How To Conduct An SEO Audit
Your website is your asset, and it has immense potential to grow in its value. If you want to ensure that it remains in its best health and performs well in search engine rankings, then its regular SEO audit is important.
Let’s find out what an SEO audit is and how it’s done.
What Is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a process of investigating your website to find out how well it relates to best practices. It involves analyzing various components of your website that impact the SEO of your site. SEO audit is the first step involved in creating an SEO strategy.
At its core, the purpose of an SEO audit is to find out as many problems in your site affecting its performance in search as possible.
A typical SEO audit reveal:
- Technical SEO issues
- Website architecture issues
- On-page SEO issues
- Off-page problems
- User experience issues
- Content gaps
- Competitor analysis
An SEO audit is essentially your site’s health check that reveals issues affecting its performance.
What Is Included In The SEO Audit Process?
SEO audit is carried out on websites having trouble ranking on search engines for certain keywords. They might never know the reasons behind failure without having a complete website audit of the site.
An overall analysis to assess your website’s strengths and determine an SEO strategy
First of all, a complete analysis of your website is performed. It is to find the strengths and weaknesses of your site, which later help in creating an SEO strategy. This is achieved by doing a technical analysis of your site.
We strongly believe in starting with technical analysis because a bad basis doesn’t help even if you redo your SEO strategy. You would not build anything on bad terrain without fixing it, would you?
Activities we do in technical analysis can be grouped into:
- Accessibility
- Indexability
1. Accessibility
As the name suggests, accessibility is search engine crawlers’ ability to access your website. It also points to the user’s ability to access your website. If search engine crawlers and users are unable to access your site, producing new content won’t help either.
High-quality accessibility doesn’t only improve your online presence but it shapes user experience too.
● Robot.txt file and robots meta tags
Two of the most important things we evaluate are the robot.txt file and robots meta tags. Often, these two are blocking the access of search engines to certain areas of your website. If pages of your website are blocked by webmaster, Google can’t access them. It means the search engine won’t display your website among search results.
We have the expertise and skills to check both files comprehensively and rectify issues in them.
● XML sitemap
Another critical component to check is the XML sitemaps of your website. An XML sitemap helps Google crawlers as a map. We ensure that your XML sitemap has a proper structure and is submitted to the webmaster tools account.
● Website architecture
Another crucial factor affecting the accessibility of your site is its architecture. When we conduct an SEO audit of your site, part of our job is to ensure that your site’s architecture is friendly for crawlers. The smaller the number of clicks between the homepage to destination page, the more accessible it will be for crawlers.
● Redirects
If redirects are not properly implemented, it can impact accessibility. When you move content to new pages, create a redirect to ensure crawlers can access the new pages through a redirect.
● Page speed
When it comes to visitor-side accessibility, page speed matters the most. Visitors are looking for quick and reliable information. If your page speed is slow, they will leave your site and find an alternative. In our SEO audit service, we determine whether your site speed is up to the desired standards or not.
Even an interactive and attractive interface can’t help much in retaining the visitors if your site speed is poor.
● Mobile responsiveness
Because many people use mobile devices to surf the internet, having a mobile responsive website is very important. In our SEO audit, analyze the responsiveness of your website to ensure you’re delivering the same high-quality user experience across all kinds of devices.
2. Indexability
After doing everything correctly in the first step, it’s time to move towards indexability.
In the context of Google as your target search engine, both go hand in hand. Both indexability and accessibility are important to ensure the online presence of your website for the end-user.
Accessibility is all about search engine spiders being able to crawl the pages of your site. While indexability points to those pages being available in the search engine.
If you have a small website, your website is indexed slowly as opposed to an established website with a lot of content.
Identifying both the on-page and off-page factors affecting search positions
1. On-page factors
An impressive site with highly engaging content is just like an untouched diamond. What’s the point in spending thousands of dollars on building a website and producing original content if no one sees it.
So why does a website not rank well even when it has a lot to offer?
Most of the time, the issue is in the content.
The issue could be in the form of insufficient content, missing/incorrect title tags, or duplicate content.
It’s important to identify on-page factors that are barriers to high ranking. Finding suitable steps to rectify these issues is part of an SEO audit.
When identified and fixed, it creates a significant positive impact on your site’s ranking.
2. Off-page factors
Many off-page factors also affect your organic search ranking on search engines. These factors account for 80% of the ranking algorithms. It emphasizes the importance of doing an absolutely critical website audit. These factors mainly focus on links. In an SEO audit, the number of links on your website, positions of these links, and quality of these links are identified.
A comprehensive SEO audit report
After completing the SEO audit, a comprehensive SEO audit report is produced. The report includes the following:
1. Competitive scorecard
A competitive scorecard helps you know the exact strategy your competitor is using. If you want to compete with your competition after they leave you behind every time, then it’s time to reverse engineer their strategy.
A competitive scorecard is particularly important when all of your efforts are yielding no or insufficient results against your competitor.
2. Backlink report
A strong backlink profile works like magic. Similarly, broken backlinks or low-quality backlinks damage your ranking. This report provides complete information on all the backlinks pointing to your website.
3. Future site strategy
After a complete SEO audit, we have invaluable information and insights into major and minor SEO issues your website is facing.
Wrap Up
Today, technology is improving every day. Google and other search engines have evolved significantly. In the last 5 years, there has been a massive change observed in their algorithms. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to cater to your SEO needs. You can’t expect a single practice to boost your rankings.
It’s an implementation of a systemic SEO strategy that yields the desired results for your website. To best implement your strategy, or to create the best strategy, the findings of an SEO audit are critical.
Conducting an SEO audit is challenging by any stretch of the imagination, but it has been made relatively easy thanks to guides like these. I hope to find more and more guides like these that can help me in this respect.
Thanks Greg