How well do you know your website is doing?
SEO experts know how vital regular audits are, but for those who don’t know much about SEO, it may seem like a big job. But in today’s digital marketing world, it’s becoming more and more important to understand this.
In this blog, we’ll give you tips on how to do an SEO audit (like an SEO audit checklist), tell you about the latest tools, and help you understand the what, where, and why of the process.
What exactly is an SEO Audit?
So what is an SEO audit? It checks your website for spam and offers optimization advice. SEO audits are vital because Google’s algorithm changes constantly with new technologies and search patterns.
Any digital marketer, whether in-house or outsourced, should do a complete SEO audit. It allows you to examine your SEO efforts, no matter how prolific or sparse, and take rapid action.
SEO audit price? That depends on your tools and business/website size. Prices vary by agency, so compare bids.
What is the importance of an SEO audit?
Checking a website’s health ensures internal and external usability. You must examine the sitemap, anchor text, and social media networks. Load time is important, and an audit will reveal red flag concerns.
This is vital so you don’t get penalized by Google for damaging your site’s rating. Many small details might cause this, and if you’re not an SEO expert, you may not realize it. An external audit might provide criticism of your content, links, etc.
You can find many technical definitions of how to do a full SEO audit online. If done right, it can improve your earnings in ways you never imagined.
Regularly check your website’s performance. Check your website once a month using the above tools, and have an expert review it annually.
Steps of an SEO Audit
An SEO audit has a few key steps that make sure the site is as optimized as it can be. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
Site Audits and Crawling
What’s an SEO audit? Every audit begins with a web crawl. This lets you examine the situation and find website faults. A crawl helps build a baseline for your audit.
Do a monthly automated scan to track bounce rate, conversions, and page views. This will reveal serious flaws including broken links, page titles, meta-data, and duplicate content. If you notice major concerns, you can have a professional audit. Annually, perform a thorough check.
Your site is scanned or audited to find faults and offer you important indicators to optimise it for SEO and brand exposure.
When conducting a technical SEO audit, examine these areas:
- URL Structure: Unique, clean, and simple URLs?
- Content: Is it well-written, structured, informative, and fresh?
- Meta descriptions: Are they unique and the proper length?
- Links: 5 links per page? Works everything?
- Images: Are the images well-described?
- Website structure: Is it easy to navigate?
A complete examination analyses your landing page’s relationship to other pages, user-friendliness, menu, and whether adverts and banners are effective or in the way.
Page Speed
Page speed is vital for SEO audits, therefore test and benchmark your load time. In our day of short attention spans, a quick site speed encourages a pleasant user experience, whereas a slow one increases bounce rates. If your website is a conversion channel, this isn’t ideal.
Here are some page speed SEO audit tools. Google PageSpeed Insights can examine your website’s desktop and mobile speed. YSlow checks your web pages and offers easy-to-implement advice, like as compressing images. Pingdom Website Speed Test analyses each web page’s elements, sizes, and load times.
A speed test helps you determine which website aspects are SEO roadblocks. Once you know where to improve, you can boost your site’s performance.
Assess your Site Architecture
A site’s structure can also enhance SEO. The better the architecture, the better the user experience for website visitors and search bots.
A clear, logical, ordered structure expressed in a complete, correct sitemap (uploaded to webmaster tool accounts) is required. Strong URL structure is crucial.
Make sure it fits your site’s hierarchy and uses clear, straightforward naming rules, avoiding symbols and numbers.
Make sure all your important web pages are featured in your website’s top navigation menu so users and bots can discover what they need effortlessly.
For the same reason, include internal links that transport humans and bots from one page to another. In this approach, you can guarantee an SEO-friendly site architecture.
Check your Site’s Content
Content is a key on-page SEO aspect that affects your site’s performance. Google prefers regularly updated, unique, searcher-relevant content.
This means your website’s content must meet this brief to boost brand visibility and rankings. A content SEO audit is vital, therefore review existing material and use SEO while developing new content.
Use keywords naturally when writing content. You must use targeted keywords without appearing spammy SEO material must be valuable and relevant.
Use a content calendar to track keywords in each format and keep up with content marketing and SEO trends.
Check your tags
Title tags that appropriately describe the page’s purpose. Search engines truncate longer titles, so shorter is better. If possible, insert a keyword.
Meta-tags describe a website’s content. They will encourage a searcher to click over to your website if optimized.
Alt tags are vital for bots crawling a website. Include accurate descriptions of your site’s images (and include keywords if it sounds appropriate) to improve SEO and digital accessibility.
Make sure each of your pages includes a rel=”canonical” link (the canonical tag) in its HTML to prevent duplicate content concerns. Blog post tags will help you organize your site’s material for indexing, assuming you have a blog. Here are 5 steps to establish a blog.
Check your Backlinks
Sometimes, it’s who you know. Search engines judge the quality of your website depending on the quality of the websites that link to it. ‘Link farming’ includes exchanging reciprocal links to boost SEO.
Over time, SEO has grown more refined and algorithmic. Focus on quality above quantity with backlinks, and if doubtful sites connect to you, a search engine could discredit your site. Verify that your links are coming from a range of sites, not the same website, as this will affect your SEO.
SEO Audit Tools
For those of us who aren’t SEO experts, it’s a good thing that there are a lot of tools out there that can help you do a good audit. Here are some of the best SEO audit tools that can be found.
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps you improve onsite SEO by getting data and checking for common SEO problems. You can download and crawl up to 500 URLs for free, or you can buy a license to get rid of this limit and use more advanced features.
Google Analytics
This is something that every digital marketer in any field needs to have. It will give you key indicators for many different metrics and help you in many ways to improve your SEO. It can be used all the time to keep track of and watch traffic. You can add Google Analytics to Screaming Frog so you can compare site data like sessions, page views, and bounce rates. This will give you a more detailed, all-around view of what’s going on with your site.
Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console and Google Trends)
Google has a number of cheap tools that anyone can use to do regular SEO checks and see your page “as” Google does. This is a good way to check how well your site is doing.
Check My Links
With this extension tool, you can check all of your links to make sure that they all help traffic and don’t hurt it. Check My Links will tell you about broken links, the right number of links, and how both internal and external links are set up. Even though it’s easy to do by hand, this only takes a few seconds.
SEO Report Card
SEO Report Card will look at your site to see how it stacks up against the other sites in your niche. Things like rank analysis, link-building structures, trust metrics, and an authority baseline will be covered. It will also check how fast and easy to use your site is overall.
MOZ’s Crawl Test Tool
When you sign up for MOZ Pro, you’ll also get a tool that helps you improve your page’s ranking for certain keywords and gives you reports on its growth. This makes MOZ’s crawler look at your pages and sends a report about what it finds. It costs anywhere from $99 to $599 per month, depending on the size and needs of the company.
Browseo
Browseo will let you see how a search engine sees your web pages. This will let you check the more technical parts of your content and make improvements where needed.
Majestic
Majestic is a tool that calls itself “the planet’s largest link index database.” It will help you find out who is linking to you so you can see if they are a good connection.
SEMRush
This is a powerful SEO tool, but it can be especially helpful when you want to see how well your visual content is doing. For example, you can use YouTube’s Keyword Magic Tool and site audit tool to do an SEO audit. Plans cost anywhere from $119.95 to $449.95 per month.
Leverage SEO to drive engagement, leads, and revenue
There is so much content out there that it can be hard to find your core audience and connect with them. Outency will teach you how to stand out in a crowded place and give you the tools you need to do so. You will learn how to optimize SEO, use search analytics, make effective paid campaigns, use search strategy, and a lot more.
Follow us on Instagram | Facebook | Youtube
