When starting a new SEO project or taking a fresh look at an existing project, it can be hard to know where to start. That's why we've decided to share our in-house checklist to save you the trouble of making your own and to help you avoid missing the important aspects along the way.

If you're just getting started with your audit then you'll want to stop here and begin with the first installation of this checklist.

That first resource focuses on the indexing of pages, XML sitemaps, identifying duplicate content, page load time, your site's content and a large collection of on-page optimization strategies. It's something you can't afford to miss!

Now, if you've already gone through part one of the checklist then congratulations and please carry on...

Site Architecture

1. Click Depth

• How many clicks is the majority of the important content from the home page?
• What's the maximum depth of content in clicks from the home page?

2. Content Structure

• How many categories are there?
• How many sub-categories are there?
• How many product or detail pages are there? Compare to number of indexed pages earlier and review what percentage of products are indexed.
• We also like to take a look at the top level view of the website using Screaming Frog's Crawl Visualization Tool. Study the clusters of URLs which typically represent categories and ask yourself how would a search engine interpret the layout of the site in regards to topics? We often find issues when looking at this point of view due to the navigation structure the site uses.

  

  These vis...