Posted by Keith on Jun 12, 2025 in General

With an audit, you set yourself up for success by creating check-ins and active processes that help you improve. Ask yourself where you could build out more content across the board. If users click away from your slow pages, Google will SEO Anomaly notice and dock your rankings. Google often shows meta descriptions in the search results, so you should try to write an enticing one for every important page. Missing H1 tags, on the other hand, usually point to bigger issues like an improperly coded theme.

This helps you tackle high-impact quick wins immediately, while planning for bigger projects. After completing your website audit, you’ll likely have a long list of potential fixes. A content audit will uncover pages you need to update if you want to boost their traffic. To improve your LCP, compress bulky resources like hero images or animations. Start by checking your page speed using Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool.

If you’re dealing with a penalty, my advice is to thoroughly audit your site—look for thin or ineffective content, bad backlinks, or technical issues—and tackle those step by step. With everything in one place, it’s also easier to spot patterns and draw connections. Like how ranking improvements might correlate with new backlinks. Or how technical issues could be holding your keyword performance back. SEO audits, whether completed in-house or externally with an agency, are often worth it. For businesses new to SEO, search engine optimization audits can provide a baseline for what needs fixed now vs. later to improve organic traffic.

The Raven study found 22% of page titles were duplicates and 17% of meta descriptions were duplicate across sites crawled . Fixing these can improve your click-through rates and avoid confusing Google. • Missing or empty titles/descriptions – these need to be written. Each page should have a unique title (50-60 characters ideally) and meta description (~155 characters) that include key terms and entice clicks. It’s been reported that over 33-34% of pages have missing meta descriptions  which is a huge missed opportunity – don’t let your site be one of them. • In Google Search Console Coverage report, look at the valid vs. error vs. excluded pages.

Raven Tools Guides

One can roughly say, that if the score is higher than 80% it means that the web page is already well-optimized whereas a score below 80% shows that there’s still room for improvement. If the score is below 30% there are severe errors and SEO issues on your website you should definitely deal with. The seventh step in our SEO audit checklist is your site’s mobile-friendliness. Considering that 61 percent of consumers are more likely to buy from mobile-friendly sites, it’s crucial that you optimize your site for mobile. This file allows you to specify and apply configuration directives on your site. This file enables you to call the shots on how users and search engines are directed to specific pages on your site, facilitate custom error pages and apply 301 redirects.

More engagement leads to better SEO and a higher search engine results page (SERP) placement, but higher SEO leads to more visibility and higher user interaction. Website audits are necessary to ensure your site is getting traffic. Here’s how to perform a complete SEO audit to check your site’s health.

However, while programmatic SEO offers significant advantages in speed and scalability, it comes with potential risks. If the content on these automatically generated pages is thin, repetitive, or lacking in value, users and search engines can perceive it as spam. Google rewards high-quality, user-friendly content and penalizes spam. It’s all about aligning your website and content with what the search engine considers valuable for search results. If your site is slow, people are going to go to one of those faster sites, increasing your bounce rate and hurting your rankings in search results.

How to Do SEO On Your Own in 13 Steps

Lastly, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability; strive for a CLS score of less than 0.1. To improve this, ensure images and embedded videos have dimensions, and avoid inserting new content above existing content unless in response to a user’s action. Another way is to use Google Analytics to view traffic from all search engines. For one client, I used user engagement metrics from Google Search Console and heatmaps to recover from a Google core update hit. While most people optimize content and backlinks, I dug deeper into how users interacted with the site after landing on it.

• As discussed extensively, SEO is a comprehensive, long-term strategy focused on optimizing individual web pages and content to rank higher in SERPs.
• An SEO audit also looks at outside variables like backlinks and rival tactics to identify areas for improvement.
• For quick implementation, choose an established agency with a solid team.
• The technical evaluation, however, addresses all three to maximize the user experience (UX).
• There are a number of choices available, and HubSpot’s Website Grader is one of the most user-friendly.

Simply embed a simple Audit Form that matches your website’s styling and colors.

This is important because Google sees these URLs as separate site versions. Having more than one accessible can cause crawling and indexing issues. In some cases, it can even dilute link equity and, thus, may negatively impact rankings. Many of these updates target specific things like content quality or link spam. If you have traffic drops coinciding with major updates, this can tell you what areas likely need your focus. Check site speed with Google PageSpeed Insights and fix issues like image compression.