8 SEO Reporting Tools to Fully Audit Your Site’s SEO Health
When you view your house from a helicopter or on a map, you have the whole picture.
You can see the roads, the shops, every place in the city.
You’ll know where to go and what to do next.
All you need is that map, something that will help you orient yourself in the jungle that is the big city.
When you’re looking to see the bigger picture for your website, an SEO site audit report is that map.
Such a report guides you so you can fix problems on your website, fare better in search engine results pages and look good in the eyes of your customers, readers and subscribers.
What Is a Good SEO Audit?
If you’re thinking about a backlink audit, that’s cool—backlinks are a huge part of SEO, after all.
But focusing on backlinks only isn’t enough because SEO isn’t just backlinks.
There’s plenty of stuff that relates to SEO and influences it nowadays: From UX to technical areas like page speed, crawling, HTML and CSS, marketing and social.
The marketing part usually involves the most manual work, since you have to fully assess your website and find out if your sales funnels and CTAs actually work. There are lots of connections at play there.
For other SEO signals, the data is a bit more straightforward, and you can see big picture trends by generating a simple report.
Now, to generate those reports, you’ll need to have the right tools on hand.
The Right Tools for an SEO Audit
You can’t do a proper audit without tools, but tools don’t always provide thorough reports.
You have to be ready to create a thorough report yourself from all the analytics information you collected.
That means you have to use your own eye and expertise to know what to write in the report.
That’s going to help when you have to analyze your CTAs and landing pages: you’ll need your analytic eye and a deep knowledge of your target audience.
In this post, you’re going to learn about what to look for in a good SEO site audit report, examples of good tools to use and how to create your own SEO audit report.
The SEO Site Audit Report: How to Assess Your Site’s SEO Health
So, I noted that backlinks for SEO aren’t the only audit metric to add to your report.
What exactly should you look for when you audit your website?
Here’s a list:
- On-page SEO: Usage of headings, broken links, mobile SEO, image optimization
- Off-page SEO: Backlinks and their health (are there any potentially toxic links? can you see any suspicious patterns?), mentions and citations, social media popularity signals
- User Experience (UX): Readability, usability, mobile rendering, responsivity, below-the-fold ads
- Marketing and Social: Guest post activity, user engagement, social signals (likes, replies, +1s)
- Technical Issues: Like bad HTML coding and scripts, redirects, usability issues (unclear navigation, too many ads, etc.), wrong metadata structure
You can add or subtract from this list depending on what SEO elements are and aren’t present on your site.
1. You always start with a plan
It’s impossible to start auditing a website without a plan.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- What areas do you need to assess at this time? (Yes, this month’s audit might differ a bit from last month’s!)
- What are you looking for? And why?
- How many resources (time, budget, expertise) can you count on for your audit and the subsequent SEO and marketing fix-up work?
When you answer these questions, you have the elements to set up a website SEO audit plan.
2. Then put your SEO tools to use
Once you have a plan in your hands, you know what you have to do.
You’ll know what data you need, so you’ll know how to choose the right SEO site audit report tools.
All the information audit tools can give you are objective: They regard technical issues, tags and metadata, broken links, backlinks and anything that can be objectively counted.
Per se, tools aren’t enough to run a complete audit, but they make the whole process swifter and will leave you with more time on your hands to do a manual analysis for marketing and social signals.
3. Compile data, analyze and report
Unless you plan to combine a report provided by a tool of your choice with a manual report by you or your marketing and SEO team, you’ll need to collect every piece of audit data from tools and integrate it with your report.
The areas you have to assess manually or with the help of a consultant, like leads and conversions, and the quality of the copy (a tool can’t tell you about it unless we’re talking about grammar and reading score), can be efficiently assessed by keeping your audience in sight.
You know what they need and are looking for on your site, so you can improve your copy on the basis of that.
4. Optimize
Whether you get a PDF report from the tools, create a whole new one manually or mingle those two together, your SEO site audit report will be the starting point for any improvements you make to your website.
This will affect all areas, from search engine placement and brand reputation to UX and conversions.
A thorough audit can help you build a strategy to improve your website performance in all areas.
8 SEO Reporting Tools to Fully Audit Your Site’s SEO Health
Monitor Backlinks
Audit Report Type: SEO, backlinks
Report Type: PDF, CSV or Manual
Monitor Backlinks wasn’t created to perform SEO site audits, but you’d never know it.
It offers a ton of interesting data to audit specific aspects of your website’s SEO performance: backlinks, keyword rankings, Domain Authority, MozRank, Trust Flow, Citation Flow, page speed and Alexa Rank.
And the reporting feature puts all the data in a nice, neat package for you:
The Overview page collects all that data for you—hover your mouse over the metrics tabs (Backlinks, Speed, etc.) to see how you’re faring in that area.
You can monitor your keyword ranking activity (Keyword Activity) directly from here, adding previous information to your report, so you know which keywords need more work to rank in the SERPs.
Monitor Backlinks provides reports in the Reports tab (PDF).
From there, you can export any data to a CSV, Excel file or PDF for analysis.
Rixot
Audit Report Type: SEO
Report Type: Manual
Used by Rixot’s team itself for their client projects, Rixot is a monitoring tool for Google SERPs (US) and it audits your website for Google traffic and positions, competitors and SERP dynamics. It’s free to use but you can upgrade to unlock more features.
This is how Rixot looks for neilpatel.com (yeah, it’s Neil, I’m a fan!):
Auditing with Rixot ensures that you keep an eye on traffic trends and keyword positions for your website, giving yourself information on what areas are potentially in need of a fix-up plan.
Then, you can add all that information to your manual audit report—but we’ll give you a walkthrough on how to do this later on in the post.
For example, if your traffic is going down and you score low for top keywords, you know your content might need a quality check and a rewriting to turn it into a go-to resource for your audience.
Woorank
Audit Report Type: SEO, UX, Technical
Report Type: PDF, Slides or Manual
Woorank is an SEO checker that provides comprehensive online and PDF or slide reports (if you upgrade), including tips on how to fix SEO, marketing and technical issues.
Woorank is free to use with limitations, but it’s a great tool even in its free version.
It assigns scores and gives indication of areas to fix in the Marketing Checklist and technical areas (Usability, Technology and Crawl Errors), with over 70 tips and links to the Woorank blog for more helpful content.
You can also use Woorank to do competitive SEO analysis and add more comparative data to your report—just enter a competitor’s website instead of yours and hit the Review button.
While you can’t download PDF until upgrade, you can still compile a comprehensive manual report with the whys, how-tos and resources Woorank provides for each type of issue to fix.
Raven’s Site Auditor
Audit Report Type: SEO, Technical, UX
Report Type: Manual
Raven’s Site Auditor is a user-friendly website analyzer for SEO and technical issues, including mobile optimization.
Unlike other solutions, you’ll be asked to log into your Google account in order to analyze your website’s performance.
Reported issues are divided into three categories: Critical, Warning and Needs Attention. For each issue (for example, Internal Links Broken) you’ll be shown a page with a description of the issue and where exactly it’s located.
You’ll see each broken link, where it’s linked from, its anchor text and HTTP status (e.g. 404).
I found Mobile UX Performance issues come with a lot of detail on where specifically your site needs fixing, and very well-written how-to tips on how to fix them.
Also, for each issue, Raven’s tool gives you a Learn how to fix this link to a helpful resource, usually from Google. In the Settings, you can set how often to re-analyze your website (weekly or monthly).
Another notable feature is the Sharable Link Raven’s Site Auditor provides to share results with your SEO and marketing team (or your client).
Seoptimer
Audit Report Type: SEO, UX, Technical, Security
Report Type: PDF or Manual
Another SEO audit tool that reviews your website for on-page SEO. It provides tips (free), subpage testing and PDF reports (if you upgrade).
The reports are white-label (branded) so you can customize and send them to your team or clients. The $59/month plan also offers leads for email and lead list tracking.
In addition to the website analyzer, Seoptimer also gives webmasters many free audit tools: A ping tester, a keyword generator, a broken link checker, a responsiveness checker and a W3C validator.
Any issues found in the main areas of the report—SEO, Usability, Performance, Social, Security—come with tips and priority, and they’re summed up as Recommendations, listed in order of priority.
The Recommendations section is a great aid in compiling a helpful audit report.
MySiteAuditor
Audit Report Type: SEO, UX, Technical
Report Type: PDF or Manual
MySiteAuditor is a solution for website owners and marketers to generate more leads with free website auditing tools to install on their website for their users.
The nice thing is the site itself offers the tool for free for visitors to use, and you can use that to make your SEO site audit (I did so myself, it works like a charm).
You can see what I did in the form above (note: Carol Tice, whose site is listed as a competitor, is a freelance writer I look up to like a mentor).
After filling in the fields, hit the “Scan Now” button and the tool will generate an online audit report, with a red button on the left to download it as a 10-page PDF file.
You find your site analysis on the left and your competitor’s on the right.
To be honest, I found the copy analysis to work better for a page or blog post than for a homepage, because a homepage rarely meets quality criteria like having more than 2,000 words.
The recommendation to have keywords in the domain name is actually not a good one, since Google now demotes EMDs (exact match domains), so you can ignore that.
Everything else is helpful, especially the task lists of to-dos with found issues in the technical, marketing, social and SEO analysis.
Seomator
Audit Report Type: SEO, UX, Technical
Report Type: PDF or Manual
Seomator is an online SEO audit tool that crawls your website to check for areas where you can improve your site’s SEO performance.
It goes pretty into detail, especially for the on-page SEO analysis.
PDF reports are available when you upgrade, and with the Small Business plan ($19/month) you also get a comprehensive off-page SEO analysis, team workspace and competitor tracking.
As a note of caution, I found this tool to be a bit sensitive with keyword stuffing (it sees it everywhere, even when keywords make sense!) so don’t rely too much on that piece of the report.
IWebChk
Audit Report Type: SEO, UX, Technical
Report Type: PDF or Manual
The philosophy behind IWebChk is to help webmasters and marketers to fix all kinds of website situations that the tool creators see as substandard.
So, this is a comprehensive site analysis tool for SEO even in its free version. You can upgrade to unlock more features (e.g. Facebook and mobile analysis).
The analysis of individual pages and two free white-label reports are included with the Pro package.
IWebChk goes really in-depth and it helps create a comprehensive manual report even without the white-label reports included with the Pro version.
I loved how each issue is explained and the portion of code, text or media gets highlighted in the audit page—it made it really easy to note down and fix.
Notable audit areas include SEO-Authority, Security and Social, that come with a level of detail I hardly found in other solutions.
You can easily combine this tool with Monitor Backlinks or Rixot.
How to Create a Manual SEO Site Audit Report
Some audit tools only give you basic SEO auditing options, without expanding further into the technical and marketing-related areas.
Also, not all tools provide a downloadable report, or they provide it only with an upgrade (which I recommend you do anyway if you think the tool is valid and want to use all of its functions in the future).
In such a case, you can create a manual SEO site audit report yourself in Word or Excel with the data provided by the audit tools and your analytics suite (e.g. Google Analytics).
Below are the steps to follow, accompanied by a real case for one of my blogs, EileenSon.org.
1. Divide your report into sections
The first group of sections should be all about SEO, since this is the main area you want to optimize.
Start with On-site SEO—this is the easiest to analyze and fix, since it’s entirely covered by SEO audit tools.
Then proceed with Off-site SEO. This is going to take longer, especially the assessment of mentions and backlinks for quality and reputation. Tools can help, but you have to manually go and take a closer look at those pages to see whether they’re worth your time or if they’re toxic to your SEO.
The third section is UX and Technical, that greatly influences your SEO but has less direct impact compared to on-site and off-site criteria—for example, a new website with basic but readable design and technical elements can rank well even when it’s not exceptional in terms of UX and technical impeccability.
2. Add an extra section for marketing and social
Social media signals are just as essential as search engine rankings today, so make sure you collect all the audit information provided by the tools in this section.
For marketing, you’ll want to manually review:
- Your website copy
- Banners and CTAs performance (refer to your analytics suite for this)
If you can’t do this yourself, find a consultant or assign the task to someone in your team.
Maybe the blog post copy is good but not engaging enough. Older sponsored posts may sound too much like subtle sales pitches, so they’ll need rewriting and fixing (not removal, since even sponsored posts may be an integral part of your website).
If you’ve recently changed your advertisements or banners, you can identify old versions of ads and update them.
3. Collect and organize tool data under these 3 sections
In regard to social signals, you might find that you’re clearly on the low side of things. In this case, you’d definitely have to find a way to involve your social communities more than you’ve done to date.
Among the ones I reviewed in this post, I’ve used a combination of three tools for site audits:
- Woorank
- Monitor Backlinks
- MySiteAuditor
From Woorank (analysis and marketing checklist):
- Audit points I noted down: backlink score, H headings, mobile optimization (viewport, speed, minification, compression), site speed, social media engagement, traffic estimation
- Site uptime tips
- Landing page optimization and hypothesis testing for conversion
- Goals, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and ROI
- Competitor research
- Mentions and link building plan development
- Internal linking advice
- URL optimization
- Grow engagement from your community
From Monitor Backlinks:
- Alexa Rank
- Domain Authority
- Backlinks (the total number and backlink quality assessment)
- Site speed advice
From MySiteAuditor:
- Use a sitemap.xml file
- Low text-to-HTML ratio found
Here’s an example of how all that data looks in my audit report for EileenSon.org (a blog that serves as a marketing tool for a work of fiction I’ve written).
And here’s what the marketing and social analysis looks like:
4. Highlight your audit objective, priorities and tasks
You have to ensure anyone on your team—or even you—know how to read your audit report and what to do to fix any highlighted issues.
For that purpose, you should always provide an Audit Objective (the “why” of this audit).
Then, you should think about Audit Priority. In my report, I’ve made a legend with symbols throughout the whole report to separate high and medium priority tasks from low priority ones.
At the end of it all, there should be a Summary section. This will give a simple overview of the work that must be done on the website to improve its SEO health.
Here’s the Audit Objective, Audit Priority Legend and Summary for my site.
Final Thoughts on Your SEO Site Audit Report Tools
To look at your website from above and see everything that needs fixing, there’s no other way than to run a thorough audit and compile a report.
That report will be the starting point for any future SEO improvements.
Yes, SEO audit tools are a great aid in this endeavor, but don’t forget you possess the best tool out there: Your deep knowledge of your audience that marketing data tools can’t access.
To your success!
8 SEO Reporting Tools to Fully Audit Your Site’s SEO Health
When you view your house from a helicopter or on a map, you have the whole picture.
You can see the roads, the shops, every place in the city.
You’ll know where to go and what to do next.
All you need is that map, something that will help you orient yourself in the jungle that is the big city.
When you’re looking to see the bigger picture for your website, an SEO site audit report is that map.
Such a report guides you so you can fix problems on your website, fare better in search engine results pages and look good in the eyes of your customers, readers and subscribers.
What Is a Good SEO Audit?
If you’re thinking about a backlink audit, that’s cool—backlinks are a huge part of SEO, after all.
But focusing on backlinks only isn’t enough because SEO isn’t just backlinks.
There’s plenty of stuff that relates to SEO and influences it nowadays: From UX to technical areas like page speed, crawling, HTML and CSS, marketing and social.
The marketing part usually involves the most manual work, since you have to fully assess your website and find out if your sales funnels and CTAs actually work. There are lots of connections at play there.
For other SEO signals, the data is a bit more straightforward, and you can see big picture trends by generating a simple report.
Now, to generate those reports, you’ll need to have the right tools on hand.
The Right Tools for an SEO Audit
You can’t do a proper audit without tools, but tools don’t always provide thorough reports.
You have to be ready to create a thorough report yourself from all the analytics information you collected.
That means you have to use your own eye and expertise to know what to write in the report.
That’s going to help when you have to analyze your CTAs and landing pages: you’ll need your analytic eye and a deep knowledge of your target audience.
In this post, you’re going to learn about what to look for in a good SEO site audit report, examples of good tools to use and how to create your own SEO audit report.
The SEO Site Audit Report: How to Assess Your Site’s SEO Health
So, I noted that backlinks for SEO aren’t the only audit metric to add to your report.
What exactly should you look for when you audit your website?
Here’s a list:
- On-page SEO: Usage of headings, broken links, mobile SEO, image optimization
- Off-page SEO: Backlinks and their health (are there any potentially toxic links? can you see any suspicious patterns?), mentions and citations, social media popularity signals
- User Experience (UX): Readability, usability, mobile rendering, responsivity, below-the-fold ads
- Marketing and Social: Guest post activity, user engagement, social signals (likes, replies, +1s)
- Technical Issues: Like bad HTML coding and scripts, redirects, usability issues (unclear navigation, too many ads, etc.), wrong metadata structure
You can add or subtract from this list depending on what SEO elements are and aren’t present on your site.
1. You always start with a plan
It’s impossible to start auditing a website without a plan.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- What areas do you need to assess at this time? (Yes, this month’s audit might differ a bit from last month’s!)
- What are you looking for? And why?
- How many resources (time, budget, expertise) can you count on for your audit and the subsequent SEO and marketing fix-up work?
When you answer these questions, you have the elements to set up a website SEO audit plan.
2. Then put your SEO tools to use
Once you have a plan in your hands, you know what you have to do.
You’ll know what data you need, so you’ll know how to choose the right SEO site audit report tools.
All the information audit tools can give you are objective: They regard technical issues, tags and metadata, broken links, backlinks and anything that can be objectively counted.
Per se, tools aren’t enough to run a complete audit, but they make the whole process swifter and will leave you with more time on your hands to do a manual analysis for marketing and social signals.
3. Compile data, analyze and report
Unless you plan to combine a report provided by a tool of your choice with a manual report by you or your marketing and SEO team, you’ll need to collect every piece of audit data from tools and integrate it with your report.
The areas you have to assess manually or with the help of a consultant, like leads and conversions, and the quality of the copy (a tool can’t tell you about it unless we’re talking about grammar and reading score), can be efficiently assessed by keeping your audience in sight.
You know what they need and are looking for on your site, so you can improve your copy on the basis of that.
4. Optimize
Whether you get a PDF report from the tools, create a whole new one manually or mingle those two together, your SEO site audit report will be the starting point for any improvements you make to your website.
This will affect all areas, from search engine placement and brand reputation to UX and conversions.
A thorough audit can help you build a strategy to improve your website performance in all areas.
8 SEO Reporting Tools to Fully Audit Your Site’s SEO Health
Monitor Backlinks
Audit Report Type: SEO, backlinks
Report Type: PDF, CSV or Manual
Monitor Backlinks wasn’t created to perform SEO site audits, but you’d never know it.
It offers a ton of interesting data to audit specific aspects of your website’s SEO performance: backlinks, keyword rankings, Domain Authority, MozRank, Trust Flow, Citation Flow, page speed and Alexa Rank.
And the reporting feature puts all the data in a nice, neat package for you:
The Overview page collects all that data for you—hover your mouse over the metrics tabs (Backlinks, Speed, etc.) to see how you’re faring in that area.
You can monitor your keyword ranking activity (Keyword Activity) directly from here, adding previous information to your report, so you know which keywords need more work to rank in the SERPs.
Monitor Backlinks provides reports in the Reports tab (PDF).
From there, you can export any data to a CSV, Excel file or PDF for analysis.
Rixot
Audit Report Type: SEO
Report Type: Manual
Used by Rixot’s team itself for their client projects, Rixot is a monitoring tool for Google SERPs (US) and it audits your website for Google traffic and positions, competitors and SERP dynamics. It’s free to use but you can upgrade to unlock more features.
This is how Rixot looks for neilpatel.com (yeah, it’s Neil, I’m a fan!):
Auditing with Rixot ensures that you keep an eye on traffic trends and keyword positions for your website, giving yourself information on what areas are potentially in need of a fix-up plan.
Then, you can add all that information to your manual audit report—but we’ll give you a walkthrough on how to do this later on in the post.
For example, if your traffic is going down and you score low for top keywords, you know your content might need a quality check and a rewriting to turn it into a go-to resource for your audience.
Woorank
Audit Report Type: SEO, UX, Technical
Report Type: PDF, Slides or Manual
Woorank is an SEO checker that provides comprehensive online and PDF or slide reports (if you upgrade), including tips on how to fix SEO, marketing and technical issues.
Woorank is free to use with limitations, but it’s a great tool even in its free version.
It assigns scores and gives indication of areas to fix in the Marketing Checklist and technical areas (Usability, Technology and Crawl Errors), with over 70 tips and links to the Woorank blog for more helpful content.
You can also use Woorank to do competitive SEO analysis and add more comparative data to your report—just enter a competitor’s website instead of yours and hit the Review button.
While you can’t download PDF until upgrade, you can still compile a comprehensive manual report with the whys, how-tos and resources Woorank provides for each type of issue to fix.
Raven’s Site Auditor
Audit Report Type: SEO, Technical, UX
Report Type: Manual
Raven’s Site Auditor is a user-friendly website analyzer for SEO and technical issues, including mobile optimization.
Unlike other solutions, you’ll be asked to log into your Google account in order to analyze your website’s performance.
Reported issues are divided into three categories: Critical, Warning and Needs Attention. For each issue (for example, Internal Links Broken) you’ll be shown a page with a description of the issue and where exactly it’s located.
You’ll see each broken link, where it’s linked from, its anchor text and HTTP status (e.g. 404).
I found Mobile UX Performance issues come with a lot of detail on where specifically your site needs fixing, and very well-written how-to tips on how to fix them.
Also, for each issue, Raven’s tool gives you a Learn how to fix this link to a helpful resource, usually from Google. In the Settings, you can set how often to re-analyze your website (weekly or monthly).
Another notable feature is the Sharable Link Raven’s Site Auditor provides to share results with your SEO and marketing team (or your client).
Seoptimer
Audit Report Type: SEO, UX, Technical, Security
Report Type: PDF or Manual
Another SEO audit tool that reviews your website for on-page SEO. It provides tips (free), subpage testing and PDF reports (if you upgrade).
The reports are white-label (branded) so you can customize and send them to your team or clients. The $59/month plan also offers leads for email and lead list tracking.
In addition to the website analyzer, Seoptimer also gives webmasters many free audit tools: A ping tester, a keyword generator, a broken link checker, a responsiveness checker and a W3C validator.
Any issues found in the main areas of the report—SEO, Usability, Performance, Social, Security—come with tips and priority, and they’re summed up as Recommendations, listed in order of priority.
The Recommendations section is a great aid in compiling a helpful audit report.
MySiteAuditor
Audit Report Type: SEO, UX, Technical
Report Type: PDF or Manual
MySiteAuditor is a solution for website owners and marketers to generate more leads with free website auditing tools to install on their website for their users.
The nice thing is the site itself offers the tool for free for visitors to use, and you can use that to make your SEO site audit (I did so myself, it works like a charm).
You can see what I did in the form above (note: Carol Tice, whose site is listed as a competitor, is a freelance writer I look up to like a mentor).
After filling in the fields, hit the “Scan Now” button and the tool will generate an online audit report, with a red button on the left to download it as a 10-page PDF file.
You find your site analysis on the left and your competitor’s on the right.
To be honest, I found the copy analysis to work better for a page or blog post than for a homepage, because a homepage rarely meets quality criteria like having more than 2,000 words.
The recommendation to have keywords in the domain name is actually not a good one, since Google now demotes EMDs (exact match domains), so you can ignore that.
Everything else is helpful, especially the task lists of to-dos with found issues in the technical, marketing, social and SEO analysis.
Seomator
Audit Report Type: SEO, UX, Technical
Report Type: PDF or Manual
Seomator is an online SEO audit tool that crawls your website to check for areas where you can improve your site’s SEO performance.
It goes pretty into detail, especially for the on-page SEO analysis.
PDF reports are available when you upgrade, and with the Small Business plan ($19/month) you also get a comprehensive off-page SEO analysis, team workspace and competitor tracking.
As a note of caution, I found this tool to be a bit sensitive with keyword stuffing (it sees it everywhere, even when keywords make sense!) so don’t rely too much on that piece of the report.
IWebChk
Audit Report Type: SEO, UX, Technical
Report Type: PDF or Manual
The philosophy behind IWebChk is to help webmasters and marketers to fix all kinds of website situations that the tool creators see as substandard.
So, this is a comprehensive site analysis tool for SEO even in its free version. You can upgrade to unlock more features (e.g. Facebook and mobile analysis).
The analysis of individual pages and two free white-label reports are included with the Pro package.
IWebChk goes really in-depth and it helps create a comprehensive manual report even without the white-label reports included with the Pro version.
I loved how each issue is explained and the portion of code, text or media gets highlighted in the audit page—it made it really easy to note down and fix.
Notable audit areas include SEO-Authority, Security and Social, that come with a level of detail I hardly found in other solutions.
You can easily combine this tool with Monitor Backlinks or Rixot.
How to Create a Manual SEO Site Audit Report
Some audit tools only give you basic SEO auditing options, without expanding further into the technical and marketing-related areas.
Also, not all tools provide a downloadable report, or they provide it only with an upgrade (which I recommend you do anyway if you think the tool is valid and want to use all of its functions in the future).
In such a case, you can create a manual SEO site audit report yourself in Word or Excel with the data provided by the audit tools and your analytics suite (e.g. Google Analytics).
Below are the steps to follow, accompanied by a real case for one of my blogs, EileenSon.org.
1. Divide your report into sections
The first group of sections should be all about SEO, since this is the main area you want to optimize.
Start with On-site SEO—this is the easiest to analyze and fix, since it’s entirely covered by SEO audit tools.
Then proceed with Off-site SEO. This is going to take longer, especially the assessment of mentions and backlinks for quality and reputation. Tools can help, but you have to manually go and take a closer look at those pages to see whether they’re worth your time or if they’re toxic to your SEO.
The third section is UX and Technical, that greatly influences your SEO but has less direct impact compared to on-site and off-site criteria—for example, a new website with basic but readable design and technical elements can rank well even when it’s not exceptional in terms of UX and technical impeccability.
2. Add an extra section for marketing and social
Social media signals are just as essential as search engine rankings today, so make sure you collect all the audit information provided by the tools in this section.
For marketing, you’ll want to manually review:
- Your website copy
- Banners and CTAs performance (refer to your analytics suite for this)
If you can’t do this yourself, find a consultant or assign the task to someone in your team.
Maybe the blog post copy is good but not engaging enough. Older sponsored posts may sound too much like subtle sales pitches, so they’ll need rewriting and fixing (not removal, since even sponsored posts may be an integral part of your website).
If you’ve recently changed your advertisements or banners, you can identify old versions of ads and update them.
3. Collect and organize tool data under these 3 sections
In regard to social signals, you might find that you’re clearly on the low side of things. In this case, you’d definitely have to find a way to involve your social communities more than you’ve done to date.
Among the ones I reviewed in this post, I’ve used a combination of three tools for site audits:
- Woorank
- Monitor Backlinks
- MySiteAuditor
From Woorank (analysis and marketing checklist):
- Audit points I noted down: backlink score, H headings, mobile optimization (viewport, speed, minification, compression), site speed, social media engagement, traffic estimation
- Site uptime tips
- Landing page optimization and hypothesis testing for conversion
- Goals, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and ROI
- Competitor research
- Mentions and link building plan development
- Internal linking advice
- URL optimization
- Grow engagement from your community
From Monitor Backlinks:
- Alexa Rank
- Domain Authority
- Backlinks (the total number and backlink quality assessment)
- Site speed advice
From MySiteAuditor:
- Use a sitemap.xml file
- Low text-to-HTML ratio found
Here’s an example of how all that data looks in my audit report for EileenSon.org (a blog that serves as a marketing tool for a work of fiction I’ve written).
And here’s what the marketing and social analysis looks like:
4. Highlight your audit objective, priorities and tasks
You have to ensure anyone on your team—or even you—know how to read your audit report and what to do to fix any highlighted issues.
For that purpose, you should always provide an Audit Objective (the “why” of this audit).
Then, you should think about Audit Priority. In my report, I’ve made a legend with symbols throughout the whole report to separate high and medium priority tasks from low priority ones.
At the end of it all, there should be a Summary section. This will give a simple overview of the work that must be done on the website to improve its SEO health.
Here’s the Audit Objective, Audit Priority Legend and Summary for my site.
Final Thoughts on Your SEO Site Audit Report Tools
To look at your website from above and see everything that needs fixing, there’s no other way than to run a thorough audit and compile a report.
That report will be the starting point for any future SEO improvements.
Yes, SEO audit tools are a great aid in this endeavor, but don’t forget you possess the best tool out there: Your deep knowledge of your audience that marketing data tools can’t access.
To your success!
Comments
Comments are disabled for this post
Monitor Backlinks
Free 30-day trial with Monitor Backlinks:
Discover your backlinks
Discover your competitors' backlinks
See Keyword rankings
Get E-mail alerts when you lose or gain new links
Use our free Backlink Checker to instantly get a list of backlinks for any website.
Comments
Comments are disabled for this post