10 Point SEO audit checklist for beginners

Search engines as a product have played a big role in making the world a smaller place. Not only now we get to know what's going on around the world but these engines help us look into the past and read about the projections of what the future holds for things relevant to mankind.

With the growing presence of people and brands online and the massive number of eyeballs, grabbing attention of the search engines is essential to get noticed. If you own a domain online, it needs to be search friendly as much it needs to be of good content quality.

The search engine spider(or crawler) looks for 3 things in your website broadly.

Relevance; This includes the quality of content shared on the website, its coherence with the basic website topic, how well it is organized and finally the relevance with the search term.

Authority: It is all about the links that lead to the website and that lead from the website. Sounds simple right? Having trusted, good quality websites link your pages or your pages having outbound links to these trusted domains/pages increases your domain authority score(Normally measured on a scale of 1-100). Do make sure that there are no broken links on your website.

Design: Search engine spider critiques your website on the basis of the user friendliness of your interface. The easier it is to find content and navigate through the website, the higher it will be ranked on the SERP. There are a number of pointers to take care of as far as website design is concerned which we shall talk about in this article later.

10 Specific things you need to keep in mind while doing the SEO audit of your website are:

1. Meta Tags: The Meta title and meta description are two things which the search engines use to identify what the domain is all about. It is a summary of what one can expect when the site is opened.

Try to keep your Meta titles between 10-17 characters long and your meta descriptions 70-320 characters. Exceeding the character limit can lead to appearance of incomplete meta tags on SERP.

2. Header Tags: Header tags are essential for the search engines to know hat the content is about and that the content is organized well under relevant headings. HTML header tags is also a good way to signal the search engines the important topics to focus on, priority of which ranges from the size of the header tag(H1-H6).

3. Link Structure: On-page as well as off-page link building is extremely important to improve the domain and page authorities. Working outbound links to trusted, quality content pages/domains boosts your SEO domain authority score.

Internal links when relevant, are also necessary and helps improve the ease of navigation adding to improving your website design and link quality.

Here's the link of a great article by Mr Neil Patel on link building strategies if you wish to learn more: https://neilpatel.com/blog/13-efficient-link-building-strategies-for-busy-marketers/

4. Mobile Optimization: Mobile phones are becoming more efficient and the mobile internet connections faster and cheaper. This stastic looks very relevant to me in today's scenario and for the coming future.

According to January 2018 data, the global mobile population amounted to 3.7 billion unique users. - Statista

A mobile friendly website is fast turning into a best practice for most developers nowadays. Although there is a difference between a mobile friendly and a mobile optimized website.

A mobile friendly website may appear small on the phone or the tablet but it will work properly on the phone like it does on the laptop/PC. Whereas a mobile optimized website will be responsive to a change in device and will reformat itself for a list of different devices. Mobile optimization is being preferred by a lot of e-commerce websites these days to improve user experience in a way which leads to improved and quicker buying decisions via mobile itself.

5. Sitemaps: Sitemaps is the basic index of the various sections/pages of the website. They helps the search engine spiders to crawl through the website with much ease thus assisting in improving the UX if made visible to the user. Normally the XML sitemaps are not visible to the user and are mostly built to assist the search engine crawlers.

Although creating a sitemap from scratch can be a bit time consuming but it is a good investment as far as SEO is concerned. A sitemap once made should be uploaded to the website and submitted Google Search Console

6. Page sizes and load speed: Users do not like to wait. The world is becoming more and more fast paced by the second. This is the reason why mobile phones are becoming more instrumental than bigger screens as far as internet surfing is concerned.

To tackle this lack of time the readers have your website pages need to load fast. The java and CSS files on the website need to be minified and all the images need to be compressed in order to make the pages load faster. The optimum page file size is no more than 5 MB.

7. Image alt attributes: Images are an important part of expression. Websites these days have a no of images along with text to make them more interactive and easily understandable.

Image Alt text is used by the search engines to identify what the image is about. The alt text should be descriptive enough where it makes it clear what the image is about but there are no extra stuff words to make it longer.

8. Social Media Activity: Social media presence helps a lot for audience to find you online. It does not directly contribute to the SEO but brand social media pages come up in SERP when the audience tries to search for the brand in addition to the website. This gives you more space on the SERP page.

Although Google search does not factor in social media directly into SEO but Bing, the 2nd largest search engine does factor in social media as a part of SEO optimization. With Bing's market share steadily growing, it is wise to include it in your SEO strategies.

9. Keyword Consistency: Keyword research is one of the most important factors to look at while doing SEO audit of your site. The website should be targeted to rank for a certain set of keywords and they need to be consistent across various tags like meta, title and headers tags.

A few tools you can use for effective keyword research and forming a set of target keywords are SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner. These are the ones which i use frequently. Moz's Keyword Explorer is another tool which i haven't tried yet but you can let me know in the comments how good it is if you have used it.

10. Using Chat-bots to your advantage: Google keeps user experience in consideration while ranking a domain. Using chat-bots can considerably improve the user experience on the domain or on specific landing pages. The user does not need to scroll through the website to get their queries answered and can simply ask the chat-bot. They also help in providing a 24/7 support even when the customer care executives are not available.

A lot of brands use chat-bots as a promotional device in order to push a new product or service for new visitors on their website. Although most chat-bots currently are pretty basic and very few websites have well built chat-bots who can provide highly relevant problem solving information, the future of chat-bots and AI is huge.

Here's a list of 30 websites to go through if you want to read more about the future of AI and chat-bots: https://blog.feedspot.com/chatbot_blogs/

I have listed 10 things to look at while doing an SEO audit. These things are basic hygiene and there are many other factors which the search engines take into consideration while ranking a domain/page. The objective of this piece is to spur your curiousity to learn more about SEO and how the search engines work and how we can make them work to our advantage.