There exist a number of methodologies now on how to conduct an SEO audit. There are a number of factors, whether you’re a small-scale business website trying to gain an organic reach or an agency trying to do the same for their client, that could make the whole process a bit overwhelming as to where to begin. Questions like how deep the analysis should be or which tools would help you get the most information would come to mind.
You need to be sure that the efforts you put in terms of digital marketing, web design, email marketing are all optimized enough to drive organic visitors and potential customers to your website.
Thus, we have nailed down some beneficial tips and tools that’ll help you conduct a successful SEO audit. Whether you’re a professional SEO or a small business owner looking to reach your customers and targets, below given steps would help you achieve organic search supremacy.
Before that, let’s revisit what an SEO audit really means?
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is an in-depth review of your website to determine how accessible it is to real users. SEO audit is designed to view the web pages of your site from the point of view of a web crawler (bots that index and search your website).
The main purpose of an SEO audit is to figure out the missing pieces of improvement that could help in enhancing your website’s SEO strength.
The procedure will list the issues and problems with your site that upon fixing would result in better SEO performance. An SEO auditor would provide an instant SEO report which can be user-friendly to determine the changes that need to be made to the website.
Performing an SEO Audit
When an agency is conducting an SEO audit, there is a list of processes that makes sure every factor is accounted for. In general, an SEO audit should follow the below-given steps
1. Crawling Your Own Site
Probably the most important step, to begin with, would be to start off with crawling your own website. There are tools available online that can crawl your site for you, saving you a lot of time and effort. This step can foremost help you with the several underlying issues with your website. Simply put in your website address and let the tool do its work for you.
Once the crawl process is over, it will give you a list of small issues with your site that could be incorrect word count, plagiarised content, broken links, etc. These are all the small underlying issues on your website that can cause poor SEO performance. Once the given data is with you, start off making the required changes.
2. On-Page SEO
The second step would be to check the on-page SEO issues to make sure your website is optimized for performing efficiently. This involves analyzing the content of the web pages, as well as the source code for proper meta descriptions, titles, H-Tags, etc.
If your site is properly optimized and has relevant content that users are looking for, that means you have high-value keywords strategically placed in your website’s content. While keywords are not as important as they used to be a few years ago, they are still a key factor in improving the SEO performance of your web pages and content.
There are other essential factors of on-page SEO audits like if your website has a user-friendly experience, the site load time is quick and easy navigation throughout the pages. If there are ads on your site, make sure there are not too many ads causing annoyance to the visitor. Lastly, make sure to test your website on mobile devices as well. If it doesn’t have easy navigation on a mobile browser, then you might need to make some significant changes.
3. Backlink Audit
What does a backlink audit do? It examines the links that are redirecting to your website. It is equally essential to perform a backlink audit to test them for their own trustworthiness. If a backlink is not respected by search engine algorithms, then your site would automatically not be respected and wouldn’t come as authoritative.
The pages and links that point to your site should ideally rank well in their own right and have good domain authority. Similarly, if the backlinks to your site are not regularly updated or don’t have similar content as yours, it will cause poor SEO performance on search engines. The backlinks that have the exact or similar anchor keywords as yours would give excellent SEO performance.
4. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the genuine traffic that your website generates without the help of paid ads presented. Organic traffic is much more beneficial in terms of both SEO ranking and conversions, as they are the primary consumers of your content. There are tools available online that can help you track down your website’s organic traffic to help you monitor your site’s SEO performance.
The information these tools would provide can help you filter out the keywords that made the visitors come to your website. So, you can remove the keywords that are not really working. You will need new customers to expand your business and organic search will help you figure out which visitor came by simply searching your name. These visitors can be potential future customers. Finally, you can tailor your keywords that are getting the most hits around your content efficiently.
5. Content Gaps & Opportunities
The main purpose of an SEO audit is to find out the gaps on the website and look for opportunities to improve the overall content for better SEO performance. When you’re done auditing your site or your client’s site, you will find a number of things that will point out the poor SEO performance of the website. It can be the use of wrong keywords or slow loading speed or duplicate content, etc.
The point is that for every issue or gap that you fix, you’ll have an opportunity to improve your website’s SEO strength. All you have to do is conduct periodical SEO audits and analyze the results and issues. This will, in the long run, bring an understanding that would help your website to perform the way you want it and succeed.
Key Takeaways
SEO Audits are routine maintenance of your website. To find out if it is in top-notch condition or needs some fixes here and there. Before you start auditing, here are few takeaways
- The step-by-step guide to audit is just a recommendation. The strategy to improve will come from you.
- There are literally no limits on how many audits one can do.
- You don’t have to put in effort and time for days and weeks to conduct an SEO audit. There are various powerful tools to help that can help you generate an instant SEO report.
- The correct use of these SEO tools would give you apt data to give better SEO performance.
- Remember the foundations of an SEO audit of a website – SEO, Accessibility, Security, Usability, and Social Activity.
Performing an SEO audit is the perfect process to identify how your website is ranking and what you can do to improve it drastically.
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