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

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
• ✅ User-friendly first, then search engine-friendly
• ✅ Concise
• ✅ Punctuated correctly
• ✅ Consistent
• ✅ Avoid repeating keywords

Links

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

Internal Linking

• ✅ Identify Orphan Pages
• ✅ Fix Redirected / Broken Links
• ✅ Relevance
• ✅ Anchor Text
• ✅ Remove Internal Links to Unimportant Pages
• ✅ Internal Link Position

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

Page Title Optimization

• ✅ Compelling and engaging
• ✅ Short, sweet, and descriptive
• ✅ Unique
• ✅ Not too long
• ✅ Optimized for your primary keyword
• ✅ Add your primary keyword towards the front

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
• ✅ Write As You Talk
• ✅ Target Your Audience Pain Point
• ✅ Analyze the Heading
• ✅ Use Sub Headings and Bullet Points
• ✅ Use Table of Content
• ✅ Avoid Plagiarism
• ✅ Write for Content Salesy
• ✅ Avoid Keyword Stuffing
• ✅ Add Relevant CTA
• ✅ Keep the Vocabulary Simple
• ✅ Remove Duplicate Content

Heading Optimization

H1 Heading

• ⚠ Missing H1 heading
• ⚠ Duplicate H1 and title tags
• ✅ You only have one H1 tag
• ✅ Your heading describes what your page is about
• ✅ They aren’t too long
• ✅ They aren’t too short either
• ✅ They grab the user’s attention
• ✅ Try to include the primary keyword you want to target

H2-H6 Heading

• ✅ Are meaningful
• ✅ Include long-tail keywords
• ✅ Answer subtopics required to answer the main search query
• ✅ Accurately summarizes your content
• ✅ Are optimized with your primary keyword
• ✅ Are engaging
• ✅ Aren’t too long

Meta Description

• ✖ Duplicate meta descriptions
• ⚠ Missing meta descriptions

Image

• ✖ Broken internal images
• ✖ Broken external images
• ⚠ Images missing alt attribute
• 🖼 Resources formatted as page link
• ✅ Descriptive
• ✅ Not too long
• ✅ Optimized for your keywords

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.