The Roadmap to SEO Success: An In-Depth SEO Audit of Your Website

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Crawlability & Indexability

Achieving strong visibility in search engines starts with a technically sound, content-rich, and user-friendly website. In this comprehensive guide, we walk you through a detailed SEO audit framework that covers everything from crawlability and site structure to content optimization, mobile readiness, and international SEO. Whether you’re uncovering hidden issues in your robots.txt file or fine-tuning your hreflang implementation, this roadmap highlights the most critical technical and on-page SEO elements that can make or break your organic performance.

Robots.txt

  • ✖ Format errors in robots.txt
  • ✖ Invalid structured data items
  • ⚠ Issues with blocked internal resources in robots.txt
  • 🖼 Issues with blocked external resources in robots.txt
  • 🖼 Robots.txt not found
  • 🖼 Pages blocked by X-Robots-Tag: noindex HTTP header
  • 🖼 Pages were blocked from crawling

URL Structure

  • ✖ Malformed links
  • ⚠ Underscores in the URL
  • ⚠ Too many parameters in URLs
  • ⚠ URL is too long
  • 🖼 URL longer than 200 characters

Links

  • ✖ Broken internal links
  • 🖼 Pages with only one incoming internal link source
  • 🖼 Pages that need more than 3 clicks to be reached

Redirects

  • ✖ Pages returning 4XX status code
  • ✖ Pages returning 5XX status code
  • ✖ WWW domain configured incorrectly
  • ✖ Redirect chains and loops
  • ✖ Pages with a meta refresh redirect tag
  • ✖ Broken canonical link
  • ✖ Multiple canonical URLs
  • ⚠ Pages with temporary redirects
  • ⚠ Internal links with nofollow attributes
  • ⚠ Too many on-page links
  • ⚠ Broken external links
  • 🖼 External links with nofollow attributes
  • 🖼 URLs with a permanent redirect

Sitemap

  • ✖ Format errors in sitemap.xml
  • ✖ Wrong pages found in sitemap.xml
  • ✖ Sitemap.xml files are too large
  • ⚠ Sitemap.xml not found
  • ⚠ Sitemap.xml not indicated in robots.txt
  • 🖼 Orphaned pages in sitemap
  • 🖼 Orphaned pages from Google Analytics

On-Page SEO

Content

  • ✖ Missing or empty title tags
  • ✖ Issues with duplicate title tags
  • ⚠ Duplicate H1 and title tags
  • ⚠ Title tag is too long
  • ⚠ Title tag is too short

H1 Tag

  • ⚠ Missing H1 heading
  • ⚠ Duplicate H1 and title tags
  • 🖼 Multiple H1 headings

Meta Description

  • ✖ Duplicate meta descriptions
  • ⚠ Missing meta descriptions

Image

  • ✖ Broken internal images
  • ✖ Broken external images
  • ⚠ Images missing alt attribute
  • 🖼 Resources formatted as page link

Technical SEO

Page Speed

  • ✖ Large HTML size
  • ✖ Slow page load speed
  • ⚠ Uncompressed pages
  • ⚠ Issues with uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files
  • ⚠ Pages have a JavaScript and CSS total size that is too large
  • ⚠ Pages use too many JavaScript and CSS files
  • ⚠ Issues with unminified JavaScript and CSS files
  • ⚠ Issues with uncached JavaScript and CSS files
  • 🖼 Issues with broken external JavaScript and CSS files

Core Web Vitals

  • 🖼 Pages that take more than 1 second to become interactive

Old Technology

  • ⚠ Frames used
  • ⚠ Doctype not declared
  • ⚠ Incompatible plugin content

Mobile

  • ✖ Missing viewport tag
  • ✖ Missing the viewport width value
  • ✖ AMP pages with HTML issues
  • ✖ AMP pages with style and layout issues
  • ✖ AMP pages with templating issues
  • ✖ AMP pages have no canonical tag
  • ✖ Issues with broken internal JavaScript and CSS files

HTTP Implementation

  • ✖ Mixed content
  • ✖ Non-secure pages
  • ✖ No redirects or canonicals to HTTPS URLs from HTTP version
  • ✖ SSL certificate registered to an incorrect domain name
  • ✖ Old security protocol version
  • ✖ Expiring or expired SSL certificate
  • ✖ Subdomains don’t support secure encryption algorithms
  • ⚠ HTTPS pages lead to HTTP page
  • ⚠ Homepage doesn’t use HTTPS encryption
  • ⚠ HTTP URLs in sitemap.xml for HTTPS site
  • ⚠ Subdomains don’t support SNI
  • 🖼 Subdomains don’t support HSTS

International SEO

  • ✖ Hreflang implementation issue
  • ✖ Hreflang conflicts within page source code
  • ✖ Incorrect hreflang links
  • ⚠ Pages with no hreflang and lang attributes
  • ⚠ Pages without character encoding declared
  • 🖼 Hreflang language mismatch issues

A successful SEO strategy starts with a solid foundation. By regularly auditing key areas like crawlability, content, page speed, and mobile performance, you’ll stay ahead of issues that could hurt your rankings. Use this roadmap as your guide, fix what matters most, and keep your site search-engine friendly and user-focused.

Pravindra Yadav

As a digital marketing professional with 5 years of experience in the industry, I have honed my skills in creating and implementing effective marketing strategies across various online platforms. I am highly skilled in utilizing Search Engine Optimization, On-Page SEO, Off-page SEO, Social Media Marketing, CMS, Google Ads, Quora Ads, and content marketing to drive traffic and increase brand awareness. Author

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