What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization enhances the visibility of websites so that search engine crawlers can find matches to search inquiries. But, when you run an SEO campaign, it’s important to check how well it performs, which is why an audit is essential.
Why SEO audit is important to ranking high and attracting traffic depends on many factors, such as keywords, site structure and performance metrics. Collectively, these SEO elements signal the likely quality of the user experience. This is a key ranking factor.
You can perform different types of audits, from comprehensive site audits to more focused SEO link audits. Generally, an SEO audit involves:
- Gathering data from a variety of sources;
- Examining current traffic and performance;
- Analyzing key metrics to present as a website audit report;
- Offering immediately actionable insights.
Now, the question is, “How do you prepare everything and proceed with an SEO audit?” Here’s what you should know:
How to Prepare for an SEO Audit?
Regular audits maintain the effectiveness of the SEO. Keeping an SEO audit checklist is considered good practice, and you should always go ahead by defining your goals.
It is important to set the goals and objectives of the audit at the beginning of the process. This includes establishing what the audit needs to achieve to be considered successful.
Common objectives are:
- To improve organic traffic;
- To enhance keyword ranking;
- To identify technical issues;
- To benchmark the site against its competitors.
To achieve maximum optimization, the audit needs to be as comprehensive as possible. Clearly defined objectives are essential. They help maintain the audit SEO focus.
Get the Right SEO Tools
Some auditing tasks can’t be done manually. It takes specialist tools with discrete functions.
Here, you can find a mix of free and paid tools, and what suits you depends on your budget. If you’re willing to spend some money and want the very best tool, you might want to put your money on Ahrefs, which offers site-wide audits and backlink analysis.
However, you should not just go with it, but take your time to research this option. Ideally, you should go to a reputable site to read Ahrefs review and have a closer look at how it really performs in the real world. This also tells you whether or not you should spend that much money on this tool.
In case budget seems to be a problem, you might want to try some of the following tools to improve SEO rankings:
- Google Search Console (GSC). GSC provides insights into a site’s performance in Google’s search results. It considers keyword effectiveness, index coverage, and mobile friendliness.
- Google Analytics (GA). GA tracks the site’s performance, user behavior, and conversion rates.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider. This is a site crawler that locates and identifies technical issues like broken links or unoptimized meta tags.
Remember, a detailed SEO analysis makes use of several tools to collect and analyze as much data as possible. Be prepared to have a few popular tools in your arsenal for the best results.
Gather Baseline Data Using Tools
Before starting the audit, it is important to know the current state of the SEO. This data will be the benchmark from which to measure progress.
The key metrics to gather data from are:
- Current traffic, using GA to examine metrics like bounce rate and pages per session;
- Rankings, using Ahrefs to establish how the target keywords are performing;
- Performance metrics, such as Screaming Frog or Google PageSpeed Insights, were used to examine technical performance.
How to Conduct Your Technical SEO Audit
Scheduling a regular technical site auditensures a website is always efficiently optimized. The practice identifies and corrects issues before they escalate, protecting the user experience.
There are four key areas.
- Crawling and indexing;
- Site structure and URL analysis;
- Mobile-friendliness;
- Page Speed and Performance.
Crawling and Indexing
Tools like Screaming Frog and GSC identify crawl errors and indexing issues. Key SEO review tasks are checking robot.txt files so that the correct pages are crawled, and verifying the XML sitemap formatting. These two features help search engines understand the structure of the site, improving the accuracy of the indexing.
Site Structure and URL Analysis
A site’s structure needs to be logical and intuitive, with a clear hierarchy and descriptive URLs to assist crawling.
An SEO tool like Ahrefs ensures the proper use of canonical tags and also looks for broken links. The SEO link audit also helps identify duplicated content that disrupts navigation and interrupts the hierarchy.
Mobile-Friendliness
Good mobile performance is critical and a major ranking factor. Responsive design optimizes mobile-friendliness. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test checks if a site delivers a seamless page experience regardless of device.
Page Speed and Performance
Page speed directly impacts user experience, making it a key ranking factor. Fast loads keep bounce rates low. Speeds can be tested using Google’s PageInsights or examined via Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics.
Essential audit tasks are:
- Optimizing images;
- Leveraging cache browsing;
- Minimizing large JavasScript and CCS files.
Reasons to Conduct an On-Page SEO Audit
An on-page SEO audit focuses on optimizing the individual pages of a website.
The audit covers quite a few aspects of on-page optimization. For instance, it checks keyword optimization to ensure keywords are aligned with audience intention and integrated into the page’s various elements, such as its meta tags and descriptions, titles, and content.
Next up, the audit pays attention to content quality – both text and visual content, including videos, images, etc. – contributing to a comprehensive content SEO audit. It evaluates how valuable and unique the content is. Google Search Console can help you find underperforming content that you have to improve or sometimes delete to protect your rankings.
Finally, the on-page SEO audit involves checking the internal linking structure. It looks at link quality and distribution to improve navigation. Using the right tool can help identify problems like broken links and orphan pages, which affect your rankings.
Reasons to Choose an Off-Page SEO Audit
Off-page SEO focuses on the external factors that influence ranking.
Crucially, it examines the quality and number of backlinks and assesses how well they are contributing to domain authority.
An off-page audit is also useful in competitor analysis. It helps unearth missed opportunities. You can find them and create content to ensure you rank higher on Google.
Some backlinks can be harmful, for example, spammy links. The audit helps identify them so they can be disavowed for a healthy backlink profile. Many tools are designed to evaluate DA and link relevance during a backlink profile analysis.
Through an audit, you can identify unwanted links, which you can “disavow” to ensure you have a healthy backlink profile.
Reasons to Conduct a User Experience (UX) Audit
A User Experience audit focuses on analyzing the principles of user experience design in relation to SEO. This tells you how usable your website is, how it performs, and how likely it is for your site to rank higher in Google.
During the audit, the tool you use assesses navigation structure. It tells you if the structure is not properly organized, so you make necessary changes. It also checks how your site performs on mobile devices and pinpoints possible issues.
A user experience audit also considers the quality of your content and determines how relevant and engaging it is for your target audience. At the same time, it checks for visual design consistency and accessibility of your site for people with disabilities.
How to Handle Analytics and Reporting
To identify SEO problems and fix them, you need to set up analytics and reporting while conducting an audit. For analytics, Google Search Console and Google Analytics will work just fine. But, using specialized tools can make things easier.
On the other hand, reporting involves sharing information about the outcomes of different SEO audits. For instance, it should offer a brief overview of all the findings of your audit, along with any key issues and recommendations.
At the same time, the audit report must share findings of technical SEO analysis, on-page SEO analysis, content analysis, and backlink analysis. Finally, there needs to be a list of recommendations with timelines included in the report.
How to Implement Change and Monitor Performance?
When askingwhat is SEO audit greatest advantage, experts will tell you that it produces a wide range of actionable insights by monitoring performance constantly. Those insights help boost rankings and increase chances of lead generation.
To take advantage of insights:
- Develop an action plan;
- Breakdown the plan into separate tasks;
- Allocate resources;
- Set realistic deadlines;
- Roll changes out gradually to allow for monitoring.
Before making changes, benchmark the site’s current performance metrics, such as its organic traffic and conversion rates and keyword rankings. GA and GSC are useful for establishing continuous tracking and regular reviews.
Conclusion
There are several key factors involved in considering how to do a site audit. Essentially, a thorough audit should have a clear goal with manageable objectives, be measured from baseline data, include on and off-page analysis, and involve a variety of tools for specialized tasks. Using paid tools can actually help you handle things better, but be sure to compare options before buying one.