. When optimizing URLs, it’s best to follow these four main principles:

1. Include your biggest keyword in the URL
2. No keyword stuffing (unnaturally including multiple keywords)
3. Avoid repeating words
4. The shorter, the better.

Adhering to these principles simply makes it easy for Google to understand what your page is about.

1. Run your website crawl on Screaming Frog.
2. Once the crawl is done, go to the URL tab at the top. This will show you all of your web pages, along with a ton of information including status codes, indexability, and character length.

3. It can be a bit difficult to view or do anything with the information on the software, so I recommend exporting it to an Excel file so you can focus on what is most important.

4. Sort your spreadsheet by “Content Type,” and remove all rows except those with “text/html; charset=UTF-8.” These refer to your visible pages on the website.

5. Remove the columns “Indexability Status,” “Hash,” “Canonical Link Element,” and “URL Encoded Address.” For most ease and effectiveness, your spreadsheet should look like this:

6. Sort by “Status Code” and look at your 404 pages, which are broken links. Sort through these 404 pages to ensure that none of them are necessary to the function of your website or for SEO purposes. If there is an important page showing up as a 404, you will need to set up a 301-redirect on the backend of your site to a relevant page that is working (200 code). If none of your 404 pages are necessary, you can just leave them alone.

7. Lastly, simply go through each of your pages to ensure that each URL follows the four principles, pay specific attention to whether each includes the keyword you are targeting (aka the relevant topic of the page). Again, I want to stress, if the URL you are concerned about is already established with backlinks, rankings, and internal links, it is best to leave it alone as you risk erasing all the progress that page has made.

Point 6: SEO Titles

The next optimization problem you might come across is your website’s SEO titles. Beforehand, it’s important to know the difference between page titles and SEO titles. Your page title is visible to your reader on your actual page. The SEO title shows up in Google search results. They do not necessarily have to match each other, but in terms of driving traffic to your website, you want to put a little more thought into the SEO title. When optimizing SEO titles, it’s best to follow these five main principles:

1. 60 characters or less
2. Try to keep your target keyword towards the front of the SEO title tag
3. Write naturally
4. It’s okay to have variations of the target word (for example: “expert” and “specialist“)
5. Avoid repeated words

In Screaming Frog, all you have to do is move from the “URL” tab to the “Page Titles” tab.

1. It can be a bit difficult to view or do anything with the information on the software screen itself, so I recommend exporting it to an Excel file so you can focus on what is most important.
2. Remove all columns except “Address,” “Title 1,” and “Title 1 Length.” Your spreadsheet should look like this:

3. Follow the above five principles. Rewrite the SEO titles of any page that exceeds 60 characters. Google will cut everything off after that threshold. Use wordcounter.net to count how many characters your rewritten title is.

For example, if you look at the sheet above, it looks like the title in row 6 exceeds the 60-character length. Here is how I would change it:

Old: “How to Communicate Effectively at Work Using Language Psychology – Screaming Frog” (81 characters)

New: “Communicate Effectively at Work Using Language Psychology” (57 characters) Sure, we are sacrificing brand name here, but it would have gotten cut off by Google anyway.

SEO titles are a critical optimization problem to fix, so do not skip this step.

Point 7: Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the short text portion that describes what the page is about. It typically shows up on a Google search beneath the blue SEO title:

For an optimized meta description, follow these four principles:

1. 155 characters or less
2. Mention your target keyword anywhere in the description
3. Get people’s attention by asking questions or appealing to their curiosity
4. Write naturally

In Screaming Frog, all you have to do is move from the “Page Titles” tab to the “Meta Description” tab.

1. It can be a bit difficult to view or do anything with the information on the software screen itself, so I recommend exporting it to an Excel file so you can focus on what is most important.
2. Remove all columns except “Address,” “Meta Description 1,” and “Meta Description 1 Length.”
3. Follow the above four principles. Rewrite any description that exceeds 155 characters. Add descriptions to those pages that are missing them.

Note: The third meta description principle requires some level of attention to copywriting skills, which we also specialize in at Unparalleled Copywriting Agency (it’s in the name!) Contact us if you would like help with any writing-related needs.)

Point 8: Header Tags

Header tags refer to the hierarchical structure every page follows (similar to an outline.) These include H1 (the main topic), H2 (the primary subtopics), H3 (the subtopics of the H2s), and on down to H6s.

A common mistake I see on a lot of sites is that people don’t understand the significance of headers in relation to search optimization. Most websites I come across have disorganized headers, missing headers, multiple H1 headers, or headers being used inaccurately simply because they appear a certain size on a page.

Avoid these common optimization problems, and follow these principles:

1. H1 headers should include your target keyword
2. Only one H1 per page, as multiple will confuse Google
3. You can have as many H2s as necessary. Just as long as they are relevant subtopics to the H1
4. Same with H3s to H2s, H4s to H3s, and so on
5. As always, write naturally

In Screaming Frog, move from the “Meta Description” tab to the “Internal” tab.

1. It is best to export this page to Excel as well, as we want to compare the Titles to the H1s to the H2s to make sure they all compliment each other.
2. Delete all columns on this spreadsheet except the “Address,” “Title 1,” “H1-1,” “H2-1,” and H2-2″ tabs. Your spreadsheet should look like this:

4. To be safe, check the H1 tab as well. If you have any H1-2s, you need to remove them from those pages. Again, multiple H1 tags can confuse Google, and penalize your site in the rankings.

5. For the H1-1 column, as stated earlier, it is not mandatory to make it different from the SEO title tag, although you can if you’d like to hit other keywords.

6. For the H2s, make sure they are subordinate topics of the H1. Rewrite them in the spreadsheet if necessary. Also fill in any blank headers. Ensure that you have target keyword variations in each header.

7. Once you have updated everything on the spreadsheet, go back into your site and update each page with your optimized header tags.

Note: This can be a very time-consuming process, but when it is done correctly, you will avoid many optimization problems and reap the benefits for months and years to come.

Point 9: Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a common optimization problem that occurs when two or more pages on your site show the exact same content. Your site will be penalized by default because Google won’t know which page to rank. Here’s how to find these pages:

1. Back to Screaming Frog, go to the “Content” tab
2. On the right panel, you will see “Exact Duplicates” and “Near Duplicates” (you won’t be able to see near duplicates unless you sign up for the paid version of the software.)
3. If you see any exact duplicates, click on the line, and it will list the pages which are exact matches.
4. At this point, you have two options: redirect one duplicate to the other, or rewrite the content on one of the duplicates.

Too many duplicate pages can be a critical optimization problem if not addressed. Many times, the issue could arise from our audit Point #1: HTTP vs HTTPS. Whatever the reason, make sure to remove any duplicates as soon as possible.

Point 10: Thin Content

Thin content is an optimization problem that refers to pages that offer little to no value to the reader. You can see which pages are “thin” simply by viewing their word count. Typically any page under 350 words is seen as thin content. Here’s how to find thin content:

1. Back to Screaming Frog. Go to the “Content” tab
2. Sort the spreadsheet by “Word Count”
3. Any pages below 350 words will be those you want to pay attention to.
4. Add as much content to those pages as you can to get over the 350 threshold. Make it natural and relevant to the page.

Note: Sometimes you will have pages that just cannot have 350+ words, such as contact pages or booking pages. There is no reason for these pages to rank highly on Google in the first place, so there is no need to stress over these types of pages.

Point 11: Broken Links

We touched on broken links in “Point 5: Optimize URLs.” Here we will go deeper into detail on on these types of pages, also known as 404 pages. Here is how to find broken links:

1. Back to Screaming Frog. Go to the “Response Codes” tab
2. Sort the spreadsheet by “Status Code”
3. For each 404 page, click the line, then click the “Inlinks” tab at the bottom of your screen. This will show which pages are linking to the 404 page. For each of these pages, you can find out where the link is located by looking at the anchor text. (Anchor text is simply the text within the content that is hyperlinked.)
4. Go to the affected page on your website, and either replace the anchor text with a link to a relevant and active page, or remove the link altogether.

There is not much else you can (or should) do in terms of your 404 pages. As long as the meaningful pages are redirected to functioning pages, and the link text in other pages is fixed, any current 404 pages you have will fade away over time in Google’s eyes. What truly matters is what the actual reader sees. And if they are not affected by broken links, then your site is good to go.

Point 12: Internal Link Structure

Internal link structure can uncover many optimization problems, and is critically important for the success of your site, especially if you are having difficulty building sufficient backlinks early on. A backlink is a page on someone else’s site that links to one of your pages. Internal links, on the other hand, are pages on your site that link to other pages on your site. So if one page in particular gains a lot of popularity, it will build more “link juice” which it can pass off to other pages that it links to.

So let’s say this post you are reading becomes the number one search result on Google for the keyword “SEO.” Odds are that it will gain tons of backlinks because people like to refer to popular and quality content. As I publish more SEO content, I can link this page to those newer pages, which will give credibility to those newer pages, helping them rank higher as well.

Analyzing internal link structure can be very difficult by looking at a spreadsheet, especially if you have a lot of content on your site. Instead, it helps to see your structure visually to determine which posts could use internal links. Naturally, Screaming Frog comes to our rescue:

1. In the very top toolbar, click “Visualizations”
2. There are several options for visual link structures, but I like to use the “Crawl Tree Graph” purely because it is the most straight-forward and visually easy to work with:

As you can see, it is easier to see the page “permalinks” (the extension after “joebalcom.com”), which pages link to which pages, and which pages don’t link to any pages at all. For an example of how we can benefit from this, if I want to strengthen my “roadtrip” and “puzzle” posts (on the right), I might want to take a successful post like “driving-cross-country,” and link it to both of them. You can’t easily identify those types of opportunities just staring at a spreadsheet, which is why this graph view is so valuable.

Avoid unnecessary optimization problems down the road and use this graph to identify opportunities for internal link building. Come back to it every month or so in order to keep up with newer posts.

Let’s take a look at what can be done with backlink profile analysis.

Point 13: Backlink Profile

There are two primary modes of backlink acquisition: active and passive. Passive acquisition is how most people operate, as backlinks naturally accumulate as good content is published. Active acquisition is what we will be looking at in this section.

When pursuing active backlink acquisition, there are dozens of strategies you can use (which is a topic for another post). But typically, a rule of thumb is to aim for backlinks from websites with a Domain Rating (website strength) of at least 20, and the number of referring domains (websites that link to you) at 50 or more. These two criteria ensure that your site will garner credibility from credible websites. But how do we determine which websites meet these metrics? Enter ahrefs.com:

Ahrefs is a website that allows you to carry out effective keyword research, research your competition, and analyze backlinks, and so much more. If Screaming Frog is the best tool for on-page SEO, then Ahrefs is the best tool for off-page SEO by far.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can use the “Site Explorer” tab in Ahrefs to analyze specific metrics of any website. This image shows my old domain, which attained a domain rating of 24, and attained over 5000 lifetime backlinks/300+ referring domains. I am in the process of building up my “.com” domain now, so one day in the not-so-distant future, this site will surpass these numbers. In short, this is the type of website you’d want to get a backlink from as it meets each of the two criteria above.

That is all for Phase 3 of this audit. Short, sweet, and to the point. Keep an eye out for a backlinking strategies post coming soon.

Point 14: Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic is the goal of this entire post. You do not want to get caught up obsessing over your daily or weekly search traffic. In fact, I suggest you only admire your progress once a month or once a quarter, as SEO is a long game. However, checking your site’s performance in recent weeks and months can reveal possible issues as well.

By seeing massive increases in traffic, it can tell you which type of content is working for you. Or in the case of this business below, it can be a sign of a “negative SEO” attack:

This website had a massive organic traffic bump a couple months ago. But it dropped like a rock just as fast as it rose up. A little research showed that this marble and granite company in suburban Philadelphia was deluged with thousands of low-quality Japanese backlinks. The story gets crazier, as the company’s search result on Google is currently in Japanese characters and shows up at the bottom of page 1 for its own brand name. (I attempted to get in touch with the owner a couple times, but unfortunately, like more business owners than you might imagine, he displayed indifference regarding his online presence.)

On the other end of the spectrum, massive decreases in organic traffic can signal that you may have been penalized by Google. Dramatic changes in your web traffic (positive or negative), show why it is important to keep your finger on the pulse of your website’s organic traffic. You can use Google Analytics (as long as you have the tag installed on your website), as it can be the most accurate way to measure traffic to your website.

Point 15: Brand Visibility

The final optimization problem to check in this 15-point SEO audit is your brand visibility. If you search your company name and it does not rank at the top of the first page of Google, then you have a lot of work ahead of you.

All sites should rank highly on Google for their brand name. This is a good sign that Google has taken notice of your brand, and it helps customers who search for your brand as well.

For this issue, you will need to focus on building a lot of backlinks to your branded pages, which will increase your site’s domain authority, as well as its brand authority.

Conclusion: The Stage is Set

Congratulations! You’ve successfully performed a complete SEO audit of your website. It’s important to note that this post is audit-focused, which means that we are now experts on identifying optimization problems to fix and opportunities for improvement. While I did my best to offer remedies and resources where possible, I refrained from making this a solutions-based post as it would have taken us well off course. Soon I will be posting detailed and actionable solutions to a lot of these optimization problems, so stay tuned.

Until then, please reach out to me with any questions that may come up as you progress through the auditing process, as some of these phases may require more time and focus. Now that you’ve learned about the 15 most impactful areas of SEO, you have dramatically increased your website’s likelihood of skyrocketing in search rankings, skyrocketing your organic traffic, and skyrocketing your revenue in turn. I wish you the best of luck, and I look forward to hearing your success stories!