When we talk about digital marketing, a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) audit serves as one of the most significant tools which can provide in-depth overview and analysis of the actual state of your website.
Basically, SEO audit is the process of strengthening and altering a website’s online relevancy. This process normally covers important constituents of a website like site architecture, content-related issues, indexing, social-media engagement and backlink analysis. SEO Audit helps in understanding such components and how they work. It also aids in detecting the strength, weaknesses, and capabilities a website has in the search engines.
Remember, if your website is not appropriately optimized for search, you are surely going to miss out on a significant amount of search engine traffic, as well as attention from potential customers.
What Is An SEO Audit?
Put simply, an SEO audit is an assessment of the search engine friendliness of a website in a number of areas. It detects the areas for improvements on your website; and is used as a basis for an action plan to keep your website up-to-date with the newest developments in search marketing. Generally, an in-depth SEO audit strategy includes 5 key parts:
- Technical Analysis
- On-Page Analysis
- Off-Page Analysis
- Competitive Analysis and Keyword Research
- User Experience
Why Do You Really Need To Perform A SEO Audit?
There are a number of reasons to perform an SEO audit for your website. Check out a few of them:
- Algorithm Changes
Popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing constantly update their algorithms to provide better search results. SEO audit helps to recognize such changes so that you can make the necessary alterations to your website content.
- Website Errors
Broken links or error messages can be a huge drawback for your website. Performing SEO audits helps to expose such errors, empowering you to redirect them and recuperate lost traffic.
- Webmaster’s Guidelines
Webmaster tools from Google and Bing undergo continuous changes. You need to perform an SEO audit to ensure compliance.
- Titles and Meta Data
Title tags and Meta descriptions play a very important part in search engines. These are the first things visitors would read when they find you in their search results. SEO audits ensure these are relevant.
- Outdated Content
Providing fresh content to the search engines is important. If visitors are not coming to your website in 6 months, it means you have nothing new to offer to them. SEO audits help re-evaluate your content and get rid of outdated material.
What Does An SEO Audit Look At?
- Keywords
Using effective keywords is one of the most important factors to build a strong SEO strategy. Your ranking success depends largely on SEO-centric keyword research; hence understanding your website’s core keywords is indispensable.
Conducting keyword analysis using an SEO audit tool is basically finding out the answers to questions like:
- Which keywords can bring in high-value search traffic?
- Where does your company rank for these keywords?
- Which keywords are currently bringing in search traffic?
- How is this traffic converting to customers?
It is very important to know which keywords your website ranks for – and spot the ones they should rank for.
Another important thing are the words used by your customers to describe your products and services. These are undoubtedly the most important keywords for you.
Researching on keywords used by your competitors can help you align your overall keyword strategy and divert traffic from your competitors’ to your own website.
Keyword research is one of the most time-consuming areas of SEO audits, but also the one which exposes maximum insights.
- External Factors
The tantalizing SEO process is affected by several factors which can sometimes be out of your control.
Google and other search engines use signals from your website, these include external signals like backlinks, brand mentions, and social media to judge the quality of your website. These signals can be considered as third-party validation where search engines consider positive comments as a positive signal that your offerings are of good quality in your industry. Social media platforms have the potential to add spice and vitality to your SEO efforts.
- Backlinks – These are one of the most important ranking factors to search engines. It works on a very simple idea: The more trustworthy, relevant resources link to a website, the more valuable that page must be, and hence deserves higher rankings.
Similarly, “Bad” backlinks are considered to be indicators of poor quality, weakening the page’s value and authority in search engines, and can also result in ranking penalties.
- Brand Mentions – These refer to when your brand name is referenced in any manner. Brand mentions include information like links, phone number, address, and other info related to the company’s name.
These are very important as there are several businesses across the globe with similar names. Positive brand mentions equal to pluses, and negative ones can cost you your rank in search engines.
- Traffic – Another important external factor your SEO audit needs to consider is the “Traffic” – where it comes from. We don’t just mean the organic and referral traffic, but also the traffic from social, email, direct, display, paid, and other sources. Understanding your website’s traffic profile is vital not only for SEO but it can be helpful across other digital signals too.
- Website Construction, Architecture, Design, and Speed
The structure of your website defines its hierarchy. It is important to arrange these pages in a manner that reflects the most important aspects of your business. Asking these questions can clear out what you need to look for in your website build:
- How many clicks does it take the user to get to what they are looking for?
- Can you improve this?
- Is your site mobile friendly?
- Secure with HTTPS?
- Easy to navigate?
The answers to all the above questions should be “YES”. If your website fails here, then it could be subject to negative changes with recent Google algorithm updates.
Site architecture is one of the most important aspects of your website in terms of usability.
- Content
What does content do? Well, it helps you drive business. SEO audit should tell you what your content is doing to help you drive business; which blog posts and landing pages are targeting keywords and bringing in traffic. When auditing content, you need to find out:
- Are your keywords reflected in the title tags?
- Is the content more geared towards search engines (overly optimized) or towards site visitors?
- Are the Meta description tag and H tags working with or against the content on-page?
- Are there spelling mistakes or poor grammar?
- Is there duplicate or plagiarized content?
Duplicate content is a very serious issue and has to be tackled as soon as possible or it will eventually suffocate your website and worsen its rankings. Checking for duplicate content is an inseparable part of every website audit.
Plagiarism tools typically compare words that appear on a page against words that appear on another page rather than exact match phrases.
As a result, some pages have a high percentage of “duplicated content” which is not 100% duplicate.
Benefits Of SEO Audit:
Following an all-inclusive SEO audit of a website highlights the details of any present issue as well as lists down recommendations which help to achieve business goals in the best possible way. Let’s list down some of the benefits performing SEO audit:
- Know competition well and stay ahead of them.
- Know the current health status of your websites.
- Spot what is hindering your business’s online visibility.
- Upsurge your domain authority by putting on the right SEO strategy.
- Fix page issues.
- Increase online traffic.
- Improve sales, conversions, and leads.
- Understand the negative factors which disturb your website’s search engine ranking.
- Identify all the web pages which search engines can crawl and index.
For more detail on the benefits of SEO Audit you can refer to SEO Website Auditing and learn more.
How To Conduct An SEO Audit
- Technical SEO
A technical SEO audit sees to it that your website can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines.
a. Crawl Your Website
A crawl can simulate how crawlers from search engines like Google may potentially see your website and highlight technical errors that can be fixed before publishing the final version.
Tools like Screaming Frog, SEMrush Site Audit, and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools can help do this. These errors can include:
- Broken links (404 errors)
- Server errors
- Duplicate content
- Slow website speed
- DNS errors
- High crawl depth – ideally, your audience should reach the most important pages from the homepage within 3 clicks or less.
b. Check for Indexing Issues
Indexing is crucial for your website, since pages that aren’t indexed, aren’t ranked. Ensure that all important pages are indexed by Google.
A tool like Google Search Console can help see which pages aren’t indexed and why. It’s also recommended to submit a sitemap to GSC.
To do this, access your business’ GSC. Check the ‘Pages’ report under ‘Index’ section in the left menu to see which pages are indexed.
You can also see why certain pages weren’t indexed and work on them if they are important to your goals.
c. Review Site Speed and Core Web Vitals
Site speed is a crucial factor that affects your page’s rank, alongside Google’s Core Web Vitals. These include
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): which measures the loading time for the main content of your page.
- First Input Delay (FID): measures the delay between a user’s first interaction on the webpage and the time when the browser actually processes it.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures the visual stability of the content on your page as it loads.
It’s essential to ensure that your pages have quick load times and fix core web vital issues since they are important ranking factors.
Tools like PageSpeed Insights can help measure site speed. If your page suffers from slow load times, try this:
- Compress images
- Optimize HTML codes and minify CSS/JavaScript codes
- Leverage browser caching
d. Mobile-Friendliness
This is a huge ranking factor for pages in 2024, with mobile traffic far surpassing desktop. That’s why, webmasters should make sure ot:
- Check for mobile usability issues
- Ensure responsive design and fast load times on mobile as well
Google Search Console can help track mobile usability as well. In the left menu, click ‘experience’, then ‘mobile usability’ to get an overview of how mobile-friendly your pages are. You can also access the negative factors causing poor mobile usability.
e. Remove duplicate versions of your website
As far as search engines are concerned, if your website has multiple different links, they count as different site versions.
Variations like including a WWW in the link or using HTTP vs HTTPS can trigger different versions, that’s why – ensure you use only one link.
Having your site be accessible at more than one address (such as https://www.website.com, https://website.com, or the less-secure http://www.website.com and http://website.com) can cause crawling issues and harm your rank.
- On-Page SEO Audit
On-page SEO focuses on making individual pages rank higher and earn more traffic rather than a general website audit. Key elements include:
a. Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Ensure your pages have accurate and appropriate tags and meta descriptions. Review your title tags and meta descriptions such that they are:
- Unique and descriptive
- Compliant with the recommended character limits
- Including relevant keywords naturally
b. Header Tags
Your content should be well structured with the appropriate header tags, in the right order. For example, each page should have one H1 tag – reflecting the core subject, and subsequent headers would be H2 tags. Points within the H2 tags can be H3, and so on. Pages generally have tags up to H5 or H6 in some cases.
c. Keyword Optimization
It’s crucial that your page includes keywords that are relevant to the user’s search intent Evaluate your page’s content to check:
- Are you targeting the right keywords?
- Is there keyword stuffing?
- Are the keywords placed naturally in the content, headers, URLs, and alt tags?
d. Content Quality and Relevance
High-quality, relevant content is key to SEO success. Assess your content for:
- Depth and comprehensiveness
- Originality and uniqueness
- User engagement metrics like bounce rate and average time spent on the page.
- Off-Page SEO Audit
Off-page SEO involves strategies to improve your site’s authority and reputation through external means, primarily backlinks.
a. Backlink Profile Analysis
Tools like Moz Link Explorer can help analyze your site’s backlink profile. Look for:
- The total number of backlinks and referring domains
- The quality and relevance of linking sites
- Anchor text distribution
- Toxic or spammy links that you need to get rid of
b. Competitor Backlink Analysis
Study your competitors’ backlink profiles to uncover opportunities. Identify where they are getting high-quality backlinks and explore if you can obtain links from the same sources.
- User Experience (UX) Audit
User experience significantly impacts SEO. That’s why it’s a good practice to check whether your website is intuitive and easy to use from the audience’s POV. Evaluate your website for:
a. Navigation and Structure
- Is your site easy to navigate?
- Is the structure logical and user-friendly?
- Are important pages easily accessible?
b. Design and Readability
- Is your site visually appealing?
- Is the content easy to read (font size, color contrast)?
- Are there intrusive ads or pop-ups affecting usability?
c. Engagement Metrics
Google Analytics can help analyze how users engage with your website. These KPIs include:
- Bounce rate: the percentage of people who enter your site or page but leave without taking any action.
- Average session duration: the average time users spend on your page.
- Pages per session: the average number of pages that users visit in a single session.
Formula: Total Pageviews / Total Sessions
- Local SEO Audit
If you own a local business, making sure your target patrons can easily find your business or store online is paramount.
Once you’ve set up your Google Business Profile, regularly update the listed information and audit key elements like:
a. Google Business Profile Listing
- Claim and verify your GBP listing
- Ensure consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) information
- Encourage and respond to reviews from customers
- Competitor Analysis
Competitor benchmarking can provide insights that help you see what strategies you’re missing out on and identify opportunities for improvement. Here's how to conduct a thorough competitor analysis:
a. Domain Comparison
Use tools like SEMrush’s Domain Overview to quickly compare your domain with those of your competitors. This can help you track metrics like organic keywords, domain authority, organic traffic, among others.
b. Keyword Gap Analysis
A keyword gap strategy involves analyzing the keywords that your competitors are using and ranking for, but your website isn’t. It provides an opportunity to improve your ranking by using better, relevant keywords that you may have missed out on.
c. Content Analysis
Examine the content strategy of your competitors:
- What topics are they covering?
- How comprehensive and engaging is their content?
- What type of content (blogs, videos, infographics) are they producing?
d. Backlink Analysis
Study your competitors' backlink profiles to discover linking opportunities you may be missing out on. Similar to the keyword gap analysis, SEMrush also has a tool to check your Backlink Gap.
Once your report is ready, assess the insights and ask:
- What are their top referring domains?
- How can you replicate or improve upon their backlink strategies?
- Are there opportunities to gain backlinks from the same sources?
e. Technical SEO Comparison
If you’re unsure about your page’s technical SEO, you could assess your competitors' technical SEO to get an idea of what others in the industry are doing. Note any differences in:
- Site speed and mobile-friendliness
- URL structure and site architecture
- Use of schema markup and structured data
f. User Experience and Engagement
Compare UX metrics like the website’s user-friendliness and check if your competitors are using features like chatbots, personalized recommendations, or interactive elements to enhance UX?
SEO is an ongoing process. Regularly monitor your site’s performance using the tools mentioned and adjust your strategies based on the latest data and algorithm updates.
SEO Audit Checklist
Now that we’ve gone over how you can conduct an SEO audit for your website in 2024, here’s a handy checklist to ensure you’ve covered all your bases:
- Crawl your website
- Check for indexing issues
- Remove duplicate website versions
- Track organic traffic drops
- Adherence to Core Web Vital best practices
- Check load times
- Ensure mobile-friendliness
- Analyze UX on desktop and mobile
- Check keyword density and optimization
- Audit header and title tags and meta descriptions
- Create a backlink profile for your domain
- Conduct keyword and backlink gap analysis
- Check your competitor’s domains and strategy
- If you have a physical outlet - check your Google Business Profile information
- Engage with customer reviews and ratings on GBP
8 Best SEO Audit Tools
No SEO audit can be completed without using tools to make the process easier. While there’s tons to choose from, here are 8 of the best tools to elevate your SEO audits to their best:
- Google Search Console: Monitor indexing status, search performance, and site issues
- Google Analytics: Analyze traffic, user behavior, and engagement metrics
- SEMrush: Their SEO Audit tool offers comprehensive SEO analysis including on-page, off-page, and technical aspects
- Ahrefs: In-depth backlink analysis and competitor research
- Screaming Frog: Detailed site crawling to identify technical issues
- Moz: Analyze links and keywords, domain authority, local SEO
- SEOptimer: Conduct SEO crawls, backlink and keyword tracking and research, and it also offers an SEO audit tool
- SEOMator: Free SEO audit tool, also featuring rank tracking, a backlink explorer and keyword research.
Conclusion:
Armed with this information, you just need to derive insights and apply them in your SEO strategy. You now have tons of insights which could lead to ideas on how to improve your site and increase your rankings in search engines to get more traffic, leads, or sales – depending on your goals.
Remember, these are just a few basic suggestions on search engine optimization. Conducting an SEO audit is no joke, and after putting in the time and effort to improve your website’s performance, upward curving results are the best rewards. Compile them into actionable reports to have an easily accessible guide with ReportGarden’s complete SEO Reports. Unlock the full potential of SEO and unleash the power of your brand!
