Your website must be highly optimised for search engines (SEO) if you want it to be found by people searching for the products and services you offer. What is the best way to determine whether your site is optimised?
Auditing your website for SEO is the first step.
In this article, I will share the importance of an SEO audit and the basic steps to conduct a search engine optimization audit.
Let’s begin.
SEO Audit Definition
A SEO audit can be defined as follows:
An SEO audit is a process of analyzing a website’s organic performance and identifying areas for improvement. It involves reviewing different aspects of the website, including content, technical structure, user experience, and backlinks, to determine any issues that may be affecting its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Also See: Essential Holiday SEO Fixes
Depending on who is conducting the SEO audit, the specifics will differ. There are, however, a few general areas that most audits cover:
- In terms of content quality and length
- Text that has been duplicated
- Markup used for schema
- Structure of URLs
- Information about metadata
- An overview of the site architecture
- Enhancing images
- Overview of the link
- Performance of a website
How Does an SEO Audit Work?
To optimise your website properly, you need to conduct an SEO audit. Most often, it is performed by a specialist, but if you have access to the right tools, you could perform some of the processes yourself.
As part of an SEO audit, the person performing it will analyse several ranking signals, which are factors influencing a website’s ranking. To properly optimise your website, you will need to create a list of steps.
Here are the steps to conduct an SEO audit:
An SEO audit typically involves the following steps:
- Define the scope and objectives: The first step is to identify the website or specific pages that need to be audited and define the objectives of the audit, such as identifying technical issues, improving keyword targeting, or analyzing the competition.
- Analyze website structure and technical performance: This involves reviewing technical aspects of the website, such as page speed, mobile-friendliness, and crawlability. The audit can be done manually or with the help of SEO tools.
- Analyze on-page SEO factors: This involves reviewing the content on each page, including the use of keywords, meta descriptions, and headers, and ensuring they are optimized for search engines.
- Analyze off-page SEO factors: This involves analyzing the website’s backlink profile, identifying low-quality or spammy backlinks, and developing a strategy for building high-quality backlinks.
- Analyze user experience: This involves analyzing user behavior on the website, such as bounce rate, time on page, and navigation, to identify issues that may be affecting the user experience.
- Develop an action plan: Based on the audit findings, an action plan is developed to address the issues and improve the website’s search engine visibility, traffic, and overall performance.
Also read: Importance of SEO To Help Your Business Stand Out
How Do SEO Audits Help You?
When you conduct an SEO audit, you are presented with a roadmap of the steps you need to follow to optimise your website properly.
You are going into SEO blind without a comprehensive audit. An audit will examine your website in much greater detail, so you will know where it stands and how it can be improved. When you hire an SEO company, you will receive a much more in-depth analysis of keywords.
Also read: 5 Brilliant Keywords Research Strategies You Should Try Out
Here are the different ways how SEO audits help you:
- Identify technical issues: An SEO audit can identify technical issues on your website that may be affecting its search engine visibility and ranking. These issues can include broken links, crawl errors, slow page speed, mobile responsiveness issues, and more. By identifying and fixing these issues, you can improve your website’s technical performance, user experience, and search engine ranking.
- Improve on-page optimization: An SEO audit can analyze the on-page elements of your website, such as title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and content quality, to ensure they are optimized for search engines. By improving on-page optimization, you can make it easier for search engines to understand what your website is about and rank it accordingly.
- Identify keyword targeting opportunities: An SEO audit can help identify opportunities for targeting new or more relevant keywords to improve your website’s visibility and ranking in search engines.
- Analyze backlink profile: An SEO audit can analyze your website’s backlink profile to identify high-quality backlinks that are helping your website’s ranking, as well as low-quality backlinks that may be hurting your website’s ranking. By identifying these issues, you can develop a strategy to build high-quality backlinks and disavow low-quality backlinks.
- Stay ahead of competition: An SEO audit can help you stay ahead of your competition by identifying areas where they may be outperforming you in terms of search engine ranking and visibility. By analyzing their strategies, you can develop a plan to improve your website’s ranking and visibility in search engines.
Also read: 11 Reasons Why Your Website Needs A Sitemap
What Is The Next Step?
The results of your audit will be presented to you after it has been completed. In this way, you can determine whether or not your website is well-optimised. As well as providing you with information about your website, it will also allow you to make changes.
Your site might need to be sped up or your meta descriptions may need to be improved. With your audit in hand, you can improve your website to help improve its search engine ranking.
Also read: 11 Reasons Why Your Website Needs A Sitemap
If An SEO audit is vital, whether you don’t know why your website doesn’t rank or want to start paying more attention to SEO. Performing an audit can be done relatively quickly, and you’ll be able to determine where to spend your time and effort to optimise your site effectively.
A regular SEO audit is even better. Audit your website every six or twelve months to see where you have made improvements and where you still need to make improvements. So you can make sure you are doing all you can to bring targeted traffic to your website and make sure it shows up in search results.
