How To Perform An SEO Audit For Free in 11 Easy Steps [Ultimate Guide For Beginners]
SEO audits do not have to feel daunting.
Don’t let SEO tools overwhelm you with hundreds of warning signs, and don’t let dodgy SEO professionals tell you that your site will go down if you don’t fix a meta tag.
Today I’ll show you how you can get started on your SEO journey – all without spending a penny.
You just need a couple of hours, an internet connection, and a laptop or a computer.
Table Of Contents
What Is An SEO Audit?
An SEO audit involves analyzing a website for opportunities that will help you improve performance on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, and more.
During the audit your aim is to find technical elements, content, and link-related issues that are potentially hindering performance on these search engines.
So, let’s get started.
How To Perform Your First SEO Audit For Free
#1 Choose An SEO Crawler
You need an SEO crawler, these can come in the form of desktop or cloud-based. An SEO crawler will visit each and every page of your website, and then give you information about that page.
Both desktop and cloud-based crawlers have their pros and cons, but they should only be weighed up once you’re at a bit more of an advanced stage.
If you’re new to SEO then what matters to you is learning and getting familiar with running crawls, so let’s look at some crawlers.
Screaming Frog is a desktop-based crawler and the free version lets you analyze 500 pages, once complete the file will be saved on your desktop
If you’re looking for a cloud-based crawler then I recommend OnCrawl.
OnCrawl is generous enough to offer you a 14-day free trial (no credit card required) letting you crawl up to 1000 pages.
If you want a third option, then you can also check out Content King. They’re also kind enough to let you get started with a free trial (no credit card required).
For the purposes of our free SEO audit, I’ll be using Screaming Frog – so go ahead and download and install the free version.
#2 Review Your Robots.txt File
This is very important. A robots.txt file tells crawlers what URLs can be accessed on your site, it’s mainly used to avoid overloading your website with requests.
Google says that it’s not to be used to keep a website out of Google – however, we will see later on that Adidas does use it to manage the way pages are crawled, and to keep certain pages out of Google’s index.
- You should make sure that your robots.txt file loads properly, if it doesn’t then Google may not crawl your website – which means your website won’t show up for searches.
- You also want to make sure that your file contains a link to your XML Sitemap. Adidas has created the following:
You can explore the full Adidas Robots file here.
If your website is missing one you can learn more about how to create a Robots.txt file here.
We’ll talk more about allowing and disallowing later on in this guide.
#3 Check Your Index Status
Head over to Google search and type in site://yourwebsitename.com. You’ll be able to see how many pages are currently found by Google.
Does this match up to the number of pages you have published? For Adidas we can see that Google has returned 92,500 results.
You want to ensure that your pages do not contain a no-index tag.
No index means that you do not want that page to show up on Google or other search engines.
Of course, there might be times when you really don’t want a page to show up, but look out for key pages containing a no-index tag.
We’re going to crawl Adidas next, and our crawler will tell us about pages that contain a no-index tag.
If you’ve set up Google Search Console, then you can also see no indexed pages in that dashboard.
#4 Crawl Your Website
We’ll be crawling 500 pages of the Canadian website of Adidas.
Once you’ve downloaded and installed Screaming Frog, open the application, at the top you’ll see an area where you can enter a website.
Go ahead and enter your website – in this case, it’s www.adidas.ca
Press start and wait for your crawl to finish.
#5 Review Response Codes
If you’re new to SEO, you’re probably unaware of technical errors, so we’ll start with one of the basics – response codes – and then get into issues that are a little more advanced.
- 1xx status codes are informational codes.
- 2xx codes are success codes.
- 3xx redirection codes are redirects.
- 4xx are any codes that fail to load on the client side or client error codes.
- 5xx are any codes that fail to load due to a server error.
The codes we are really looking for here are 404s. If you see 404s, then you need to address them (they affect everything from the way Google crawls your website to user experience).
You can view response codes by clicking on the response codes tab (at the top), or clicking on the overview tab on the right-hand side.
My preference is to go into the response codes tab and then sort status codes from highest to lowest.
In our crawl of 500 pages, we can see that Adidas has 1 404 page.
Example:
https://adidas.ca/andre_saraova-kids is returning a 404 error.
A good course of action would be to set up a 301 redirect to https://www.adidas.ca/en/kids.
In our crawl we did not come across any 302 response codes (302 response codes are temporary redirects), in the event that we did then we would want to review the redirect and see if it makes sense to make the redirection permanent.
A.K.A converting the 302 into a 301 redirect.
If you have set up Google Search Console, then you can also find 404 pages in there – click on indexing on the left-hand side, and then you’ll be able to see a list of issues.
#6 Review Internal Links For Non-200 Response Codes
If you have 301s, 302s, or 404s you want to make sure that good pages do not link to them.
Fixing internal links to redirects
https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-outlet-shoes returns a 301 response code. This page redirects to https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-shoes-outlet.
But wait, why is this important?
From a user and Googlebot perspective they are landing on page X and then being redirected to page Y, wasting unnecessary time.
So how do we fix this?
Using the Inlinks tab in Screaming Frog we can see that https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-outlet-shoes has 50+ internal links – some of these are from key pages such as the homepage and other category pages.
Updating each and every link is going to be a time-consuming process.
However, if we scroll to the right we can see what anchor text is used to create the internal link.
In the case of the Women Outlet Shoes it’s “shoes”.
Now it’s become a lot easier to find where this internal link is.
We just need to go on one of the pages that links to https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-outlet-shoes and look for a place where “shoes” is mentioned and linked to.
We found it. The navigation.
It’s under “extra 50% off outlet” > “shoes”.
To fix this issue we’ll simply swap out the link from https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-outlet-shoes to https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-shoes-outlet
Fixing internal links to 4XX status codes:
Once we’ve analyzed redirects that have received internal links, we want to see if our 404 pages receive internal links.
It makes no sense to send Google, Bing, or potential customers to a broken page.
Using the same method as above, we can see that https://adidas.ca/andre_saraova-kids has 50+ internal links with the anchor text Andrè Saraova.
Once again, it’s in the navigation.
In this case, it makes sense to remove this link from the navigation.
The URL is returning a 404 error, and previously we’ve already decided to redirect the page to the kids category.
If more 404s were present, then it would make sense to update their destination so that the user and Googlebot, Bingbot, Yandexbot or any other search engine crawler would end up on a 200 response code page.
#7 Look For Redirect Chains
Redirect chains look something like this:
- Page A goes to Page B
- Page B goes to Page C
- Page C goes to Page D
- Page D goes to Page E
- Finally, the chain ends and you are on page E.
The user has had to wait for their browser to load all of the redirects, and Googlebot has been sent on a long journey.
To fix redirect chains we would update the redirect for each URL so that it goes directly to our destination.
Example:
- Page A would go directly to Page E.
- Page B would go directly to Page E
- Page C would go directly to Page E.
In Screaming Frog you can easily find redirect chains.
Click ‘Reports > Redirects > Redirect Chains’ To View Chains & Loops.
If there are any, an Excel spreadsheet will be generated.
For Adidas Canada there is 1.
http://adidas.ca/ is sent to https://www.adidas.ca/ which is then sent to https://www.adidas.ca/en/.
#8 Review Canonical Tags
“Review a canonawhatt”.
If you’re new to SEO this is where you might be wanting to stop reading, but don’t be afraid.
This section might be a little long but it’s really important.
- Imagine Homer Simpson is wearing a t-shirt that tells people he is Homer Simpson.
- Imagine Homer Simpson has 3 clones.
- All of the clones are wearing a t-shirt that is pointing to the real Homer Simpson.
That’s how canonical tags work.
A canonical tag (rel=canonical), is a way of telling Google and other search engines that a specific URL is the master copy of a page.
The tag tells search engines which version of a page you want to appear in the search results.
If a page does not have another page to point to, then it’s best practice to implement a canonical tag that is self-referencing (points to itself [see my original Homer Simpson reference].
Canonical tags prevent problems caused by duplicate content, so now let’s review Adidas.
How To Find Issues With Canonical Tags
In Screaming Frog navigation click on “Canonicals”, and then on the right-hand side you will see “Overview”.
We can see that no page has a missing tag, and no page has multiple tags – this is good.
Of course, if pages had missing canonical tags then we would update them to be self-referencing or point to their closest page, like the example below.
Our next step is to review the “canonicalised” URLs to see if the tag is necessary.
Let’s look at: https://www.adidas.ca/en/adizero-running
- The adizero-running page has a canonical tag that points to https://www.adidas.ca/en/adizero.
- This page also has a robots tag of index, follow.
- This means that when google bot visits the page it’s being told that adizero is the master.
If we had access to Google Search Console, we would be able to “inspect” both URLs to see what’s going on, and to see if Google is obeying our commands.
We’d also be able to see how much traffic and what keywords each page is ranking for.
But we don’t.
So I’ll use another SEO tool to cross-check. I would normally use SEMRush or Ahrefs, but they are both expensive tools, so let’s try Ubersuggest.
(For your SEO Audit I strongly recommend that you use Google Search Console, if you don’t have access or are completing an audit to apply for a job, or just taking on SEO as an extra role then it might be worth subscribing for a month to one of the tools).
Ubersuggest gives you 3 free daily searches.
Once you’ve created an account go to Traffic Estimation > Traffic Overview.
Plug in your URL and make sure you’ve selected your chosen country, in this case it’s Canada.
After analyzing both URLs I can see that /adizero-running/ does not rank for any keywords, while /adizero/ does. In this case, there is not an issue with our canonical tag.
Now analyze the rest of your pages… (but first carry on reading).
During your analysis you might find that the canonical and master are both ranking for keywords and generating content.
So now what… we have to manage duplicate content.
How To Manage Duplicate Content
A canonical tag is one way to manage duplicate content – but we are here because we’re talking about knowing what to do if a canonical tag fails.
You need to understand why the canonicalized page is getting traffic – unfortunately, there could be lots of reasons.
Such as:
- Server misconfigurations – your website having a www and non www version, to your website having a HTTP and HTTPS version.
- URLs having a trailing slash and no trailing slash.
- Lots of parameters (and Adidas has a lot) for example https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-jackets?v_size_en_ca=one_size
Unless your duplicate content is caused by parameters and filtering, one of the best ways to fix duplicate content is by 301 redirecting from the non-preferred version of your page to the one you prefer.
For example if you have a server misconfiguration you need to make sure either your www or non www is 301 redirecting to the version you want the world to see.
From our Adidas crawl even though Google is respecting the canonical tag for Adizero, I don’t know why they have the adizero-running page.
This can be 301 redirected to /adizero/.
If our duplicate content was caused by parameters and filters then we would need to find another solution.
How To Manage Duplicate Content Caused By Filters and Sorting
One of the best methods is a canonical tag, but there is one more thing you can do.
That’s work on your Robots.txt (remember we talked about it earlier).
For example on https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-jackets you can sort and filter by a range of options.
https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-jackets?v_size_en_ca=one_size
In the Adidas Robots.txt they are disallowing Googlebot from crawling that page. They have implemented the following in their Robots.txt
Disallow: /*?*v_size*
So disallowing Google from crawling any page with a size filter, coupled with implementing a canonical tag on:
- https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-jackets?v_size_en_ca=one_size that points to:
- https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-jackets
Solves Adidas’ issue of duplicate content. If you have an e-commerce store then this approach could be entirely suitable for your store.
#9 Keyword Targeting
You want to make sure your pages target the correct words, you need to make sure all of your on-page elements cater to the correct keywords.
That includes:
- The URL
- Title Tag
- Meta Description
- H1 and other Headers
- On-page Content
You also want to take into account the language of the country you’re in.
For example, in the UK “trainers” has three times the search volume when compared to “sneakers”. In Canada this is the opposite, sneakers have much higher search volume.
So it would make sense to target the word “trainers” in the UK, whereas it would make sense to target “sneakers” in Canada.
URL Keyword Targeting
Ensure that your URLs are short, to the point and targeting a keyword.
For example, we know that the URL https://www.adidas.ca/en/women-golf-shoes is going to be about women’s golf shoes.
Page Title Best Practices
Include a relevant keyword, and ensure that your page title is less than 60 characters.
Shorts for Men | adidas Canada is a good page title, as is Golf Shoes for Women | adidas Canada
Duplicate Page Titles
Click into the page titles tab to explore issues.
For Adidas Canada there are 45 duplicate page titles.
These are managed with canonical tags and robots.txt, so they are not causing issues.
In the event that they were causing issues, then we would want to solve this problem via our duplicate content strategy presented above.
Missing Page Titles
This one is easy, if you have a missing page title then you need to add a relevant title to the page.
Over 60 Characters
Long page titles will get cut off mobile devices, try and keep your titles below 60 characters.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions should be less than 160 characters, these are more for click-through as the user will read these on the search engine results page.
This is a good meta description:
Find the best deals on adidas athletic wear & exercise equipment online at adidas Canada outlet. Free shipping over $50 and free returns!
Try and make it enticing enough so that the user will click through.
H1 and Other Headers
You should only use 1 H1 per page – and in doing so make sure that it’s targeting a relevant keyword.
For example on the Men-Bags page the H1 is MEN · BAGS.
A better H1 would be Men’s Bags.
Simon’s Canada returned the number 1 result for “Mens Bags”, and that is their H1.
Throughout your content you should also make sure of other headers – you can have multiple H2s. H3s and H4s.
Headers help separate your content and add relevancy to your page, for example a relevant H2 might be “Shop Men’s Bags for Sale”.
H2s, H3s and H4s are especially important when you create long form content such as blog articles.
On-Page Content
Never stuff keywords in your content for the sake of including the keyword. Always try to sound natural.
Example, how many times have I used the word SEO audit in the article? Not much right. I included it in the URL, H1, H2 and sprinkled it a couple of times where relevant.
Google rewards content that is created for users and not search engines. This information comes directly from Google, and with years of expertise in SEO I can confirm that it’s true.
You should evaluate the content on your pages vs the competition – for example, if all results on page 1 contain 2000+ words of in depth content, you are probably not likely to rank if your content only contains 300 words.
Let’s take a look at the page: https://www.adidas.ca/en/men-gift_guide
When I search “men’s gift guide” all of the results are magazines – this tells me it will be hard, near enough impossible for Adidas to rank for this keyword on page 1.
But, we can try. The page requires some drastic changes.
https://searchvolume.io/ is a tool that gives you some free searches, the downside is the volume is from the USA, however we can still use it to judge trends.
- Men’s gift guide = 480 searches
- Gift ideas for men = 40,500
- Gifts for men = 90,500
From this we can now make a few decisions.
Recommended URL: /gifts-for-men
Recommended Page Title: 50 Best Gifts For Men 2022 | adidas Canada
Recommended Meta Description: Explore some of the best gift ideas for men this holiday season. From cool styles to everyday essentials – use code HOLIDAY for 50% off select styles.
Recommended H1: 50 Best Gifts For Men 2022
For the on-page content, I can see that all of the magazines contain list based content.
Adidas have gone for a product category style page, I would convert this into a list of 50 products. These could be 50 of their top selling, or products they want to shift inventory for.
As well as this I would provide a brief introduction in the region of 150 – 200 words that talks about holiday gifting for men. This introduction would also provide the opportunity to link to other relevant sections of Adidas’s website.
Following the introduction I would proceed to list 50 products.
The page would now better match the user’s search intent and is more likely to rank for the keyword, based on the type of results that are appearing in the SERPs.
#10 Off-Page SEO
Pages with high-quality backlinks generally rank better than those without.
The process of acquiring backlinks is called link building and it can be a complicated process, if done wrong you risk the wrath of a Google penalty. That’s why I’m not going to show you how to link build, instead I’m going to show you how to compare your website vs your competition.
Off-page SEO deserves its own article but you should be aware of a few metrics, these are:
- Domain Authority (DA)
- Domain Rating (DR)
- Authority Score (AS)
These are all made-up metrics by SEO tools. However, they can give you an idea of where your website stands.
Keeping in line of only recommending free tools, you can view Domain Authority here. Moz gives you 3 free searches per day.
Simply enter your website URL and you’ll receive a score.
On this link we can see the metrics for Adidas. You should compare your website to a few key competitors to see where you stand.
#11 Review Your XML Sitemap
XML sitemaps contain a list of URLs that you want Google to crawl, it acts as a guide and tells search engines what content is available and how to get there. Here are some common locations:
- https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
- https://www.youtwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml
- https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap1.xml
You want to make sure your sitemap contains URLs that return a 200 status code.
You should find your XML sitemap, crawl it using a crawler and then update the URLs.
Final Word: SEO Doesn’t Stop Here
This was just an introduction into the world of SEO, and hopefully, you found this guide useful. If you want to watch a video, then I also have that created for you!
It’s by no means exhaustive, but if you’ve never completed an audit before, or you’re just getting started with SEO it’s a means to learn more about how you can make the most out of the free tools available.
SEO doesn’t have to be expensive and you can get started for free!
If you have questions, comments, or feedback, or would like to connect then reach out to me on LinkedIn.
SEO focused digital marketer with over a decade of experience driving organic growth. Successfully implemented SEO strategies for some of the world’s most loved enterprise brands across automotive, ecommerce, FMCG, retail, finance, and B2B SAAS industries. Harpreet holds a BA in Geography from the University of Leicester and a MSc in International Management from King's College London.