Is your website struggling to rank in search engines despite your best efforts?
Losing valuable organic traffic to competitors can mean a loss of business opportunities. The solution? Conducting a search engine optimization (SEO) audit of your website.
An SEO audit is a detailed evaluation of a website’s performance in search engines. It examines on-page elements, technical aspects, and off-page factors like backlinks to identify issues and opportunities for improving search rankings and organic traffic. The audit helps optimize a site for better visibility and user experience.
You can perform your website's SEO audit using SEO tools and make positive changes that will shoot your website up the rankings.
SEO audits should be run regularly. Consider them like service visits to your mechanic. They are necessary to ensure that everything is running smoothly. If there is an issue, you can tweak and fix it before it impacts your rankings.
Regular audits are especially critical with Google's frequent algorithm updates, which can impact your site’s visibility overnight if you're not prepared.
In this comprehensive guide, you'll learn step-by-step how to conduct an SEO audit.
A good SEO audit goes deep into all of the components that make up your SEO marketing efforts. These can include status codes, meta tags, sitemaps, page speed, crawlability, your content, the structure of your content, and how your site is optimized for mobile. It gives you insights into your marketplace to identify where you are missing out.
In total, there could be dozens of components that can be analyzed and checked for performance. All of that information can then be distilled into an audit document that you and your digital marketing team can then analyze to create actionable and relevant recommendations to improve the performance of your website.
However, it all boils down to three components: on-site SEO, off-site SEO, and content strategy.
If you are not well-versed in SEO or are hard-pressed for time, you can hire SEO services to do it for you. Consider your needs before hiring an SEO company.
Performing a thorough SEO audit requires a suite of specialized tools to gather data, analyze performance, and identify optimization opportunities. Here are some free and paid SEO tools you can make use of:
When an agency or marketing team conducts an audit, they tend to follow an SEO audit checklist to make sure that everything is covered and accounted for. In general, an audit should follow a thorough step-by-step process.
Perhaps the most important step for an SEO audit is the first one. Doing a crawl of your website can help identify several issues with your website. There are several SEO audit tools out there that you can use to crawl your website for you, which can save you a lot of time. Simply put in your site’s URL and let the tool do the work. It will run through your site the same way that the algorithms for Google or other search engines would and assess your site in the same way.
Once it’s finished, you will be given a breakdown of several components of your website to help identify problems. These problems could include inadequate word counts for content, missing internal links, duplication in content, and too many redirects. These are all factors that can harm your search engine performance. Once you get this data, you can make changes to your site to correct those issues.
For example, you can download the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool and conduct a site crawl and audit for up to 500 URLs of your website for free.
Screenshot from Screaming Frog
Alternatively, you can use the Ahrefs or SEMrush site audit tool too.
Besides using a tool, you can also search your website yourself using your preferred target keywords. Count up the number of your pages that rank for those search results and assess where they appear. Are they at or near the top? This will give you a general overview of how your site is performing.
This is also how you can check if your site is indexing properly. If you do a search for your website’s primary URL, you can see how many of your pages are being indexed by search engines. If you don’t see one of your pages, you can enter that specific URL to see if it comes up.
If a page isn't indexing, there could be a problem with the meta robots tag. This tag instructs search engines how to treat the page's content for indexing. If it is broken or used improperly, your page will not be indexed.
In addition, also check for indexing issues directly from Google Search Console from the Pages tab under Indexing. It will list the pages that weren't indexed and provide the reason. For example, you might have added a robots.txt file or a noindex tag to some pages by mistake. Some pages might need to be redirected properly to the new content.
The key thing to remember when you are creating an SEO strategy is that nothing you do is in a vacuum. Yes, you have to make improvements to your site and your other digital marketing, but remember, your competitors are probably doing the same things. Search engine rankings are a comparison of how websites are doing within a certain sector. You can’t guarantee that you will get to the very top position for all of your keywords, but by following best practices, you can maximize your results.
Do a Google search for your site using your keywords and see where it ranks. Your goal should be to get to the first page. The more pages back you are, the less likely that searchers are going to click through and find you. If you are on the first page, then you are dramatically increasing your exposure to new site visitors and customers. Aim for that, and good things will happen.
An on-page SEO check will help to make sure that the elements you need to optimize your website are in place and performing as they should. This involves analyzing all of the content of your page, as well as the source code. If your site is properly optimized, then it will provide search engines with the information they need to index your site accurately. The content will be relevant to what users are looking for so that users will want to engage with it, and it will help search engines identify your page as one with authority.
This means that you have high-value keywords strategically placed in your high-quality content in your posts and pages.
While keywords are not as valuable as they used to be as search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated, they are still a key component of any SEO strategy. What is becoming more important is how relevant content is. It must fulfill the need that users are searching for. This means that not only should your keywords be in place, but the content surrounding those keywords must also be useful, readable, and engaging for readers.
Your on-page SEO check will also ensure that your site is running as it should, which means that the user experience is as good as it can be. This includes analyzing your web page's titles, meta descriptions, headers, image sizes, alt tags, content length, URL structure, internal and external links, anchor texts for links, and more.
You may be using ads for revenue, images, videos, and the like for interactive content, but if there are too many and they interfere with your site's usability, you are losing out on more than you are gaining.
Make sure to test your site on mobile devices as well. If it is not as easy to navigate on a phone, if not more so, then you need to make big changes.
Part of producing relevant and trustworthy content is making sure it is original, and duplication doesn’t have to be from other sites, either. While having duplicate content is not against Google's spam policies, it can be damaging to your SEO efforts as it can cause a bad user experience or keyword cannibalization.
If a search engine finds that your site has duplicate content between its pages, it will appear that you are trying to stuff your site without truly providing useful information. Sometimes, businesses don't even realize that they have duplicate content, so it’s important to check your site thoroughly with a content audit.
Delete or rewrite anything that might be deemed as a duplication. Or specify a canonical (preferred) URL to the search engine as the preferred version from a set of duplicate pages.
Do not simply regurgitate or copy information from your pages to fill space. Instead, take the time to create engaging, original content throughout your site. Search engine algorithms will recognize those efforts and reward you accordingly.
Also, use a site search for your preferred keywords to find potential keyword cannibalization. You can use tools like Ahrefs that provide features to find such instances.
It may shock you how fast users will click away from a page that doesn’t load quickly enough. You might think you have a minute or even thirty seconds, but unfortunately, you don’t. In fact, in as little as two to three seconds, a user will decide that waiting for your page to load just isn’t worth it. If your site is loading too slowly, you are no doubt losing out on eyeballs.
Use Google's PageSpeed Insights tool to check your site speed.
Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights
Enter your URL and use the diagnosis to identify issues and fix them. Check all of the elements that contribute to page load speed. This means that your images and videos should be smaller, and you should be hosted by an adequately fast server for your purposes. If not, then make those changes right away.
Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights
You can also check the Core Web Vitals on GSC to identify potential issues related to page loading performance.
A backlink audit examines the links that are pointing to your site. In effect, you are testing them for their own authority and trustworthiness. If the sites that are linking to you are not respected by search engine algorithms, then your site will be less respected as well.
You want the pages pointing to you to rank well in their own right and that have good domain authority. If there are some backlinks from sites that are no longer updated regularly or that do not have related content to yours, then they are most likely bringing your site down. The best backlinks are those that have exact or close to matching anchor tags to yours on their pages.
Use Ahrefs or SEMrush backlink analysis tools to perform a backlink audit and formulate your link-building strategy accordingly.
Organic search traffic is any traffic to your site that gets through without the use of paid ads. This is essentially users who visit through search engines. Organic traffic is much more likely to have a better percentage of conversions since those visitors are theoretically motivated to consume your content. They would have searched for something related to what you have on your website. There are several web tools that you can use to monitor your organic traffic to get a sense of how your SEO efforts are working.
For a start, use GSC to find your top pages based on impressions and clicks under the Search Results tab. Use this to track any spikes or drops in traffic. Also, find out the queries you rank for and keep an eye on the average position. You can try to optimize the page to improve its average position and clicks.
Once you have this information, you can filter out those who came via certain search terms. This will help you identify which keywords are working and which ones aren’t. You can filter for those who came by simply searching your business name as well. Growing your business means finding new customers, and organic traffic that came to your site without googling your name is most likely new to your business. You can tailor your marketing efforts around those keywords that are getting you the most efficient hits.
User experience is important when it comes to SEO. If there is anything on your site that does not provide an easy and engaging experience, people will click away quickly. Broken links are frustrating for web users and can make your page look neglected and unprofessional.
Any link that leads to an error, such as a 404, is considered a broken link. Make sure that you are checking all of the links on your website, both internal and external, to ensure that they lead to the right content and that content exists.
Performing an SEO audit is primarily about finding gaps and opportunities. When your audit is finished, you will see just where the weaknesses are in your SEO strategy. It might be that there are keywords that you are not using or that your page speeds are lacking.
The best thing is that fixing every gap or issue you find will only lead to better results. Every gap and issue is an opportunity to improve. All you have to do is run an SEO audit and properly analyze the results to get your website performing as you need it to find success.
When planning an SEO audit, make sure that it is comprehensive. You should touch on at least all of the components mentioned above and any more that might affect your search engine rankings. This can give you a high-level view of where you are at with your SEO and where you can go.
While it should be comprehensive, you also want the results to be simple to understand. That way, not only will you comprehend it, but you can present it to other staff members in a clear and concise way. You and your marketing team should be able to draw a link between what your audit finds and your website’s SEO performance.
Inevitably, an SEO website audit will yield recommendations to make your digital marketing efforts better. You must have a clear strategy to achieve the recommendations. Not only that, but they should be prioritized and take into account the amount of work and budget that they will require. There is little point in running an SEO audit if you do not or cannot take action on the results that you analyze. It is only by using the best practices as part of a comprehensive SEO strategy that you can get the measurable results that you are looking for.
You should never feel like you are rushing an SEO audit. You need to be patient and take the time to examine every aspect of your online presence to get a sense of how everything is performing. In some cases, it can take up to 6 weeks to perform an audit for a large website. The very minimum amount of time you should expect to spend on an audit is 2 weeks. It’s crucial that you are thorough since you do not want to make changes to your website without the proper data to back up the reason for those changes.
Here’s a Free SEO audit checklist that you can use to audit your website. This checklist covers key areas like on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO and helps ensure your site is optimized for search engines. Use this to find SEO issues and fix them.
Things change quickly in the digital marketing world, and your SEO strategy needs to keep up if you want to keep up with your competitors. Performing an SEO audit is the perfect way to assess how your website is ranking and identify what you need to do to get it on the path to page one.
Looking for more? Master technical SEO to avoid the most common mistakes and improve your search visibility.
This article was originally published in 2020 and has been updated with new information.
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