SEO Audit Outline Sample
By the time I was faced with producing my first SEO Audit, I had been doing SEO for a while. I was pretty confident I’d touched on most major SEO factors and felt like I had a good sense of the overall SEO picture. Despite that, something about the task of preparing a full top to bottom audit was terrifying. So much to cover!
Back then, I searched high and low for a template, outline, or sample and came up empty handed. As part of my research for this post I looked around again and even leveraged a tool that wasn’t available to me the first time around, Twitter.
I don’t have a ton of followers on twitter but its a really responsive and helpful group made up mostly of SEOs. I was surprised that nobody had a resource to point out. The following tweet was also met with the online equivalent of a blank stare. I wasn’t as surprised.
It looks like it would be just as difficult to get started today than it was back then! Once I started asking people why they wouldn’t share their audit templates, the silence was broken. Here are a few of the reasons:
- They spent the time to build their own audit from scratch, why give some newcomer a head start?
- Their company’s policy forbids them from doing so. It’s proprietary.
- The audits they produce are highly customized. If they pull out the client stuff, there would be nothing left of value to share.
- Some audits are computer generated. The ‘template’ is code and algorithm based.
- Peer review can sting.
Despite some reasons not to, today I’m happy to share with you the basic audit outline that I use. The first version was created years ago and I’ve carried it with me as my SEO career has evolved and had a number of smart folks weigh in. The point of this post is to give you a starting point if you are new to auditing or something to compare your own audit against if you’ve been at this a while.
Sample SEO Audit Outline
I. Overview
II. Scorecard (link to download template)
III. Most Pressing and Valuable Changes
IV. On-Page/Content Optimization
- Keyphrase Targeting
- Title Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- H Tags
- Substantive & Unique Content
- Image Alt & Filenames
- Over-Optimization
V. URL Conventions
- Keyword Inclusion
- Length
- Sub-folders
- Parameters
- File Extension
- Word Separation
- Case
VI. Site Architecture
- Content Hierarchy/Organization
- Internal Anchor Text
VII. Crawling, Indexing & Technical Issues
- Meta Directives
- Robots.txt
- XML Sitemaps
- Crawling Problems
- URL Redirects in Place
- Expiring Content Policies
- Site Speed
- Duplicate Content
VIII. Search Guidelines & Spam Protocols
- Canonicalized Site Versions
- Search Result & Sort Pages
- Link Acquisition Practices
- Outbound Linking Practices
- Other
IX. Link Opportunities
X. Link-Worthiness
XI. Vertical Search Opportunities
XII. Competitive Comparison
XIII. Keyword Research
XIV. Metrics
XV. Conclusion
XVI. Appendix
Combine this audit outline with a couple other nuggets I’ve shared recently on SEOmoz (4 Ways to Improve your SEO Site Audit and SEO Site Audits: Getting Started) and you’ve got yourself a pretty good starting point, if I do say so myself!
Happy Auditing!
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
Very interesting article. A good starting point to optimize your web site.
Thanks.
Nice Resource Lindzie. People in the search industry don’t want to share probably b/c they know all their competitors are watching and the ones who normally do share, are too big time for it to matter.
Thanks for the templates.
Any thoughts on reducing the scale from 1-5 to 1-2-3? I just wonder if that would make it easier for clients to digest.
You know… I’ve been thinking about that. If you look at my legend though, I wonder if I’d lose too much for the sake of simplifying. I find myself assigning a lot of 4s. There is always room for at least a little improvement… no? It could go either way though. Pros/cons to each approach.
What about an outline for self starters that can’t afford to hire companies? Just enough for them to do it themselves correctly and then if they need more in-depth work, they can hire someone. Then that someone can focus on the heavy lifting since the basics were already covered…
Hi, I do my own SEO Score Card based in your article en SEOMOZ and was very practical. However, some parts only aply to the domain, not for every page like Sitemap, robots.txt, etc :)
Regards
@Carlo This is true. Some scorecard items only apply at the domain level. In these cases I leave the other columns blank and just use the first one (home page, usually). I’m glad you’ve found the scorecard useful. Means a lot!
I love the scorecards and audit lists, but are these anything more than SEO articles to try to get attention and draw some links? If they are… if they are real serious attempts to present a meaningful SEO scorecard, why not test them?
Pick a few sites.. any sites. Send them out to each of you SEOs who claim to have scorecards or audit lists, and score them. Then let’s compare scores in public! If these are meaningful assessment tools, we should agree at least in ranking site 1 against site 2 and site 3, no? A minimally useful tool should at least discriminate between sites of various SEO condition.
And if the tools don’t agree, we have a basis for improving our scorecards, right?
@john Thanks for the comment and for encouraging a little debate. Manual scorecarding is certainly subjective. The key to a scorecard proving useful to the client is more in the auditor’s ability to explain their findings and suggest enhancements. Also, the accuracy of the final scores that show up on a client’s scorecards are only as good as the SEO who preformed the audit. The best tools and templates in the world can’t make an SEO out of just anybody.
As for your suggestion that I’ve created content for links… I wouldn’t be an SEO if I didn’t create content in hopes that it prove itself link-worthy.
You’re a kind soul, Lindzie. My guardian angel told me long ago that i can’t keep it till such time i don’t pass it on. Handy primer ! Thanks.
Good information and thanks for sharing. Although it would be better to see a complete document
This is really great. Thanks for putting the time and effort towards making it and sharing it. This will be going in my bookmarks for future reference.
This is a very good article, that’s very good, very grateful
Hey, thanks for putting this together! I am going to download the score card and give her a try! I have the SEO Moz pro tools and I find them to be very useful, but it’s always nice to have additional resources and feedback.
@Lindsay We shared our complete Effective Web Audit in January 2010 under a creative commons licence when we created a new product (search for effective web audit – the pdf is at the end of blog post). Have had a few hundred downloads but very little feedback.
Great post, very informative. I’ve always thought it was quite hard to pinpoint a reliable and efficient SEO company who can provide every one of the steps necessary to rank yourself on the largest search engines online.
Thanks Lindsay, I do auditing a lot but I have many more parameters like SVN, keywords clustering etc … I will share it sometimes with others … I have made one excel that will 100% auditing month after month. It contains key-stats (progress audit), work audit, onpage, offpage (in connection with keyphrase selected) etc etc
Hi again, in the cases about sitemap, robots, etc; I prefer use a other colum called General, because if I use in the Home the final Score maybe would be altered.
If you want I can send you be email :), just tell me where.
Good stuff man! Consider it bookmarked!
How would you get a reliable speed test of the website though (without GWT access)?
Hi Lindsay
I think it’s a great share, especially the score card. I spent ages looking for a template when I started and found nothing. Good stuff.
Great post. So rare to see these items digitally published. Thanks again
A wonderfully generous gesture and a very useful score-card! Thank you.
Awesome audit Lindzie! I agree that this is super generous of you to share. I’ve been cruising around wondering if there was anything I should add to my current audit or a new way to organize and came across this. It’s crazy how we can all be doing the same thing effectively for our clients, yet approaching the way we present information very differently. Consider me inspired!
This is an awesome steps for SEO audit. Thanks for sharing and keep it coming.