Businesses need to be well-positioned online to achieve successful web page ranking. Of course, having a website is not enough.
To attract organic traffic and have your website rank higher in search engines, ensure it is done correctly, keeping search engines in mind. This is where an SEO audit comes in, not as an option but as a necessity.
According to the study, organic search is crucial in web traffic, with nearly 53% of website appearances online. An SEO audit will enable you to find areas for improvement and take steps to fix them, boosting your website’s visibility and performance.
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a powerful review of your site’s search engine optimization. This process checks various aspects of your site, like content, technical elements, and backlink profile, to help you pinpoint where you are at your best or weakest. The main objective of the SEO audit is to achieve two goals: your website must be optimized for search engines and users to get more organic traffic & increase your website’s visibility on the Web.
What Tools Do You Need for SEO Audit?
To conduct an effective SEO audit, you’ll need a few essential tools in your arsenal:
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- Semrush or Ahrefs
- Screaming Frog
- PageSpeed Insights
Why Should You Perform SEO Audit?
Conducting an SEO audit is crucial for several reasons:
- Identify technical issues: Through the audit, you can easily highlight some technical issues that may be decreasing the efficiency of your site, such as slow loading time, broken links, and crawl errors.
- Improve user experience: A well-designed structure, content, and site navigation can provide a better user experience, which can decrease bounce rates.
- Boost search engine rankings: By identifying and eliminating SEO issues, you can improve your website’s traffic by increasing the number of users who find it through search engine results pages (SERP).
- Stay ahead of competitors: Frequently reviewing your site will keep you ahead by finding ways to eliminate shortcomings and implement best practices.
Types of SEO audits
SEO audits differ greatly in approach and complexity depending on the size of your website. You should conduct an SEO audit to prioritize it accordingly.
→ SEO content audit
This is about targeting areas that will increase the precision, up-to-dateness, and relevance of the content of the pages you are trying to drive traffic to or improve rank. Google E-E-A-T is the compass for you in this quest. It will be a theme for the further paragraphs of this post. The features of this type of audit will include detecting the chances of optimization to become the featured snippet, and people will also ask for a section and passage rank.
→ On-page SEO audit
On-page SEO concerns how a page’s back-end elements are optimized for search engine crawlers. The start of an on-page SEO audit would consist of filling in missing meta descriptions, meta titles, image alt text, and compression, among other things.
→ Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO audit activities will have to focus on external pages and even other domains that connect to the pages you are working on, which could be the number, quality, distribution, and recency of these links.
→ Technical SEO audit
This SEO audit will include on-page optimizations like image optimizations but will mostly concentrate on performance metrics such as site speed and security. In the technical SEO audit, you can reveal possibilities for dealing with bad or inappropriate code, preventing spam, switching from HTTP to HTTPS, etc.
→ Local SEO audit
Local SEO is a bundle of specific methods to make your business top-ranked in local search. The local SEO audit will be smaller; however, it will still incorporate aspects from all aspects of an SEO audit, namely listing (off-page), content (pages and posts with a local focus), on-page (targeting and inserting keywords), and technical (site speed and security).
How to Do An SEO Audit | 14-Step Checklist
Now that you know why and when types of SEO audits are important, here are the steps to carry out an SEO audit.
#1. Ensure Your Pages are Discoverable
The first step in a professional SEO audit is to confirm that search engines index your website pages. Google Search Console has tools that help identify any issue with indexing, such as pages blocked by robots.txt or tagged with “noindex” meta tags.
- To check if a detailed page is indexed, use the “site:” address-the-search-operator-then- URLs (such as site:yourdomain.com/page – URLs).
- If you come to know about important pages that aren’t indexed, find out the cause of this failure and take corrective measures, including removing the “noindex” tag or updating the robots.txt file.
#2. Establish a Canonical URL
Search engines may find your website in a duplicate format, which may confuse them and cause your site to lose its authority. The solution to this problem is to ensure that only one version of the site is available.
- Make sure you have redirects in place for the same URL but with different variations (with or without “www” or “https”) and redirect them all to the canonical URL.
- If you have similar pages, use the rel=”canonical” tag, which suggests search engines which version is preferred.
Example: If your website is available in two domain versions, such as “http://yourdomain.com” and “https://www.yourdomain.com,” use a 301 redirect to redirect the http version to the https version.
#3. Find Technical SEO Issues
Use a tool like Screaming Frog or Semrush to complete a crawl of your site. This will help you determine technical SEO issues, such as:
- Broken links
- Duplicate content
- Inadequate or absent meta tags
- Incorrect HTTP status codes
Issues should be given priority and dealt with based on their gravity and their effect on the website’s performance.
#4. Ensure Compliance with Google’s Guidelines
Google penalizes websites that ignore its guidelines by taking manual actions, which results in a drop in search ranking. Google Search Console can check for any penalties on your site.
If you find any manual actions:
- Highlight the reason for the action, for instance:
- spammy backlinks
- low-quality content
- Take measures to resolve the problem
- such as disavowing spammy links and improving the content quality
Drop a reconsideration request to Google.
#5. Optimize for Mobile Users
Almost 60% of the traffic through the web is mobile. We should consider a mobile-friendly website for SEO since we all know that SEO is about getting traffic to our website. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is an appropriate tool that will evaluate the mobile-friendliness of your website and discover any problems that might exist.
- Have a responsive design that adjusts your site to be visible on various screen sizes.
- Optimize the images and content for rapid display on mobile devices.
- Ensure touch elements (e.g., buttons, links) are readily available on mobile screens.
#6. Analyze Your Site’s Speed
Site speed is the main factors crucial for user experience (UX) and search engine rankings. Utilize free tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to check your website’s loading speed and spot problematic areas that need improvement.
To enhance your site’s performance:
- Decrease image size by compiling and selecting suitable file types.
- Compress CSS, JavaScript, and HTML by making the code as small as possible.
- Use browser caching, leading to lighter server loads and quicker loading times.
- You may wish to try the Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve content from servers nearer to the user.
#7. Analyze Your Core Web Vitals
The collection of metrics known as Core Web Vitals evaluates how fast your webpage loads, how responsive it is, and how steady it looks. These metrics are essential to a good user experience and reflect your search rankings.
Use Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report to identify and address issues related to:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Improve loading speed
- First Input Delay (FID): Policies emphasize interactivity.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Bring about visual constancy
Example: If the LCP is too high, you must reduce it. You can optimize images, browser caching, and minifying code to improve the loading times.
#8. Analyze Your Internal Links
The internal linking structure with a good design allows the search engines to perceive the structure of your website and spread the link juice on each page of your site. Use internal link analyzing tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs to find ways to improve the existing links or add new ones.
- Make sure that your most essential pages are linked to other relevant pages from other pages.
- Use descriptive and relevant anchor text as the link text for your internal links.
- Fix the broken internal links to improve the site users’ experience and crawlability.
#9. Check Your Organic Traffic
Use your Google Analytics to measure organic search traffic. Identify your top-performing pages, monitor traffic trends, and track key metrics like:
- Bounce rate
- Time on site
- Pages per session
- Conversion rate
This data will help you clarify your audience’s behavior and determine the key points to improve your SEO plan.
#10. Identify Opportunities for Growth Against Your Competitors
It is a basic principle of SEO audit to study a competitive analysis. Semrush or Ahrefs allows you to benchmark your website against your competitors.
- Analyze their keyword positions to discover weak points in your keyword marketing.
- Evaluate their backlink profiles to discover possible ways to get good-quality links.
- Analyze their content strategies to imitate your content production.
#11. Expand Your Keyword Portfolio
Examine the competitors’ ranking for keywords to pinpoint the profitable keywords that are not listed among your keywords. Employ a range of instruments such as Ahrefs or Semrush to identify the under-exploited fields.
- Search first for keywords that have a high concurrence rate and low rivalry.
- Pick the most suitable words for your business goals and a certain audience group.
- Include these keywords in the content strategy and on-page optimization to guide your SEO plan.
#12. Find Missed Backlink Opportunities
High-quality backlinks remain one of the most significant aspects of your website’s ranking and the search engine itself. Monitor your competitors’ backlink profiles and determine what backlinks you should get from other high-quality websites.
- Search your competitors’ sites with links to their sites but not yours.
- Build a strategy for acquiring such links through creative content, outreach, or other methods.
- Make the best efforts to get links from relevant and authoritative sites in your niche.
#13. Audit and Improve Your Top Pages
Identify your website’s key high-performing pages and establish them specifically by their organic traffic and conversion ability. Conduct this analysis to discover what makes these pages successful and search for opportunities to improve them.
- Make a few content changes to keep the tone new, important, and thorough.
- Improve the user experience by increasing the website’s navigability, readability, and visual interest.
- Check that all these pages are well-linked internally to keep and increase their search ranking.
#14. Monitor Your Rankings
Check SEO metrics to keep tabs on your progress and look for spots where changes may be required. Use SEO audit tools, and rank-tracking software to measure your:
- Organic traffic growth
- Keyword rankings
- Backlink profile development
- Conversion rates
Conclusion
Conducting an SEO audit properly is one of the main things you must do to ensure your site is optimized for search engines (like Google) and users. This 14-step guide lets you discover what’s wrong with your site and correct the technical errors.
Thus, more successful content and a better user experience can be achieved, leading to higher search engine visibility. Recall that SEO is a continuous process; therefore, a regular site audit will remove the hindrances, and you can stay forward of the competition.
AlgoSaga digital marketing agency comprehends a complete picture of SEO audit, which is essential for organic traffic and online visibility. Contact us now to know how we can help ensure your site becomes the next big thing.