Before diving into an seo audit, it’s crucial to conduct keyword research. This will help you pinpoint essential industry keywords, assess your competition, and determine whether your content is properly optimized. Additionally, it’s important to evaluate your current performance in organic search results, as this will serve as a baseline to measure the success of your SEO efforts. Once you’re prepared, begin by ensuring your content is accessible to search engines and that Googlebot can index it. So, let’s break down how to perform this interesting perform.
SEO Audit Checklist: Ensuring Indexability
Check for Manual Actions
First, head to Google Search Console to confirm there are no manual actions against your site. If any are found, investigate their cause and create a plan to resolve them. Learn how to detect and fix these issues here.
Verify Security Protocols
Make sure your website is secure and reachable through various protocols. Check if your site uses HTTPS and ensure that all alternative versions, such as HTTP, www, or non-trailing slash URLs, are properly redirected to the main site version. For instance, our website, https://hatchandvox.com/seo/audits/, can also be accessed via multiple URLs, but all of them redirect to the main one.
Inspect Crawled Pages
Utilize the Page Indexing Report to check how many pages Google has indexed. If your site contains 100 pages but only 50 are indexed, there may be a robots.txt file or meta tag unintentionally blocking valuable content. To investigate further, use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console to learn why certain pages haven’t been indexed. If these pages are important, edit the file or tag and request a recrawl. Conversely, if more pages than expected are indexed, check your robots.txt file to ensure internal search results and unnecessary subdirectories are not being indexed.