To achieve success in the online world, it’s not enough to develop the best SEO plan; you also need to control it, continuously monitoring it to extract data and make informed decisions.
Ultimately, it’s important to evaluate the results you’re getting from your website and conduct an SEO audit. In short, an SEO audit is a standard procedure for any website, conducted to determine its current ranking status.
Unlike a traditional audit, this one is done solely for marketing purposes. It allows you to gain a better understanding of your website and overall traffic. It’s a great way to improve performance , allowing you to rank higher in the SERPs.
For this reason, it is advisable to perform SEO audits frequently, at annual or even semi-annual intervals.
What is an SEO audit for?
A general SEO audit consists of reviewing technical ranking factors such as content optimization and link profiles, with the ultimate goal of uncovering specific website issues. This way, a plan can be created to correct these problems by implementing best practices.
SEO audits also include checks to uncover conversion and user experience issues on your site—everything you need to know to get on track on the long road to search engine optimization.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO relates to the elements of your own website, everything that happens within it, and is within your reach. That’s why it’s important in the SEO audit .
These internal factors include both the technical configuration and the quality of your code, as well as the textual and visual content, as well as the usability of your page.
In this regard, it is important for you to know that to have good on-page SEO you need:
- Technical excellence: Code quality must be high. Check that the code isn’t blocking crawlers from indexing your website.
- Awesome content: Why do people visit your website? It’s because it contains information they’re looking for. Therefore, you must write excellent content. Search engines like Google read your text, so it should be keyword-rich, informative, and easy to read.
- Impeccable UX: The third and final pillar is user experience. Users should be able to easily understand your website. They should be able to find what they’re looking for in the blink of an eye. They should know where to click and how to navigate your site. And it should be fast!
Off-page SEO
There are factors external to the page that should also be taken into account in an SEO audit. These are known as off-page SEO .
Its purpose is to boost your web links, as well as social media engagement and other marketing activities that, as we mentioned, are outside of your own website.
If you focus on off-page SEO, your main goal will be to get more links . The more relevant links you get, the higher your ranking on Google. This way, you’ll get the following benefits:
- Increased rankings: This is the most important benefit of off-page SEO. Your website will rank higher in the SERPs, which also means more traffic.
- Increased Page Rank : Page rank is a number between 0 and 10 that indicates a website’s importance in Google’s eyes. Off-page SEO can help you climb the rankings.
- Greater exposure: Higher rankings also mean greater exposure because when a website ranks high, it gets more links, as well as visits and more social media mentions. It’s like an endless sequence of events where one thing leads to another and then another.
- Trustworthiness: In addition to the above, Google has introduced the concept of expertise-authority-trustworthiness (EAT ). Off-page SEO is a fundamental pillar for the last concept of this trinity.
Importance of an SEO audit
There are countless benefits to performing an SEO audit. Here are some of them:
- It helps you identify SEO weaknesses: you can look at certain elements to determine if they’re properly optimized. It’s important to remember that Google updates its algorithms frequently. You need to keep up!
- Measurability: An SEO audit will set the stage against which all metrics and progress can be measured. If you don’t know what the situation was like before, it will be difficult to determine how your site has improved later.
- Prioritize marketing: An SEO audit is likely to uncover several areas for improvement. While it may be tempting to run through all these suggestions as quickly as possible, it’s worth breaking down individual tasks into mini-projects and prioritizing them.
- Tracking your keyword ranking progress: One of the best ways to determine how well your site is performing is by monitoring the movement of your keywords. As you optimize, you should see your keywords increase.
- Evaluate your competition: Website audits aren’t limited to your own websites. You can perform an SEO audit on your competitors’ websites to discover your strengths and weaknesses.
How to do a step-by-step SEO audit?
It’s very important to know how to perform an SEO audit. Although it can be complicated to standardize the entire process, here are a series of steps you can follow as a reference:
- Compare your rankings and understand your competitors: You need to compare your site’s rankings as well as its performance against your competitors.
- Check for duplicate versions of your page in Google’s index: It’s very important to ensure that Google only indexes one version of your website.
- Analyze your page speed: Speed is key. It’s important for your website to be fast from both an SEO and UX perspective.
- Check for mobile compatibility issues: If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s likely you’re not putting UX first.
- Analyze and resolve more indexing issues: Here you can learn about coverage errors and excluded pages.
- Understand your website’s page experience: User experience is becoming a ranking factor. It’s something you should actively monitor and act upon.
- Audit your on-page SEO: Analyze the need for optimization of title tags and meta descriptions to verify that you are not missing opportunities for optimization.
- Fix broken internal links: Having broken internal links creates a very poor user experience and sends negative quality signals to search engines.
- Check your redirects: If redirects are implemented incorrectly, this can cause crawling issues.
- Find and fix duplicate content issues: Duplicate content on your website can cause problems that prevent you from ranking as high as you could.
Tools for conducting an SEO audit
The following tools will help you gather the information you need to complete a comprehensive and effective SEO audit of your website:
- Semrush : This is a software that helps businesses execute digital marketing methods like SEO campaigns. This digital marketing program helps execute SEO campaigns like pay-per-click (PPC) or social media and content marketing.
- Google Search Control : Google offers several search and analytics tools, and this is just one of them. One of the most powerful features of this tool is receiving alerts about errors or critical issues, ensuring your site is always Google-compliant. Beyond that, you can check indexing statistics, view HTML errors, and many other features.
- Google Mobile Friendly Test : Google’s Mobile Friendly Test is a tool that allows businesses to type in your URL and find out how mobile-friendly your page is.
Of course, there are other tools. These are just a few of the most widely used to facilitate an SEO audit. Still, your number one tool will be a good critical sense and consistency.
