Marketers taking their SEO responsibilities know it takes time to master search engine optimization. Since it’s a continuous process, you should frequently do SEO website audits on your website to ensure everything is properly optimized and operating.
The rules for search engines are always evolving, making it simple to overlook crucial upgrades and new specifications that may impact your performance. Performance issues may also exist even if you have followed all the rules.
To keep you on track, we’ve created a thorough yet straightforward SEO website audit checklist with all the necessary actions you must complete to guarantee your SEO success in 2022. Remember that an audit suggests you already have an SEO plan and want to analyze and revisit it to ensure there aren’t any setbacks.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO website audit is a procedure for assessing a website’s search engine friendliness in various categories. An SEO audit’s main objective is to support you in optimizing a website so that it may rank better in search engine results.
An SEO auditor will manually review the website and provide recommendations for what needs to be altered and fixed to improve the website’s search engine performance.
An SEO audit is designed to gather data on how well a website performs on the organic search results page. A comprehensive audit can be beneficial and offer sensitive information that will aid site improvement.
By examining the crucial elements of an SEO audit, a firm may create an action plan based on priority. Additionally, this will assist in raising the rankings in organic search.
Contact us for better SEO audits for enhanced performance on SERP!
Why is an SEO audit crucial?
In the SEO world, things may change drastically in months, so what works now could not in six. An SEO audit will keep you current with the supposedly hundreds of modifications Google makes to its ranking algorithm each year.
To ensure your website is current with the most recent advancements, you should do routine SEO audits at least twice a year. The importance of SEO can be determined by the fact that both small and large business organizations depend on SEO for their website success.
☛ SEO audits are essential to assist your website and organization in avoiding:
- Organic traffic is being lost due to problems with the site’s health.
- loss of sales possibilities or a diminished ability to compete against other brands
- being incorrectly indexed, which prevents searchers from seeing your website
- getting penalized by Google for having harmful backlinks
In conclusion, an audit of your website might identify issues that can lose visitors and revenue.
Tools for SEO Audits You May Need
There are a few tools that you should try to make the SEO process easier before we get started. They’ll make the procedure much simpler and more efficient.
Here are some of the top SEO audit tools and some applications for them:
- Please find out how quickly your page loads and receive suggestions on making it faster using Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool checks whether your structured data has been deployed correctly.
- Utilize Google Analytics to find useful information and trends for website optimization.
- Google Search Console to Check out how well your sites are doing on Google.
- Check out the SERP Simulator to see how your article’s title tag and Meta description will appear on the Google results page.
Simple 10-step checklist for SEO audit
There are several SEO auditing techniques available. Suppose you’re a small business attempting to optimize your site for organic search. Knowing where to start, how in-depth your investigation should go, and which SEO tools will help you gather the most helpful information can be challenging.
We’ve outlined 10 essential components for an effective SEO site audit to cut through some of the clutter. Additionally, we’ll go through how to resolve any problems you encounter and the procedures for carrying them out.
1. Find possibilities for link building:
The process of gaining website authority involves developing links, and no SEO audit would be complete without advice on creating internal and external connections relevant to a certain website.
- Build internal links– Internal links are crucial for creating authoritative hierarchies on your website since they convey link equity inside your pages. Finding anchor text to link to the new content within the older content involves conducting a site search for related, older content that has preferably developed some authority. This strategy is straightforward and well-established.
- Build external links– Connecting various trustworthy websites is essential for increasing Domain Authority. Searching for resource lists that might potentially highlight your work and connect to you is a simple technique to gain external links.
2. Determine what site upgrades are needed:
The broad definition of information architecture is “The way information is organized or structured. “To do an SEO analysis and develop user-friendly solutions to increase page authority without compromising UX by working collaboratively with developers and designers.
More blog articles per page are preferred. If your blog index only has 10 pages at a time, older content will be 20–30 clicks away from your homepage. To move those older entries closer to the homepage, increase the number of posts per page. Check for duplicate links.
3. Track down and correct any weak content:
Your pages won’t be considered in the SERP if they are too thin. This content is anything that does not satisfy consumer demands. Communicating a challenging concept in a 300-word blog post would be considered thin.
However, using 1000–2000 words for each webpage is impractical. Design elements (hero images, icons, and call-to-action buttons) and content centered on your items will predominate on pages closer to your homepage.
4. Find duplicate stuff and remove it:
When you search for the same material, the areas of your website that you looked at for thin content will be looked at. Some SEOs become enraged when discussing duplicate content and the potential site penalties that stem from it.
Google is intelligent enough to detect whether you are purposefully and maliciously duplicating material on your site to jam the SERP with links to your site.
Perhaps pages with a similar design that haven’t been manually canonicalized in Search Console are being dynamically generated by your CMS. Your SEO audit can still be hampered by anything that makes Google’s crawlers work harder or think more complexly.
5. Search for keyword improvement:
Similar to when you bulk up poor content, some pages on your website won’t be able to optimize for target and auxiliary keywords efficiently. Utilize a free keyword tool to look for high intent, high volume, and low difficulty keywords related to your topic.
6. Ensure that your Meta tags are optimized:
Meta tags consist of a title and a description. They are two of the main variables Google considers when deciding how to rank pages and help it understand the content of the page it is indexing.
By aiding users of search results in comprehending the content of your website, they also act as ads for your content. Use your vertical-specific keyword research to write or rewrite your Meta tags, and be careful to optimize them for the keywords that will help them appear in search.
7. Recognize the potential for page updates:
Any modification, no matter how little, directs Google to crawl the website. Therefore, regular changes will help the search engine recognize your relevant and up-to-date information. Two kinds of data require regular updating: First, The top pages are the ones that bring in the most customers for your company.
By updating them, you can be sure that they’ll keep bringing customers to your site. The second one is the Opportunities page. An opportunity page would significantly boost traffic if it were to climb a few spots in the SERP.
8. Analyze the speed of the page:
Since Google has discontinued its Performance Update and Page Experience Update, page speed is crucial. Somewhat to blame for this are increases in smartphone searches.
Anyone searching the internet on their phone won’t hang around for a slow-loading page. It implies that the quicker your website loads, the more probable that Google will reward you with high organic ranks.
9. Check the site for errors:
A 404 error is a notification that states, “Page not found.” Broken links and pictures on your website are typically to blame. Contrary to common belief, sites are not penalized when links are broken.
Four hundred four errors happen naturally when your site’s structure evolves as new and old material is added and removed. Nevertheless, your internal connecting system may become unstable if broken links are in the wrong areas.
10. Transform HTTP to HTTPS:
Running on HTTP is completely unacceptable in the world of digital marketing today. Because HTTPS is speedier and more secure, Google utilizes it as one of its ranking signals.
If you want to know if your site is using HTTPS, you have to manually enter each non-HTTPS variation and ensure they have all been 301 redirected to the HTTPS version. After that, you should go through the search results for any non-HTTPS URLs.
Conclusion
Google is an enigmatic creature. It virtually always modifies its algorithm, but it seldom explains why or how it does so. It is impossible to do a universal SEO audit. These procedures are essential, tried-and-true components of an effective SEO audit.
If you fix the issues they bring to light; you’ll be well on your way to dominating organic search. The ideal course of action is to choose the best digital marketing services experts to handle all of your SEO requirements. Many technical and non-technical issues get resolved with experience.