SEO Audit Checklist: Identifying Technical, On-Page, and Off-Page Issues

Imagine this: Your team have invested money, time, creativity, and energy into your website and yet your competitors keep showing up above you on Google. Plus, the traffic graph is sloping down, and conversions are crawling like a snail. That could be a frustrating experience to have for sure. 

But the truth most website owners overlook is, “a good-looking website is nothing if the search engines can’t crawl, understand, or trust it”. That’s where SEO auditing comes in. It could be your website’s life-saving diagnostic scan as it examines every corner of the site. 

This detailed write-up outlines a brief introduction to technical SEO auditing along with key elements for the same. So, next time you are looking to strengthen your online presence, know that SEO services in Delhi or an SEO audit is the first thing to look at. 

A Brief About Technical SEO Audit 

Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO is the core foundation of a website. It ensures your website is built on a strong and error-free foundation. The main tasks involve analysing everything that can affect the website’s crawling, indexing, speed, structure, and performance.

Technically speaking, an SEO audit refers to the analysis of all the elements that ensure everything is on point and you haven’t missed anything that is hindering the optimisation process. In addition, a thorough audit can even highlight the legitimate technical problems on the website. For instance, it could be hreflang errors, canonical issues, or mixed content problems.

What Numbers Have to Say?

  • 68% of websites lose traffic due to unresolved technical issues.
  • 50% of users leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
  • Regularly optimised websites experience a 32% higher conversion rate due to improved user experience. 
  • A complete audit can lower bounce rates by 50%.
  • Post-audit actions led to a 144% increase in organic revenue within a year.

Key Elements of Site Auditing

Site Auditing

Best SEO services in Delhi start with creating a strong foundation. A technical SEO audit is not an easy task; hence, an expert can only handle them. This section explains the pillars of a complete SEO audit. 

Each of these elements is explained in detail to highlight its purpose and impact on the website. 

  • Usability

The fact that usability isn’t seen as a direct SEO issue, but checking that as well could mark a good start. A bad user experience can result in a higher bounce rate, lower dwell time, and fewer conversions. The best service providers like iSearchSolution check if the navigation is intuitive, if the site is mobile-friendly, if the content is easy to read, and if the CTAs are CTA’s clear. 

Failing to achieve apt usability can affect the conversion rate and propensity of people to link to a site. Given that, a great SEO starts with great UX, because users who stay make Google stay.

  • Duplicate Content Checks

It refers to some blocks of text or entire pages which may appear in more than one place. This can happen either within your website or across the web. So, when this happens, search engines get confused when they see the same content repeated. This hinders search engines from determining which page should rank higher, which page is the original, and which page provides the most value to users. 

As a whole, this confusion ends up in ranking dilution, indexing issues, or even complete invisibility for certain pages.

To practically do this, start by taking unique phrases from the different content pages on the site. Just like this: 

Page 1

URL: XYZ.com/seo-services-in-delhi

Content: “Using the best SEO techniques, iSearchSolution provides intelligent digital solutions. We bring measurable outcomes and years of expertise on board”.

Page 2

URL: XYZ.com/seo-services-in-delhi

Content: “Looking for the best SEO services in Delhi? iSearchSolution provides data-driven SEO solutions and strong ranking improvements.”

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As you can see, both pages target the same keyword and contain similar content. So, when you search for them in Google, make sure those strings are enclosed inside double quotes. Like this: “iSearchSolution offers the best SEO services in Delhi with proven strategies, technical expertise, and measurable results”.

Google gets confused and splits the ranking power between both pages. At the end, neither page performs well and the authority or click-through rate declines.

  • Keyword Health Checks

Keywords are your visibility supporters; if they’re used right, the content will rank; if not, the site will lose ranking clarity. So, try to figure out answers to these questions: Are the right keywords being targeted? Does the site architecture logically flow as per the user search on related keywords, and does one or more pages target the exact same keyword? 

Once you have answered these questions, you will understand that when a keyword “SEO services in Delhi” is targeted for the homepage, but in the blog, you try to rank for the same, the ranking falls.

  • Content Review

Content plays a huge role in the digital space, so it should be valuable, relevant, insightful, and trustworthy. When auditing a site, an expert will make sure the main pages have enough content and that there is proper use of header tags. Despite this, auditing checks thin or underperforming pages, E-E-A-T, topic relevance, CTA clarity, and content freshness.

  • Meta Tag Review

Meta tags tell search engines what the page is about. During an audit, a SEO service provider will check for the “meta robots tag” on the pages of a site. Even a single meta robot tag, like NoIndex or NoFollow, can drastically mess up the search ranking plan.

For your reference, the audit checklist includes a 60-character title, primary keyword inclusion in the title, compelling meta description, and more.

  • Accessibility or Spiderability

When auditing a site, accessibility aims to make a website usable for people with disabilities, and spiderability or crawlability defines how easily search engine bots can access and index content on the site. At the core, if search engines can’t crawl your site, they can’t rank it. 

Auditing checks for crawl errors (5xx, 4xx), Robots.txt restrictions, JavaScript blocking issues, and rendering problems. The best tools to check the spiderability include GSC Crawl Stats and Screaming Frog Rendering.

  • Search Engine Health Check

This determines how search engines perceive your website. It includes a process of examining the site’s current condition to see if it is performing well for search engines and users. 

Let us show you how to do it: search for “site:yourdomain.com” and see how many pages appear in the index. Now you can compare the results to the number of unique pages a site has. Besides this, auditing involves checks on mobile usability, page experience signals, schema errors, and penalty checks. 

  • Title Tag Review

A title tag refers to an HTML element which is responsible for specifying the title of a webpage. In simple words, it is a clickable headline that appears on SERPs, browsers, and social media platforms. Overall, it acts as a webpage’s headline or page title.

  • Internal Linking Checks

Internal links are hyperlinks that connect different pages on the same website. SEO  auditing looks for pages that have excessive links. It even reviews anchor texts, link depth, orphan pages, and broken internal links.

  • Geolocation

The term “geolocation SEO” describes optimising a website so that search engines, such as Google, can determine which geographic area your company is targeting. However, if the concern is primarily about ranking for “pizza parlour” because you own it in Delhi, then make sure the address is on every page. Pro Tip: Apply them preferably in the footer or header.

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This will reinforce the geographical relevance and indicate to Google that your pizza parlour serves in Delhi. However, the same principle applies to other industries as well. If an IT business wants to improve its regional visibility, the local SEO services in Delhi can help it clearly display its location details and city-specific keywords throughout its website. 

  • External Linking

External links build the site’s trustworthiness, which is why SEO services in Delhi check the inbound links to the site. If you are doing it on your own, you can use backlinking tools like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO to collect link data. Other than that, auditing the site even involves checking toxic or spammy links, sudden spikes in backlinks, relevance or authority, and link-building patterns. 

  • Image Alt Tags

Images are often overlooked, but they actually play an important role as they support SEO efforts, accessibility, and ranking. Auditing involves checking if the images have relevant, keyword-rich image alt attributes and filenames.

  • Page Load Time

As the name suggests, page load time evaluates how long a web page takes to load or become fully visible. Auditing can include everything, from examining loading text and images to executing scripts and displaying components. A slow page load time can directly impact user experience, search rankings, bounce rates, and conversions. 

You can say: even a 1-second delay in page load time could end up lowering the conversions by up to 7%. Moreover, it is found that 53% of users will leave a site if a mobile site loads in more than 3 seconds.

The best tools to check page load time are GTmetrix, PSI, and WebPageTest.

  • Sitemap File and Robots.txt File Verification

The robots.txt file is the most straightforward file on any website. These two files control how search engines crawl your site. While auditing, providers of the best SEO services in Delhi verify sitemap submission, no broken links in XML, robots.txt blocking only unimportant pages, and no accidental “Disallow” rules. 

  • URL Check 

URLs should be SEO-friendly. Yes, you heard it right. Auditing ensures the site has clean, short, and descriptive URLs. Do not get confused with descriptive URLs; descriptive means keyword-rich but not keyword-stuffed URLs.

Example of ideal URL is: yourdomain.com/best-seo-services-in-delhi/

Final Words

The world is now interconnected digitally, and search engine optimisation has unquestionably appeared as a cornerstone of digital globalisation. At its core, SEO projects demand forethought and mindful planning to enjoy the best results. 

We recommend readers not to treat the abovementioned pointers as a complete SEO audit checklist; there is still a lot to do. For instance, checking the crawl budget, technical on-page elements, mobile-friendliness, code quality, and more.

In contrast, if you’re interested in expanding a business with local SEO services in India, our audit-first approach to every page on your site is data-driven and results-focused.

FAQs

Q1: How often should you perform a site SEO audit?

A: Well, it should be done every 3–6 months or immediately after a major ranking drop. If the in-house team is not available, then consider getting SEO services in Delhi so that things remain under control. 

Q2: How much do SEO services cost?

A: If you are looking for local SEO services in India, then you might get overwhelmed with the options available. To make that easy, iSearchSolution provides affordable digital solutions across the globe. 

Q3: Will an SEO audit improve my rankings?

A: Absolutely yes! After thoughtful technical fixes and content improvements, results will appear within a week or sometimes even months, not more than that.

Q4: How long does a professional SEO audit take?

A: A deep analysis or SEO audit typically takes 7–14 days, approximately. Moreover, it can depend on a website’s size and technical complexity.

Q5: What makes iSearchSolution’s SEO audits different?

A: Our services are quite different; we combine a mix of manual review and toll-driven insights to catch issues that automated tools often miss.