1. Take an objective look at your content

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Put yourself in the users’ shoes through a manual review. Click through your website and take note of where your attention is directed, engaged, and lost. Running your website through crawling and auditing tools of your choice, such as Screaming Frog and Site Bulb, can help you pick up on things you may have missed, an essential tool for even the most diligent.

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2. Indexing, crawling and rendering

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The only definitive way to see what pages are indexed is to use a Coverage Report in GSC, which is essential for the website to rank. If it isn’t indexed, Google may have trouble crawling it. Screaming Frog can help you troubleshoot with rendering tools and sitemap reviews.

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Page Speed Insights, GTMetrix and WedPageTest are other great tools for page speed issues and analysis.

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3. Put analytic tools to use

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Google Search Console (GSC) is a genius way to gather statistics for your site. The Performance report shows how you scale in search engine results via clicks, impressions, average position and click through rates.

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The Page Experience report analyses and compares your Page Experience against Google’s experience signals such as Core Web Vitals and Mobile Usability, showing how you average.

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For additional visibility data, use Semrush. They gather precious data you didn’t know you needed such as a URL rating, Domain Rating, Organic Keywords, Organic traffic, Organic positions, and Top pages.

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Ahrefs is another tool to find the number of backlinks that link back to the website, as well as the number of referring domains, both can be exported for further analysis.

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4.  Get linking!

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Internal Linking Utilisation can make or break a website, as it indicates which pages the user considers most important. When auditing, you should check to see if the internal linking makes sense, and don’t forget to see if breadcrumbs have been added across the entire website, to improve navigation.

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To better understand the content of the web page and enable the use of special search features, Google uses structured data. To check if it’s valid, use the Rich Results Test.

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5. Headings, Keywords and Content

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Page titles need to be unique and have <title> tags. Keep it within 30-60 characters to provide search engines and users with the most valuable information about the page.

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Every webpage needs a H1 header, containing the target keyword to communicate the topic of the site. Check these in Screaming Frog.

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6. Redirects and status codes

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Server errors are those with a 5xxstatus code such as 500 (internal service error) and 503 (maintenance). Keep an eye out for these, as they indicate an overloaded server that needs additional configuration.

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Look out for redirect chains with incorrect statuses, as they can leave URLs undiscovered. The website you are auditing should use 301 (permanent) redirects.