The 10 Minute SEO Audit

The 10 Minute SEO Audit

Posted on December 13, 2016 Mary Merritt

We all do it - if you're in the web marketing industry then you know what I'm talking about - you end up "auditing" nearly every website you visit.  Even if you aren't a web marketer, you probably evaluate or critique a majority of the websites you visit in some way or another.  If your skills are at all technical, you probably take a peek at the source code at least once during your visit.  You snicker when you see flash being abused - you might even scoff when you see a table-based layout. You can quickly evaluate the merits and failures of even the most well intentioned and harmless websites that come across your browser.

If you're a search optimizer you may look closer than anyone else - I know you can't help yourself, and neither can I.  Are those page headings h1s? Is the nav crawlable? Are the image names optimized? A dozen questions may pop into your head the second that analytical switch is flipped.

So, in honor of that little critical voice in your head, here are a set of rapid-fire yes or no questions you can answer in less than 10 minutes for a quick and nerdy on-site SEO health status report:

  • Do the site's pages have unique titles and meta descriptions?
  • Are the page titles and meta descriptions unique, descriptive, and do they contain target keywords?
  • Are target keywords used in the first half of the page titles?
  • Do page titles appear to be optimized for target keywords?
  • Are there metric tracking scripts installed on the site (Analytics, StatCounter, Omniture, etc.?)
  • Do pages have unique and keyword relevent h1 headings?
  • Are h2 or h3 headings used effectively for sub-headings?
  • Do most pages have at least a small amount of keyword relevent text?
  • Is the robots.txt file excluding any important directories (or blocking crawlers altogether)?
  • Is there any duplicate content found on the site? If so, are canonical link elements used?
  • Are image file names optimized for target keywords?
  • Are page URLs optimized for target keywords?
  • Does the non-www URL for the site redirect to the www URL for the site (or vice versa)?
  • Does Google have most or all of the pages indexed? (search for "site:example.com" to see what comes up)
  • Is the site's navigation text-based and crawable?
  • Does the site load quickly?
  • Is the total site download size reasonable?
  • Does the site copy have a sufficient amount of internal linking on relevent & targeted keywords?
  • Does any vital piece of content on the site rely on javascript?
  • When browsing the site without javascript, is anything broken or missing?
  • Does the site have a privacy policy?
  • If a local business, are the business name, address, and phone number found easily?

Of course, these questions are just a start, but if you've answered "no" to any of them, there may be room for some on-site SEO improvement.  If you'd like to discuss, learn more about, add to, or argue about any of the questions in our list please let us know in the comments below - and if you think NerdyMind might be the right web marketing company for your website, please contact us today!