How to Conduct an SEO Audit
Performing an SEO audit can reveal issues that affect your site’s ability to rank. This can include things like Javascript, viewport coding and hreflang attributes.
An SEO audit can also reveal opportunities to improve content. This may be in the form of adding more relevant keywords or adjusting content to better meet user needs.
1. Technical Aspects
The first step in conducting a successful SEO audit is to examine the technical aspects of your website. This includes checking your sitemaps, analyzing the competition, and evaluating competitor keywords. You should also check for errors such as duplicate content, 404s, and non-canonical URLs (different URLs for the same page).
This part of an SEO audit is a crucial one because it ensures that your website is easily crawled. If your website is not crawled, it won’t be indexed, and thus, won’t appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Another important aspect of technical SEO is making sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Since Google’s mobile-first algorithm was implemented, it has become even more important for websites to be optimized for mobile devices. You can test your site’s mobile-friendliness by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.
Finally, you should check that your website is up to date with the latest SEO best practices. This means ensuring that your site is structured properly, having good internal and external links, and making use of metadata (including meta titles and descriptions). Also, you should make sure that your site is secure by checking its SSL certificate. This will help prevent malicious activity from hackers and protect sensitive information such as credit card numbers or social security numbers.
2. Content
A website is a very important asset for any business and one of the most important aspects to consider when it comes to SEO is its content. This includes everything from meta titles and descriptions to body copy, headers, image alt text, keyword usage, etc. A good SEO audit should be able to find any content errors or opportunities that can help the site rank higher in organic search results and reduce its dependence on paid advertising campaigns.
There are a variety of tools available to help with this process, and it is always best to start with a crawl, which will give you an overall overview of the website and highlight any major issues. These can include errors (which need immediate attention), warnings (should be addressed sooner rather than later), and notices (that are more for awareness). Some of these tools can also help you to spot broken pages on your site, which can cause serious damage if they continue to be indexed by Google or if they have backlinks from other sites.
Conducting a content SEO audit can be beneficial to anyone who works in the field of online marketing, whether it is an agency owner or a digital marketer. This will allow them to take a step back from their day-to-day work and evaluate the progress that they have made with their clients. It will also allow them to see any areas of their client’s website that need further development or are currently lacking in visibility.
3. Backlinks
Essentially, a backlink is a hyperlink that leads to your site from another website. During an SEO audit, you need to evaluate the quality of your backlink profile and find ways to improve it.
The best way to do this is by analyzing the backlinks of your competitors. This will help you understand how they rank in search engine results pages and what types of links are working for them. You can also learn from their mistakes and apply them to your own strategy.
However, it’s important to note that not all backlinks are equal. You should avoid anything that looks low-quality or spammy, as it could have a negative impact on your ranking. This includes PBNs (private blog networks), paid links, and link exchanges.
To make sure that your backlinks are clean, you should run them through a tool like Moz’s Backlink Audit Tool. This will check for spammy links based on 17 different factors. It will also evaluate your overall backlink health and tell you if any of your links are at risk of being penalized by Google.
Another way to evaluate your backlinks is by using a competitor analysis tool that will provide you with a list of all the sites that are linking to your competitors. You can then use this information to reach out to those sites and ask them for a link.
4. User Experience
A well-conducted SEO audit will make sure all the elements on your site are functioning as they should. This will help safeguard you against misguided SEO tactics, which could have been applied in an effort to manipulate search ranking algorithms. Performing an SEO audit will also allow you to refocus your SEO strategy back on users and not just on search engines.
A good example of this would be to ensure that your website has an up-to-date and comprehensive set of contact details. This is an important factor in ensuring that potential customers can get in touch with your business in the most effective way possible. It is also important to check that all your forms and checkout processes are working properly so that you can convert visitors into customers.
Another aspect of the user experience to check is whether your site is easy to navigate. This includes checking things like page load speed, mobile responsiveness and if any of your pages are redirecting to 404 errors (page not found).
A good way to check if your site is up to scratch in this regard is to run a “crawl” with software such as Ahrefs or SEMrush. These will scan your website for various SEO factors and give you a report on any errors, warnings or notices that should be addressed immediately.
