SEO Audit

On-Page

1. Do product or service pages include keywords in the title tags?

Frequently
Sometimes
Rarely

Page titles are visible by hovering over the browser tab (in most browsers), using a Google site: search (for example site:www.lunametrics.com in the Google search bar) and looking at the blue underlined text in the search results or viewing the source code and finding the value between <title> and </title>. Page titles without keywords tend to include page name and/or brand, for example a contact page title that might simply be Contact Us | LunaMetrics. Compare that to the SEO page, which includes common search terms.

2. Do product or service pages include custom Meta descriptions with calls-to-action?

Frequently
Sometimes
Rarely

Meta descriptions can be found below the page title in the search results and source code using the two tactics from above. Custom descriptions are tailored to the page while standardized or nonexistent descriptions can be seen in the search results with a portion of the page copy followed by an ellipsis.

3. Do product or service pages include much copy?

> 300 words
< 300 words
Very few words

4. Does Google’s cache include product or service page copy?

Yes
No

Like the site: search from the first question, use cache:domain.com to find the version that Google has in its index then click on the “Text-Only version” in the upper right corner of the window.

Off-Page

5. Is home page authority higher than competitors?

Yes
In the middle
No

Find authority by using OpenSiteExplorer.org and selecting the “Compare Pages” dropdown to include competitors. This is a freemium tool from Moz so it is available three times per day without a login.

6. Where is the blog (or resource/content section) located?

Domain.com/blog
Blog.domain.com
Domain-blog.com
There is no blog

7. Does the blog have social share buttons?

Yes
No

8. Does the site provide links to social media?

Yes and the social media are active.
Yes, but the social media are not active.
No

Technical

9. Does the home page URL include anything after .com/.org/.edu?

No
Yes

Common things to see might look like domain.com/home or domain.com/home.htm.

10. Does the site have a www version and a non-www version of the home page?

No
Yes

In the browser bar, type the URL with www in front. Try the same thing again without www in front of the domain. Are there two versions or does one redirect to the other?

11. Does the site have a robots.txt file?

Yes
No

The robots file can be found at domain.com/robots.txt, for example www.lunametrics.com/robots.txt on our site.

12. Does the site have an XML sitemap?

Yes
No

XML sitemaps can be slightly trickier to discover. Start checking the robots file (from above) and looking for a line at the end that lists the sitemap. If that does not work, try a site: search in Google for inurl:xml site:domain.com.

13. Does the number of pages in Google’s index seem appropriate?

Yes
No

Find the number of pages in Google’s index with the site: search. Recently, a small non-profit asked for a quick review of their site, which probably had 200 pages. Google’s index had over 6,000 pages indexed. The site had lots of duplicate content from www and non-www versions, internal search pages being indexed, improper multilingual setup and wicked pagination.