from an update. Final thoughts If you’re worried about

over-optimization, your intuition is probably a good guide. If you feel like you’re doing something that Google (or your users) won’t like, or you’re fixating on tiny imree SEO Audit Template (With Video Walkthrough) By Joshua Hardwick, Patrick Stox Reviewed by Sam Oh Updated: December 6, 2023 2 min read Joshua Hardwick Joshua Hardwick Head of Content   Ahrefs (or, in plain English, I’m the guy responsible for ensuring that every blog post we publish is EPIC). Article Performance Data from Ahrefs Organic traffic 576 Linking websites 49 Sign up for Ahrefs Get SEO metrics of any website or URL. Get the week’s best marketing content Email Subscription Enter your email Subscribe Evolve –

Singapore – October 24-25 Contents Download the

template Why you should use our template What the template covers How to use the template Next steps Looking to improve your website’s SEO but don’t know where to start? Use our free SEO audit template to find SEO issues that need fixing. Download the SEO audit template Google Docs → Google Sheets → Microsoft Excel → Microsoft Word → PDF → SIDENOTE. Looking for a different format? Request it here. Why you should use our template Our SEO audit template focuses on finding SEO issues that move the needle—not everything that can go wrong with a website. This is because sweating the

small stuff rarely does much for your ranking

s. It’s better to spend 80% of your time fixing the 20% of things that matter. It’s also: Easy to follow (each step has clear instructions). Easy to outsource (just send it to an employee, freelancer, or VA). Interactive (check each item off the checklist as you go). DOING AN SEO AUDIT FOR A CLIENT? My buddy Patrick (who’s done way more SEO audits for clients than me!) has some great advice: If clients are coming to you asking for an audit, they already have a pain point. Talk to them. Solve that one thing

and they’ll be happy with the audit. Patrick Stox

Patrick Stox, Product Advisor Maldives Email List  Ahrefs What the template covers Our template has 13 items focused on issues in three categories: Technical issues like indexing and crawling. Content issues like outdated content and content gaps. Link issues like dead pages with backlinks. SIDENOTE. Remember that we’re not focused on finding every issue under the sun here. We’re focused on finding and fixing the stuff that matters. That’s why our template only has 13 steps, not an overwhelming 100-200 like many others. How to use the template Follow the three simple steps below or watch the video walkthrough. 1. Crawl

your website Set up a free Ahrefs Webmaster

Tools (AWT) account and crawl your website with Site Audit. (Make sure to tick the “Backlinks” option under “Crawl settings” as this is important for one of the checks in the template). Turning on backlinks as a URL source in Ahrefs’ Site Audit 2. Download and follow the template Check off items as you complete them. Checking items off the SEO audit checklist. 3.  find these in the template. Use them if you’re having trouble following a step or fixing an issue. Next

steps Keep an eye on your organic traffic in

Google Search Console or Ahrefs’ Site OPTIMIZING EVERY SINGLE META DESCRIPTION  Explorer. Hopefully, fixing the issues in our SEO audit template will lead to some improvement. I also recommend scheduling regular crawls in Ahrefs’ Site Audit. This will alert you to important SEO issues as they happen so you can fix them before they cause problems. How to run scheduled crawls in Site Auditrogrammatic SEO, Explained for Beginners By Ryan Law Updated: November 29, 2023 10 min read Ryan Law Ryan Law Ryan Law is the Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs. Ryan has 13 years experience as a writer, content strategist, team lead, marketing director, VP, CMO,