Free Technical SEO Audit Template & Checklist 2021

What is a Technical SEO Audit

A technical SEO audit is a process of analyzing your website and making corrections or improvements to its code to make it more search engine friendly.

Technical SEO audit looks at both the backend and front-end of your site and includes things like checking that you’re using a crawlable URL structure, ensuring your pages have proper titles and descriptions, the speed of your site, and more.

A Technical SEO Audit helps you better understand your website’s current state, find potential problems that could be affecting your search rankings, and ultimately help Google crawl and understand your site better.

Why Use a Technical SEO Audit Checklist?

SEO used to be simple. Create a few pages, fill them with targeted keywords, and the page would rise in the rankings. Not anymore!

Google’s algorithms have changed, and now sites have to work much harder to rank for competitive keywords.

It doesn’t matter if you have the best content in the world if no one can find it. This is why regular site audits are important.

With technical SEO audits, you can analyze your website and optimize it further to get high organic visibility.

And for the step-by-step audit process, you can use this checklist.

This technical SEO audit template is designed to help you see how optimized your website is overall. You can use this template to find opportunities for improvement to get more organic traffic.

Remember that: technical SEO isn’t just a series of best practices that can be followed to achieve predictable organic traffic growth.

Instead, it is a strategy that should be applied thoughtfully to create a website that search engines are more likely to crawl, index, and rank well for relevant searches.

So use this checklist and make sure that your website is well optimized for ranking in Google.

What’s Included in the Checklist

This technical SEO audit checklist is divided into 11 sections:

• Crawability & Indexing
• Security
• Links
• Site Structure
• Content Optimization
• Image Optimization
• Videos Optimization
• Mobile Friendliness
• Core Web Vitals (Page Speed)
• Accessibility
• International Optimization

You can browse through each point in the checklist and tick the ones you have completed in the audit.

How to Use This Checklist

Here’s how you can start using this checklist:

• Download the free Technical SEO Audit Checklist from this page.
• If you’ve opened the Notion checklist, you can simply duplicate it.
• If you’ve opened the Google Sheets checklist version, you can make a copy of it.
• As you follow the checklist, you can tick the items that pass and leave them blank that don’t pass the audit.
• Once the checklist is complete, wait for a few weeks to observe the ranking changes.

Note that SEO is an ever-evolving process that requires constant tweaking, optimization, and improvement.

So my recommendation is to go through this technical SEO audit checklist every six months or so and check if there’s something new in your website that needs to be fixed.

Tools Needed to Run a Technical SEO Audit

These are some of the tools you can use for your website technical SEO audit:

• Google Analytics (free)
• Google Search Console (free)
• Google Page Speed Insights (free)
• Screaming Frog (free)
• Semrush (free)
• Ahrefs (paid)
• Sitebuilb (free)
• Copyscape (free)
• Siteliner (free)

Note that all of these tools are not required, but using them will definitely make the whole audit process easier and faster for you.

Also, if you’re not familiar with all the tools, you can start with Semrush or Ahrefs only, as these will cover most of the technical factors.

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