{"id":11668,"date":"2012-03-08T15:50:08","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T15:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/?post_type=guides&#038;p=11668"},"modified":"2023-03-03T12:08:13","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T12:08:13","slug":"seo-strategy-audit-checklist","status":"publish","type":"guides","link":"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/","title":{"rendered":"SEO strategy audit checklist"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"product-benefits\" class=\"product-info\">\n<h3>How will this checklist help me and my business?<\/h3>\n<p>The first step in any successful strategy is to audit your current activities against best practices. By looking at a full list of activities, and how they should be carried out, you can score yourself from 'market leader' down through to 'improvements needed'. After all, you can't create a plan to improve if you don't know how well you're doing right now.<\/p>\n<p>This SEO strategy audit checklist gives you a comprehensive list of activities to grade your organization against. You can set tasks as priorities and designate responsible workers inside your company against them so, once completed, you have a full list of further actions that your team can work from. By completing this checklist every three\/six months, you'll be able to measure how your SEO efforts have improved and prove return on investment for multiple areas of work from your digital marketing team.<\/p>\n<h3>What's included in the SEO strategy audit<\/h3>\n<p>We've made the strategy audit easy to scan so you can complete a quick review by using the 50 questions included to assess the effectiveness of your SEO in these categories:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Step 1 \u2013 Goals and KPIs:<\/strong> Auditing value of current SEO and identifying goals<\/li>\n<li><strong>Step 2 \u2013 Technical SEO:<\/strong> Improve crawling and indexing for maximum visibility<\/li>\n<li><strong>Step 3 \u2013 On-page optimization:<\/strong> Review markup and copy against best practices<\/li>\n<li><strong>Step 4 \u2013 Content strategy:<\/strong> Managing the right type of content to attract links and visitors<\/li>\n<li><strong>Step 5 \u2013 Link-building:<\/strong> Ideas to gain more quality links and review and disavow\u00a0poor quality links<\/li>\n<li><strong>Step 6 \u2013 Internal linking:<\/strong> Often a missed opportunity to improve SEO<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We try to keep the jargon and buzzwords to a minimum, but they're inevitable with SEO, so we recommend using this spreadsheet checklist alongside our interactive <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/learning-paths\/search-engine-optimization-seo\/\">SEO Learning Path<\/a> if you need help understanding concepts or are looking for further optimization tips.<\/p>\n<h3>Who is the SEO audit checklist for?<\/h3>\n<p>Details are important within SEO since there are so many factors Google uses to inform its search rankings. It's easy to get lost and miss the important factors for success.<\/p>\n<p>The 'use-case' for this audit is for:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Consultants - <\/strong>Who can use the spreadsheet as a detailed checklist and then make prioritized recommendations for improvement.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Agency or in-house SEO specialist - <\/strong>Who will also benefit from the using the checklist to identify more detailed areas to improve. This can be useful for getting buy-in to an SEO strategy from higher levels management.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/managing-seo-checklist\/\">SEO playbook<\/a> gives a higher-level checklist for reviewing improvements to your SEO. You can also use our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/learning-paths\/search-engine-optimization-seo\/\">SEO Learning Path<\/a> to find useful modules to upskill your SEO knowledge and tactics.<\/p>\n<h3>Latest updates<\/h3>\n<p>This checklist has been updated with brand new recommendations and instructions for you to follow. The priority section of the audit has been edited to improve automatic colour formatting, meaning you can score all of your activities and quickly see what needs actioning immediately (P1 in green), over the next six months (P2 in red), and in the long term (P3 in blue). The resources section has also been updated to include links through to our latest resources.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How will this checklist help me and my business? The first step in any successful strategy is to audit your current activities against best practices. By looking at a full list of activities, and how they should be carried out, &hellip;..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":129562,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_glsr_average":0,"_glsr_ranking":0,"_glsr_reviews":0,"footnotes":""},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>SEO strategy audit checklist | Smart Insights<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Easily audit your SEO strategy to assess what you need to work on with our helpful checklist covering 50 important SEO questions.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"SEO strategy audit checklist | Smart Insights\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Easily audit your SEO strategy to assess what you need to work on with our helpful checklist covering 50 important SEO questions.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Smart Insights\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/smartinsights\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2023-03-03T12:08:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"595\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"839\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@smartinsights\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/\",\"name\":\"SEO strategy audit checklist | Smart Insights\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2012-03-08T15:50:08+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2023-03-03T12:08:13+00:00\",\"description\":\"Easily audit your SEO strategy to assess what you need to work on with our helpful checklist covering 50 important SEO questions.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist.jpg\",\"width\":595,\"height\":839,\"caption\":\"seo-strategy-audit-checklist\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/seo-strategy-audit-checklist\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Guides\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/guides\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":3,\"name\":\"SEO strategy audit checklist\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/\",\"name\":\"Smart Insights\",\"description\":\"Digital Marketing &gt; 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