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Posted by GeoffKenyon

Back in 2011, I wrote a technical site audit checklist, and while it was thorough, there have been a lot of additions to what is encompassed in a site audit. I have gone through and updated that old checklist for 2015. Some of the biggest changes were the addition of sections for mobile, international, and site speed.

This checklist should help you put together a thorough site audit and determine what is holding back the organic performance of your site. At the end of your audit, don't write a document that says what's wrong with the website. Instead, create a document that says what needs to be done. Then explain why these actions need to be taken and why they are important. What I've found to really helpful is to provide a prioritized list along with your document of all the actions that you would like them to implement. This list can be handed off to a dev or content team to be implemented easily. These teams can refer to your more thorough document as needed.

• Do a site: search.
• How many pages are returned? (This can be way off so don't put too much stock in this).
• Is the homepage showing up as the first result?
• If the homepage isn't showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty or poor site architecture/internal linking, affecting the site. This may be less of a concern as Google's John Mueller recently said that your homepage doesn't need to be listed first.

Review the number of organic landing pages in Google Analytics

• Does this match with the number of results in a site: search?
• This is often the best view of how many pages are in a search engine's index that search engines find valuable.

Search for the brand and branded terms

• Is the homepage showing up at the top, or are correct pages showing up?
• If the proper pages aren't showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty, in play.

• Is the content showing up?
• Are navigation links present?
• Are there links that aren't visible on the site?

Do a mobile search for your brand and key landing pages

• Does your listing have the "mobile friendly" label?
• Are your landing pages mobile friendly?
• If the answer is no to either of these, it may be costing you organic visits.

• Does the homepage have at least one paragraph?
• There has to be enough content on the page to give search engines an understanding of what a page is about. Based on my experience, I typically recommend at least 150 words.

• Do these pages have at least a few paragraphs of content? Is it enough to give search engines an understanding of what the page is about?
• Is it template text or is it completely unique?

• Is there real content on the site or is the "content" simply a list of links?

• Does the intent behind the keyword match the intent of the landing page?
• Are there pages targeting head terms, mid-tail, and long-tail keywords?

• Do a site: search in Google for important keyword phrases.
• Check for duplicate content/page titles using the Moz Pro Crawl Test.

• In addition to search engine driven content, there should be content to help educate users about the product or service.

• Is the content formatted well and easy to read quickly?
• Are H tags used?
• Are images used?
• Is the text broken down into easy to read paragraphs?

• Good headlines go a long way. Make sure the headlines are well written and draw users in.

• Since the implementation of Panda, the amount of ad-space on a page has become important to evaluate.
• Make sure there is significant unique content above the fold.
• If you have more ads than unique content, you are probably going to have a problem.

• Do URLs include parameters or tracking code? This will result in multiple URLs for a piece of content.
• Does the same content reside on completely different URLs? This is often due to products/content being replicated across different categories.

• Take a content snippet, put it in quotes and search for it.
• Does the content show up elsewhere on the domain?
• Has it been scraped? If the content has been scraped, you should file a content removal request with Google.

• Does the same content exist on different sub-domains?

• Does the content exist on a secure version of the site?

• Is the content replicated on other domains owned by the company?

• If there are "printer friendly" versions of pages, they may be causing duplicate content.

• 100-200 is a good target, but not a rule.

• Homepage links to category pages.
• Category pages link to sub-category and product pages as appropriate.
• Product pages link to relevant category pages.

• Category pages link to other relevant category pages.
• Product pages link to other relevant product pages.

• Does not utilize massive blocks of links stuck in the content to do internal linking.

• Does not use a block of footer links instead of proper navigation.
• Does not link to landing pages with optimized anchors.

• Link Checker and Xenu are good tools for this.

• Are 301s being used for all redirects?
• If the root is being directed to a landing page, are they using a 301 instead of a 302?
• Use Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin to check 301s.

• These include 302s, 307s, meta refresh, and JavaScript redirects as they pass little to no value.
• These redirects can easily be identified with a tool like Screaming Frog.

• Redirect chains significantly diminish the amount of link equity associated with the final URL.
• Google has said that they will stop following a redirect chain after several redirects.

• Is content being served in JavaScript?
• Are links being served in JavaScript? Is this to do PR sculpting or is it accidental?

• Is content being pulled in via iFrames?

• Is the entire site done in Flash, or is Flash used sparingly in a way that doesn't hinder crawling?

• Google WMT will give you a good list of technical problems that they are encountering on your site (such as: 4xx and 5xx errors, inaccessible pages in the XML sitemap, and soft 404s)

• Are XML sitemaps in place?
• Are XML sitemaps covering for poor site architecture?
• Are XML sitemaps structured to show indexation problems?
• Do the sitemaps follow proper XML protocols?

• Gzip Test

Enable caching

• Google's guide to optimizing your images

• Consider using a CDN for your images.

• Google's guide to optimizing your images

Mobile

• Is there a mobile site set up?
• If there is, is it a mobile site, responsive design, or dynamic serving?

Make sure analytics are set up if separate mobile content exists

If dynamic serving is being used, make sure the Vary HTTP header is being used

• This helps alert search engines understand that the content is different for mobile users.
• Google on dynamic serving.

• Do your mobile visitors have a different intent than desktop based visitors?

• If your site redirects mobile visitors away from their intended URL (typically to the homepage), you're likely going to run into issues impacting your mobile organic performance.

• If a mobile site (m.) exists, does the desktop equivalent URL point to the mobile version with rel="alternate"?
• Does the mobile version canonical to the desktop version?
• Official documentation.

• ex: site.com/uk/ or uk.site.com

• If the site is targeted to one specific country, is this specified in webmaster tools?
• If the site has international sections, are they targeted in webmaster tools?

• Documentation

This audit covers the main technical elements of a site and should help you uncover any issues that are holding a site back. As with any project, the deliverable is critical. I've found focusing on the solution and impact (business case) is the best approach for site audit reports. While it is important to outline the problems, too much detail here can take away from the recommendations. If you're looking for more resources on site audits, I recommend the following:

Helpful tools for doing a site audit:

Annie Cushing's Site Audit
Web Developer Toolbar
User Agent Add-on
Firebug
Link Checker
SEObook Toolbar
MozBar (Moz's SEO toolbar)
Xenu
Screaming Frog
Your own scraper
Inflow's technical mobile best practices

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