What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit examines various factors that could affect your website’s ability to rank on SERPs. It gives you insights into your website, traffic, and individual pages.
Doing an SEO audit helps you fix and optimize your website for higher rankings on search results. You can identify technical SEO issues, On-page and off-page SEO issues, structural issues, user experience issues, and content gaps.
How do I do an SEO audit?
The SEO audit provides you with a big picture of your website. It, therefore, needs to help you see issues affecting your site, goals, and revenue.
You can do the SEO audit manually to check what needs fixing, but using SEO audit tools can give you an in depth look at your site. It can make sure you don’t miss anything.
What should be in an SEO audit?
For your SEO audit, you will need first to check whether Google has penalized your website. Follow this with an audit of its appearance, your technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and competitor and keyword research.
Penalties affect your rankings. If you find one, check the date of the penalty, and why it happened. Then work to rectify and remove it.
You can use the Google Console to check for penalties or see if a recent Google update has affected your rankings.
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Checking whether visitors to your site can easily access your website.
Checking that your robots.txt files and meta tags are okay. Ensure there are no restrictions to website access. Mistakes in robots.txt can cause serious indexing issues
Confirming that you’ve registered your website on Bing webmaster tools and Google search console. Google console will have information like the number of pages on your website. You can also see keywords you rank for keywords that bring traffic, mobile usability issues, indexing issues, etc.
Confirming that you have one preferred domain to avoid duplicate content issues. Set your canonical URL right so that only one version of your site is browsable.
Activating your XML sitemap and ensuring it’s working perfectly. Users should easily navigate from one page to the next on your website.
Enabling structured data for your homepage, articles, products, and XML sitemap. Doing this ensures that Google can understand the context and meaning of content on the site. Structured data helps Google enhance its presentation of search results.
Setting up a canonical URL to ensure Google identifies important pages on your site. It’ also a great way to find duplicate content issues.
Optimizing your 404 for a smooth user experience.
Improving your site speed
Making your site mobile-friendly.
On-page SEO involves the content on your site. An on-page SEO audit will include:
Optimizing titles and descriptions
Formating text properly (Use H1, H2 tags correctly)
Checking your content for uniqueness, correct grammar, proper formatting, and proper promotion on social pages.
Updating out of date content and merging similar content
Linking related pages
Checking your images for accurate descriptions and ALT text. Compress large files to avoid pages that take too long to load.
Identifying broken links since they ruin a user’s experience
Check if your site is user friendly. Does it redirect to a 404 when a user types the wrong URL? How fast can a user find what they are looking for? Do you have an easy to use main menu? Is there a user sitemap? Can users differentiate between content and ads?
Off-page SEO involves techniques you use to promote your website online or link building. An off-page SEO audit will include checking:
Whether you have any toxic links
If unique and trusted domains link to your content
The number of links pointing to your internal and home page
Next, you need to perform a social audit.
Do you have a presence on social platforms your audience frequents?
Can people easily find and follow you on these platforms
Once you’ve dealt with internal issues, check your competitors plus keywords. Find keywords that perform well to rank for on search engines. Also, keep an eye on your competitor’s SEO tactics while maintaining best practices in SEO to avoid penalties.
Why is an SEO audit important?
The SEO industry keeps changing, and there are always updates. What worked 5-months ago may not work today. Google also keeps updating its algorithm every year, and performing an audit could help your website stay up to date. You also regularly add and remove content from your site which means issues will arise from time to time.
The audit ensures Google is not penalizing you for issues that could ruin your ranking. It offers you comprehensive feedback on best practices in running your website.