An SEO’s Guide to SEO Audits Part 4: What to Include in Your “SEO Site Audit Checklist”

More Reading

• Part 1 The Pre-Audit Preparation Process What to Charge & What to Do
• Part 2: The Pre-Audit Preparation
• Part 3: SEO Site Audit Approach & Layout

This is really the heart of the matter: what are you going to include in your SEO audit? This should be influenced by:

• Your price
• Your area(s) of expertise
• The client’s expectations, goals, and what they expressed they’re looking for
• Your personal approach

I’ll give you an idea of what I include in an audit and how I approach each section, but again every SEO’s audit is likely at least a little different. Here are a few great examples of alternative perspectives on what to include in your audit:

• Geoff Kenyon’s technical SEO audit checklist on the SEO Moz blog
• Rhea Drysdale’s run down of what you need to know about SEO audits (nice sections in there about the value of personalization and customization)
• Michael Martinez’s post on how to do an SEO audit
• Alan Bleiweiss’s SEO audit checklist

As always you’ll need to consider the factors above and ultimately will have to roll your own, but as I mentioned in the last installment of the series, as a general approach I like to orient the client to what we’re trying to accomplish with each section of the report, and then start to drill in to more specific recommendations.

For instance let’s just look quickly at the first section of the report, keyword targeting: what I aim to do with this section is arm the client with a methodology for better attacking keyword targeting – I’m not going to hand-write each and every title tag on their site, but rather I’ll make strategic suggestions such as:

“Your current strategy over-emphasizes head terms in both the IA and your link building efforts – we recommend you place more emphasis on longer tail variations such as X (more on how to specifically execute against this in the link building, title tag, and information architecture sections).”

And again as I mentioned in the last installment it’s really helpful here to link to the sections where you do, in fact, give specific recommendations on how to implement a keyword research strategy.

This is basically the approach I’m applying to each of the following sections:

1. Keyword Targeting
2. Information Architecture
3. Search Visibility & Indexation
4. Duplicate Content Issues
5. Title Tags & Meta Descriptions & Keywords
   1. Title Tag Best Practices
   2. Duplicate Title Tags
   3. Meta Keyword Tag
   4. Meta Descriptions
   5. Robots.txt File
   6. Page Speed
   7. Errors in Webmaster Tools
   8. XML Sitemap
   9. Cannonicalization
   10. Broken Links
   11. Internal Linking
   12. Additional On-Page Factors
       1. Alt Attributes – On Page
       2. Alt Attributes – Hyper linked images
       3. Content Blocks on Category Pages & Dynamically Generated Content
       4. Content & Link Building Strategy

I won’t go into a lot of detail about how to conduct each of these analyses as this isn’t meant to be a tutorial on how to do SEO, but obviously making detailed recommendations within each of these sections will lead to a really time and labor-intensive project and in most cases a pretty lengthy document (although there’s no need to worry about the plop factor – if you’re doing the audit properly and doing a good job of setting expectations you’ll likely be delivering value well north of what the client’s paying for your report, which should be a lot more interesting than how many words or pages are in your final version).

That brings us to the end of the four part series on conducting an SEO audit. Hopefully if you’ve read the guide from end to end you’ve learned something about:

• How to price and scope your SEO audit
• How to prepare for the SEO audit process with the proper account access, information from your client, and tools to conduct your audit
• How to approach the audit and how to actually format and layout the audit
• How to build out your own SEO audit checklist