If you’re like most people, hearing the word “audit” probably makes you feel a little nervous.
But if you’re an SEO pro (we bet you are), it might excite you about finding useful marketing insights.
The SEO audit tools help us figure out what’s driving traffic to a site, why content isn’t ranking well on Google, and how to make the copy on a page better.
We’ve tried out a bunch of SEO audit tools, and today we’re here to share the details about our very own tool—SEO Checker.
This handy tool doesn’t just handle the grunt work of bulk SEO checks; it also includes speed and security checks.
Let’s break down what an SEO audit is and how SEO Checker can help you get it done.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit basically checks how well your website is set up for search engines.
It helps spot issues that could stop your site from ranking higher and finds opportunities to improve your visibility.
This way, you can increase your rankings, get more traffic, and see better results for your business.
Here are a few more perks of doing an SEO audit:
- Keeps you ahead of your competitors on search engines
- Improves the experience for your website visitors
- Identifies key SEO opportunities to get the most out of your investment
- Helps fine-tune your SEO strategy
- Helps you explain SEO’s importance to stakeholders in your business
We’ll dive deeper into this later when we walk you through how to do an SEO audit using SEO Checker.
What SEO audit tools do you need?
There are plenty of tools out there to help you perform an SEO audit for your website. One of them is our very own SEO Minion, which lets you check SEO stats for individual pages.
But since many of you needed a tool for websites with thousands of pages—and SEO Minion wasn’t built for such a massive job—we created a new tool called SEO Checker.
This handy tool doesn’t just take care of bulk SEO checks; we’ve also added features to check speed and security—because those are just as important!
While building this SEO audit tool, our team took inspiration from some of the best website crawlers out there, like Screaming Frog, Checkbot, and Sitebulb.
With SEO Checker, you can scan thousands of pages efficiently, find all the issues, and also get clear instructions on how to fix them.
How to do an SEO audit?
Everyone’s approach to an SEO audit is a bit different, but here’s how you can easily create your own SEO audit using SEO Checker in 10 simple steps:
1. Run a crawl of your website
A “crawl” is just software scanning your website to find SEO issues. To get started with your SEO audit, you’ll need to run one using SEO Checker.
First, head to the Chrome Store and install the SEO Checker extension. Once it’s ready, open the tool, type in your website, and click “Start Crawling.”
You can also adjust the settings—like how many pages you want it to check, the maximum number of URLs, or even block some URLs to speed things up.
In seconds, SEO Checker will give you a full overview of your site’s SEO, speed, and security.
From the overview, you can see your SEO Checker scores, how many pages and URLs it crawled, and details like broken links, redirects, or other errors.
SEO Checker also makes it easy to spot and fix SEO, speed, and security issues that might hurt your site.
If you want to dig deep, you can export all the issues into a CSV file for more detailed analysis.
2. Perform an SEO analysis
SEO is all about making sure your site can be found by search engines.
An SEO-optimized page focuses on both users and search engines, helping you drive organic traffic by offering content that matches what people are looking for.
But if your website isn’t performing well, you could miss out on chances to attract and engage visitors. That’s why an SEO analysis is so important.
So, how do you do it? Where do you start?
When you run a crawl of your site using SEO Checker (like we explained earlier in step one), the tool will show you your SEO Analysis score and give you a breakdown of how you’re doing in the key areas of SEO.
Just click on the SEO Analysis option on the left side of the screen, and you’ll see the important SEO components our tool can check for you automatically.
In the next steps, we’ll walk you through each of these components one at a time.
3. Improve your page titles, headings, and meta descriptions
Even though Google has said meta descriptions don’t directly impact rankings, your title and meta tags still play a big role in getting people to click.
Users tend to choose pages that feel most relevant to what they’re searching for.
SEO Checker helps by flagging pages where titles and meta tags are too long, too short, missing, or duplicated. It also checks if each page has a unique and properly optimized H1 heading.
These might seem like small details, but page titles and descriptions are often the first thing users and search engines notice. Optimizing them can make a big difference in driving clicks, links, and conversions.
As for meta descriptions, Google mentioned over a decade ago that they don’t use them to rank pages. Instead, they use them to create the snippet shown in search results.
While that hasn’t changed much, a well-written meta description can still boost your click-through rate, indirectly helping your page rankings.
4. Optimize your website URL
A URL is basically the web address you type into your browser to visit a specific page.
It’s like the digital address that guides you to a unique resource online, whether it’s a web page, an image, or a video.
A well-structured URL gives both people and search engines a clear idea of what the page is about. While search engines focus on the overall authority of your domain, including keywords in your URL can also act as a small ranking factor.
That’s why analyzing your URLs is an important step in an SEO audit.
SEO Checker makes this easy by running a URL analysis and providing useful details like:
- Are your URLs short?
- Do they have extensions?
- Are there parameters in the URLs?
- Are there symbols in the URLs?
- Are the URLs lowercase?
- Are there underscores in the URLs?
This data helps you find URLs that aren’t doing much for your site’s performance.
That said, let’s clear something up: While including keywords in URLs can boost your search visibility, URLs themselves don’t have a huge impact on rankings.
So, while it’s worth paying attention to, don’t create awkward or unnecessary URLs just to include a keyword. Focus on keeping them clean and meaningful instead.
5. Perform a content analysis
Content analysis is the process of reviewing your content—whether it’s brand new or something you’ve already published—to identify factors that could either help or hurt its performance in search rankings.
The main idea behind SEO content analysis is simple: Not all URLs that search engines crawl will make it into their index.
In other words, just because Google (or any search engine) crawls your website, it doesn’t mean your content will actually rank.
This can happen for lots of reasons. SEO content analysis helps you find these issues and fix them.
We usually break these problems into two categories:
- Common issues: These include targeting the wrong keywords, missing key on-page SEO elements, focusing on the wrong search intent, not providing enough detail on the topic, or writing low-quality content that users can’t easily understand (which can lead to a higher bounce rate).
- Problems with existing content: These could be things like thin or duplicate content, copying text from other sites, not using browser plugins, missing ALT text for images, or content that isn’t mobile-friendly.
While you can tackle these problems manually, SEO Checker does the heavy lifting for you.
It runs a content analysis to ensure your content stays competitive, relevant, and optimized for both search engines and users.
With this SEO audit tool, you can quickly spot thin or duplicate content, check for missing image meta tags, and even see how well your content performs on mobile devices.
6. Fix broken links
By now, you probably know that broken links are a big no-no for maintaining a high-quality website. Why? Because:
- Broken links can hurt your conversion rates.
- They indirectly damage your SEO by affecting bounce rate, time spent on your site, and how link juice is passed.
- Broken links can also directly impact SEO rankings by signaling that your site is old or outdated.
So, how do you go about fixing broken links?
You can use SEO Checker to automatically check broken links and save a lot of time and effort.
Our SEO audit tool will show you if a link returns a 404 error, whether the broken link is internal or external, and it will even let you know if there are issues with your page resources.
Just like abandoned buildings, broken links shouldn’t be a regular sight on your site. If you want to meet high online standards, make sure they’re a rare exception.
7. Conduct a redirect audit
A redirect is a way to send search engines and users to a URL other than the one they originally requested—the “requested URL.”
The three most common types of redirects are 301, 302, and Meta Refresh.
From an SEO perspective, redirects are super important for maintaining link equity and ranking signals.
When a page moves or its URL changes, a redirect makes sure the ranking power and trust from the old URL get passed to the new one.
That’s why it’s crucial to ensure all your redirects are working properly.
SEO Checker helps you find and review both temporary and permanent redirects. It also spots redirect chains and loops, which can slow down crawling, lose link equity, and hurt page load time.
8. Review your Robots.txt file
A robots.txt file is like a set of instructions telling search engines which pages to crawl and which ones to skip. It helps control crawler access, but it doesn’t necessarily keep pages out of Google’s index.
Pages like your staging sites and admin panels shouldn’t be indexed, so it’s important to optimize things to make the best use of your crawl budget.
SEO Checker makes it easy to check if your robots.txt file is in place and whether it correctly points to your sitemap locations.
9. Perform a page speed analysis
Page speed is a key factor in how well your site performs overall.
A study by Portent found that the best conversion rates happen when a page loads in 0-4 seconds. Anything longer than that can start to cause issues.
Google also treats page speed as an official ranking factor, so slow load times can hurt both user experience and your rankings.
Manually checking page speed can be a huge task.
With SEO Checker, you can automatically identify which elements (like scripts, images, and CSS) are slowing down your page.
The tool lets you analyze several components and gives you a clear picture of what’s optimal (marked with green check marks) and what needs improvement (shown with percentage indicators).
SEO Checker not only points out the problems but also tells you how to fix them. Just click on any issue to see more details and instructions.
For example, if the minification setup is only at 87%, clicking that result will give you a step-by-step guide to fix it and get optimal performance.
SEO Checker even lists the specific URLs that need attention, making optimization easier.
Just follow the guides and make the necessary tweaks to boost your site’s speed and overall performance.
10. Conduct a security audit
Regular security audits are crucial, not just for protecting your data but also for keeping your SEO performance in check.
Google considers security protocols like HTTPS to be a ranking signal. If your website has security weaknesses, it’s at risk of search engine penalties.
Poor security can even lead to hosting spammy content, which can really hurt your SEO efforts.
You can perform a security analysis with SEO Checker in seconds.
This SEO audit tool helps you spot potential security vulnerabilities and ensures everything is optimized, including secure connections, content sniffing prevention, iframe restrictions, clickjacking protection, and so much more.
Conclusion
If you’re still doing SEO audits manually, it’s time to automate what can be automated so you can focus on the more creative and strategic parts of your work.
SEO Checker crawls every page on your website. It flags potential technical and on-page SEO issues, offers recommendations on how to fix them, visualizes key data, and provides an overall SEO health score.
Make the most of SEO Checker and simplify your SEO efforts today!