How can you Perform an SEO Audit?

By: Devex Hub/October 6, 2022/ Marketing/ 0 Comments

Digital Marketing is crucial for the growth of any business. And the best way to begin with the marketing of your business is to conduct an SEO audit. SEO audits are critical for your business. With tens of thousands of websites being created daily, and competition of new websites constantly joining in. It can be hard to improve your search engine rankings with the competition of new websites constantly joining in. An audit is a perfect approach to finding the weak spots in your web presence. And fixing these issues so you can boost traffic, conversion rates, and revenue.

SEO audit is conducted by digital marketing experts and is commonly used to check whether a website is optimized for search robots and other online marketing. With the help of an audit, a business can collect data about any website and user behavior to improve its SEO strategy. With Google’s algorithm updates happening every month, it is crucial to stay on top of all changes and ensure you implement them correctly.

Purpose of SEO Audit

An SEO analysis thoroughly evaluates your website’s current SEO strategy and high-level goals.

Thus, a thorough search engine optimization audit is helpful in the below-mentioned points:

Improving site performance
Evaluating your competitor sites and determine if there are any areas of overlap with yours
Evaluating the effectiveness of existing content on your site
Checking if the current SEO is working

SEO Audit Checklist

The SEO audit is a crucial step before starting an SEO campaign. It helps you measure your website’s current state, evaluate your competitors and search engine ranking positions, identify potential problems, set goals, and define milestones for future work.

An SEO audit checklist is a list that includes everything one needs to perform an SEO audit.

Technical SEO Audit

To begin with the SEO audit, a technical audit is the first thing you should consider. Technical Audit SEO is the process of evaluating your website on a technical level and checking its website structure following best practices. Technical audits include search engine crawling to check for any possible code issues and broken links using various SEO audit tools available.

Here is a technical audit list to help you perform a technical audit and gain a better understanding of your website.

Register with Google Search Console – Google Search Console is a free website audit tool that will give you the best insights into your organic search results – and show you where your site traffic is coming from
Optimize robots.txt File – Robot.txt is highly crucial for a website as they contain the detail of pages that should be accessible by the search engine crawlers.
Make SEO-friendly URLs – Check if the URLs are clean, simple, and SEO-friendly. The URLs should include keywords, and hyphens and must be unique for each page.
Secure Site – It is crucial to check if the website is SEO-friendly and has SSL certs. You can check that on the search bar, if the website is not secure, you will see the Not Secure error.
Website Speed – According to Google, the page loading speed of a website is a primary ranking factor. So check for website speed optimization.
Mobile-friendly Site – The increased use of mobile phones makes it mandatory to have a mobile-friendly business website.

On-page Audit

Once the technical audit is done, the next step towards the SEO audit is to deal with the content on the website. The on-page factors are crucial for any website to have a better ranking on the SERP. And you can use an on-page SEO checker by Semrush to carry out the on-page audit of your site.

Here is an on-page audit checklist;

Check Meta Tags – A page meta tags include page titles and descriptions that will appear on the SERP. As a result, to rank at the top of a search engine, your page must have unique titles and descriptions with relevant keywords in it.
Check Headings – Plain text throughout the page will not just attract the eyes of visitors leading to an increased bounce rate. Thus, check whether your page has heading tags and bold text where required.
Check Content SEO – Since content is king, it becomes the primary factor that Google or any other search engine would consider. Checking the content of your website must be done very carefully and scan it for any duplicate or low-quality content.
Internal Linking – A website has multiple pages, and an internal link means a link from one page of your website to the other page. As a result, linking is critical for assisting Google crawlers in crawling your site’s pages.
Image SEO – Images make a website look more beautiful, but if not optimized properly, they can go against you. So check whether your images on the website are descriptive and have ALT text.

Off-page Audit

Off-page SEO refers to all actions you take outside of your website to influence your search engine ranking. These tasks, while performed outside of the website, are critical in the SEO of any business. Here is a detailed checklist of all the off-page tasks.

Link Building – Backlinks provide two main benefits for your website. Firstly, they help to improve your search engine rankings. And secondly, they provide additional exposure and access to your website from external sources. Also, backlinks act like votes in that they indicate to the search engines that the link provided leads to something of value and interest. Also, more backlinks mean more votes leading to a better website ranking. But, to get a better ranking, the quality of backlinks matters. Thus, an off-page audit will provide an analysis of the nature of backlinks, and you can fix it accordingly.
Social Media Engagement – However, social media does not affect the search engine ranking of any website. Further, it helps to improve visibility, increase traffic, and ultimately generate leads through the website of a business. So an SEO audit should not ignore social media platforms.
Local SEO – This is specific for brick-and-mortar businesses or the businesses that serve exclusively in the local area, such as doctors, supermarkets, or local restaurants. Check whether the business is listed in business directories, and has contact information on all digital platforms.

Key Takeaway

If you’re looking for a way to improve your website’s SEO, performing an audit can help you identify areas that need attention. An SEO audit will reveal where your website falls short. And what needs to be changed to improve rankings on search engines like Google and Yahoo! It can also give you information about how other websites rank concerning yours, which can help you decide what steps to take next. We can help with this process by providing our expertise in digital marketing strategy or web design services – whichever is more appropriate for your needs!