Assume your website is a car. It’s all shiny-looking, with a strong engine cruising down the digital highway. But suddenly, it begins to crackle and slow down, and you notice other cars take over. Well, you’ll surely look for the root cause and start fixing whatever has gone wrong. Similarly, when your website, which usually runs smoothly, starts causing trouble, you need to find a solution. A comprehensive SEO audit can solve all your problems.
Learn how to take your website to new heights in search engine rankings with techniques ranging from technical research to content review. In this article, we delve into the intricacies of thorough SEO audits and go beyond simple tweaks.
Before we dive into the things you should keep an eye out for, let’s discuss what an SEO audit exactly is.
What is SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is an examination of page performance before implementing large-scale search engine optimization (SEO) or a website redesign. Website auditing can determine whether or not it’s optimized to achieve traffic goals and give you ways in which you can improve it to reach those goals.
Also read Search Engine Optimization: What is SEO and How it Can Help Your Business?
Components of an SEO Audit
This can include key areas that collectively ensure that your website is optimized for search engines and provides a good user experience. Here are the primary components of an SEO audit:
- Technical SEO: It is about improving your website to make it easier for search engines to find, understand, and store your content.
- On-page SEO: identify issues with web pages like improper use of headings and low-quality content.
- Off-page SEO: Evaluate if you can enhance the actions you take (such as constructing links from reliable sources) to raise your rankings outside of your website.
- User-friendly design (UX): Examine how simple it is for users to engage with and navigate your website.
Following an audit, you’ll be able to make adjustments that can improve business outcomes, traffic, and rankings.
Why perform an SEO audit in the first place?
There are plenty of reasons why one should perform an SEO audit on their website. SEO auditing is important because:
1. It helps in identifying and fixing issues.
With SEO auditing, we can unravel the hidden issues with technical, on-page, and off-page SEO that prevent websites from securing higher search rankings.
2. It improves the user experience.
By identifying aspects that can be improved, SEO auditing helps build a website that provides a better user experience.
3. It assists in optimizing your website for search engines.
One should perform SEO audits, as they can significantly improve the visibility of the website on the web and will eventually draw in more organic traffic.
Now that it’s clear why SEO audits are important, let’s see how SEO audits are performed.
A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Perform a Comprehensive SEO Audit
Here are some steps that you should follow while performing an SEO audit:
1. Perform an SEO link audit
This type of audit processes the links pointing to your website to find potential issues or opportunities in your backlink profile. This audit will assist in optimizing your website to rank for your desired keywords by analyzing your links.
Link audits look at the anchor text, domain, and URL source to see whether your page is receiving value and equity (also known as “link juice”). This will indicate how much a link is helping or hurting your website’s visibility in SERPs. Links from well-known websites are of higher quality than those of smaller, lesser-known sites.
First, compile all of your link data before doing an SEO link audit. Using Google Search Console, you can achieve this by entering your domain and then selecting and clicking on “Links to Your Site” under “Search Traffic.”
Then, from there, you can download the recent links and form a link audit spreadsheet. After that, you should assess your links, taking into account variables such as page content, IP address, and anchor text.
To eliminate ambiguity while evaluating the worth of the links you have obtained, you can also use tools such as Ahref’s backlink checker (Free Backlink Checker by Ahrefs).
2. Execute a site crawl
Running a website is crucial since crawl-based SEO audits are more effective.
In other words, you should be able to stimulate how Google scans your sites and view every problem related to those pages as if they were presented by Google.
It can be performed by an SEO auditing tool for websites, such as Site Audit, to do that. You must first set up the audit and establish a project.
The key points to verify are as follows:
- Status code: Make sure that each page returns a 200-character status code. You would be required to fix the 404 (the error code for ‘not found’) and 301 (the error code for being ‘redirected’) status codes.
- Internal links: Make sure there is a coherent linking structure and identify if there are any broken internal links present.
- Meta tags: Look for redundant or missing meta descriptions and title tags.
- H1 tags: You need to make sure that each page has a unique H1 tag.
- XML Sitemap: Confirm that you have updated and published your XML sitemap to search engines.
You can learn more about website crawlers at Website Crawlers:(semrush.com).
3. Track analytics and make modifications
Analyzing the performance of your website regularly with tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console is of extreme importance. Data like conversion rate, bounce rate, and organic traffic are valuable; hence, you are required to monitor these metrics:
- Traffic Sources: Identify the sources of your traffic and focus on the most effective ones.
- User Behaviour: Examine user behavior on your website to find inconsistent areas that require modifications.
- Conversion Rate: Monitor the overall conversion rate as well as the efficiency of your calls to action (CTA).
4. Examine the organic traffic
Organic traffic is generated when visitors land on your website after clicking on an unpaid (“organic”) search result. Keeping an eye on your organic traffic is essential to determining the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. To examine your data on organic traffic, use Google Analytics. Points to keep in mind are:
- Traffic Trends: Track changes in organic traffic over time to see if they’re increasing or decreasing.
- Top Landing Pages: Determine which pages get the most natural traffic and examine the factors that contribute to their success.
- Bounce Rate: To determine whether readers find your material interesting, keep an eye on the bounce rate for organic traffic.
- Geographic Information: Analyse the geographic sources of your organic traffic so that you may better target those consumers with your content.
- User Behaviour: To determine user engagement, examine measures like average session length and pages per session.
5. Look for any duplicate versions of your website
You would need to ensure that Google is only indexing one version of your website. Depending on whether HTTPS is used by your website and if the domain contains WWW, several URL variants can be used.
For instance, these are all distinct versions of the website for a search engine:
- http://www.example.com
- http://example.com
- https://www.example.com
- https://example.com
Multiple URL variations for your website can lead to various problems with crawling, indexing, and ranking. Most importantly, Google will consider them to be duplicates, and having several versions of your website can also lower your page rank, which will hurt your search engine results.
This is fairly simple to check: Load your website in all of its versions into a web browser. The desired version should be immediately forwarded to you.
As an example, if you type any other version of the URL into your browser and your preferred version is https://example.com, you should be forwarded to it. If your website is accessible in more than one version, utilize a 301 redirect for those versions.
6. Look for manual actions
Your website can be subject to manual action by Google if it breaches its spam standards.
When Google takes a manual action, your site’s rankings will suffer until the action is reversed. This might apply to the entire website or just certain pages.
You could have received a manual action for several reasons, such as:
- Overusing keywords.
- Artificially generated links.
- Different types of spam.
- Thin material with minimal or no value addition.
If you’ve got a manual action, you may check it in the Google Search Console. There is a “Manual Actions” link present under the “Security and Manual Actions” part of the menu displayed on the left side.
When you click it, you’ll land on a page where you’ll see the status.
Ideally, a green checkmark appears, indicating that no problems have been found.
You must address the problems and request reconsideration if your website is the target of a manual action. To learn more, see Google’s Manual Actions guide.
For instance, you must remove backlinks from your website by contacting webmasters or disavowing them if you have gotten a manual action due to purchasing backlinks, shown as “unnatural links to your site.”
7. Conduct competitor analysis
An effective SEO audit should assist you in assessing your position in comparison with your rivals. For your SEO efforts, knowing the tactics used by your rivals might yield insightful information. Analyze your competition using tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.
Key research areas include:
- Keyword strategy: Determine the keywords your rivals are ranking for and use those same phrases in your original content.
- Information: Examine the kind and quality of information generated by your rivals.
- Backlinks: Research high-quality backlinks that are comparable to those of your rivals by looking at their profiles.
Tools like Domain Overview are a great place to start. The tool will provide you with a reliable comparison of the important metrics of the chosen domains. These can help you get a clear picture of your progress and areas for improvement.
8. Check for mobile-friendliness issues
In the mobile-first era we live in, you are probably not prioritizing your user experience if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices.
One of Google’s primary Page Experience indicators is mobile friendliness. Since 2015, it has been a component of rankings. This implies that it may have a direct impact on how well you rank in search results. A Mobile-Friendly Test tool developed by Google can assist you in evaluating your site’s mobile compatibility.
Key points to check:
- Make sure your website adapts fluidly to various screen sizes by using responsive design.
- Touch Elements: Verify that links and buttons can be readily touched.
- Font Size: On lower displays, use legible font sizes.
9. Analyse the user experience (UX)
How do your consumers find this design to be working? Certain software provides heatmaps showing the areas of your design that get the most attention from consumers and what they are reading. Retaining users and enhancing SEO performance is dependent on a great user experience (UX). Improving your SEO efforts requires evaluating and increasing the user experience (UX) of your website. You could find out from this type of study how your visitors are being affected by the overall design and user experience.
Bottom line
An SEO audit is not just a checklist of tasks. It’s a deep dive into your website’s health, much like a thorough car maintenance check. We’ve explored various aspects of the audit process, from technical SEO to on-page optimization, and from analyzing user experience to conducting competitive research.
By systematically analyzing and optimizing various aspects of your site, you can enhance your visibility, attract more organic traffic, and provide a better user experience. To stay ahead in this rapidly changing and evolving digital environment, SEO is an ongoing process that requires regular evaluations.