What you need to know about website audits to improve SEO

If you don’t have a lot of experience diving into the backend of your website, you might consider consulting a web expert to secure your site. Now you have to use it in your content if you aren’t already. (Well, almost there.) Most SEO audits take place on desktop, but doing a few quick mobile checks can make the difference between ranking or not. Download the free Google Quality Rater Tool and get the kinds of insights on your content that actually improve your rankings. For competitive keywords, the small SEO Anomaly details often make the difference.

Audits Founder, Carl Hendy

Millions of dollars or more are at stake with search engine optimization for businesses looking to compete at the enterprise level. At this level, most of your competition has likely invested heavily in search engine marketing tactics like SEO and PPC for over a decade. An enterprise SEO audit should also consider how the website’s performance compares to competing sites in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

• Google Search Console is a tool that checks your site’s indexing status and how it appears on SERPs.
• Site audit tool from Ubersuggest audits your website against their in-depth 44-point SEO checklist to help you discover how well your site is optimized for search engines.
• The nofollow page was created by Cloudflare’s email address protection.
• Hence, we ended up with a more complete Technical SEO and beyond site audit — one that covers nearly every important SEO area with the potential to impact traffic and rankings.

Tools

It is a paid tool, but you can run an audit of 500 URLs for free. We’ll discuss a few of these areas in more detail throughout this guide. But performing a site crawl is a quick way to assess lots of aspects at once.

For example, this shows us that our article on the top 100 most visited websites has declined massively over the last six months. For example, our list of top Google searches declined massively in 2021. It also has the same number of pages with an empty or missing meta description and thousands with a missing or empty H1 tag. For example, the core update in August 2018 appeared to largely affect health, fitness, and medical sites that failed to demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-A-T).

When you conduct your SEO audit for 2025, check that your site is mobile-friendly. This means that mobile-friendly sites rank higher in search results. So for WebFX, branded keywords would be something like “WebFX SEO services.” Once you have the results for your company, look at what pages are included in the results. An example of a long-tail keyword is “bakeries near Harrisburg, PA.” This specific keyword will attract leads interested in bakeries near Harrisburg. Similarly, other long-tail keywords help you drive more qualified leads that are looking for your business. Just plug in your domain, go to the Best by links report, and add a “404 not found” filter.