What is SEO Audit?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become the lifeline of the Internet world. SEO Audit is one of the essential processes of evaluating a website’s performance to boost the website’s search engine rankings.

In the digital world, you always need to have optimized websites and blogs to show-off the presence of targeted audiences and get the desired results.

An SEO Audit helps website owners break down the different components of SEO. It also pinpoints their weakest points and eliminates any errors that could damage their SERPs.

SEO Audit refers to a set of some technical steps to analyze a website and find out the fault lines and design a strategy to fix them all.

SEO Audit is a thorough analysis of the entire technical infrastructure of the website as well as On-site and Off-site elements that could help to improve your website’s usability, visibility, and accessibility.

Google is constantly changing. The regular SEO audits of your website are required and you need to stay up-to-date on the terms people are searching for business growth.

An SEO audit serves as a pilot diagram for business owners to improve their strategy. An SEO audit calculates the search engine friendliness of a website.

The website owner can create an accurate SEO audit report with an SEO audit checklist. An SEO audit is usually the first step in evaluating your website’s overall SEO health.

An SEO audit helps you to understand your current website benchmarks including issues, weaknesses, strengths, and opportunities. SEO audit looks at various website factors like content, links, and site structure.

SEO audit is a key insight into the effectiveness of your website. It highlights technical issues that need to be fixed as well as indicates opportunities for improvement against competitors.

Here are a lot of advantages of an SEO audit checklist out of which few as follows:

Identify the website’s weakest points and alter them.
Website On-page and Off-page SEO optimization.
Boost website’s loading speed with effectiveness.
Increase organic traffic for your business.

An SEO audit involves analyzing the website itself as well as using a number of tools includes Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google My Business, Google AdWords, and Bing Webmaster Tools, etc.

Benefits of SEO Audit –

An SEO audit determines the website’s as-it-state based on which you can determine a workable plan for improving your website’s rankings on major search engines.

SEO Audit is a great benchmarking exercise that can give you an idea of what your competitors are doing. It can help you formulate tactics to improve the website’s visibility and accessibility.

It’ll educate about all the factors that could affect your ranking on major search engines. You can create a strategy that helps you fix issues and improve the website’s DA by knowing the weaknesses.

An effective SEO audit will provide the following benefits:

The overview of current search engine performance, detailing of strengths, weaknesses and competitive gaps.
Recommendations of how to take advantage of your strengths, minimize your weaknesses, and seal the gap on your competitors.
An actionable to-do a list of steps based on your strengths, weaknesses, and competitive gaps.
You can gain a clear view of what’s working well and what could be causing performance issues.
You can identify issues before they become problems.
You can improve website search engine rankings which affect the volume of users coming to you.
You can improve UX for website users that affect more conversions and repeat visits.

A Step by Step Guide for Effective SEO Audit –

SEO Audit is a technical and mechanical aspect and it involves some definite steps that need to be followed in a sequence to get desired results.

Here is a comprehensive SEO audit checklist that covers all the significant aspects of SEO:

# Website Optimization – You need to do a website examination that is called crawling. It helps in understanding what the real issues are and how it can be fixed. Crawling is done via coding or software. The coding method is complicated and there is different crawling software in the market.

# Webmaster Tools – The Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools are the next steps to get information about the website’s performance and visitors’ once crawling is done.

# Accessibility to Website – The SEO auditor has to start the process of SEO Audit after crawling and collecting data via webmaster tools.

SEO Auditor has to verify the accessibility of a website. SEO Auditor needs to find out how a website is being accessed by search engine crawlers and visitors.

It’s determined that what type of Meta tags and Meta descriptions a website contains and how it’s URL is responding to browsers. In SEO Audit, you need to verify the XML sitemap and its submission with webmaster tools.

The architecture of your website should be simple and smooth to help visitors easily accessible. You need to check the speed and image loading capacity of the website in the SEO Audit process.

# Ineligibility of Website – In SEO Audit, you should check which pages are accessible and blocked off a website and how the website is being indexed by different search engines.

You should verify how many of a website’s accessible pages are being indexed. It can be checked by entering the URLs of those webpages.

# Ranking Factors – The SEO Auditor needs to analyze a website with reference to both On-page and Off-page ranking factors.

On-page ranking factors will include URLs, Content, HTML Markup, Titles, Meta Descriptions, Image and Outbound Links. On-page SEO Audit would involve an analysis which includes:

—- Navigation – The website global navigation affects the user experience. It should be simple, accurate and it should be easy on the page’s footer.

—- Breadcrumbs – It helps to communicate the right pages and convey the right information. It’s helpful with Schema Markup and navigation.

—- Content – The website articles and information should be optimized for the relevant keywords to the targeted audience. The long-tail keywords have a chance to rank higher on search engines.

—- URL – The URL should be short, simple, and keyword focused. It should communicate what the particular webpage is about.

Off-page SEO Audit involves backlinks, social media audits, and traffic sources. The Off-page ranking factors will include Domain Popularity, Backlinks, and Social Media Bookmarking.

—- Traffic – Google Analytics is the best tool to find out the traffic source. In Search Console, you can see an information chart with the website ranking, performance and search visibility.

—- Backlinks – The SEO audit analyze the quality and quantity of inbound links. The most authoritative and beneficial links are from .gov and .edu websites.

It’s crucial to ensure that deep links are more than the homepage links. Deep links point out to internal webpages and homepage links point out to start page.

# Keyword Analysis – Keywords are one of the important elements of SEO and necessary to begin the SEO audit with proper keyword analysis.

Your goal should be to discover the less competitive long-tail keywords specific to your industry.

You need to use relevant and measurable keywords that help to rank better. It’s important to understand that the use of too many keywords on the website will destroy your SEO reputation.

# Website Speed – Website speed is an important point for business success. It has a lot of impact on the user’s experience and can influence users’ decisions to stay on the website.

It’s crucial to boost website speed performance. You can find out the website speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.

It can help you determine the speed of the website on both desktop and mobile devices. You should look at for certain factors which include:

—- Code to text ratio.

—- The size of images on the website.

—- The webpage size.

—- Cache installation.

—- Minimize JavaScript (JS) to improve site speed.

# UX Analysis – The User Experience (UX) is crucial to your SEO. Google has made UX as one of the main SEO ranking factors.

You would get a clear insight into the website’s traffic and the average time spent by visitors during UX analysis. You can use Google Analytics to check UX on your website.

# Technical Aspects – A technical SEO audit involves an analysis of the technical base of the website. Some of the website features to analyze are as follow:

—- DNS Settings – It’ll help you to make sure that search engine bots don’t get an error whenever they try to crawl and index the website. Google Search Console can check for crawl errors and the current status on the dashboard.

—- Server Error – You can check further detail in the search console to look for any crawl errors as well as the total server connectivity errors.

—- Robots.txt – In the Search Console, you can use the Robots.txt tester to ensure specific parts of your website are not being blocked.

—- 404 Errors – 404 errors indicate that there are missing pages and it could mean that the server has issues and are problems with the website’s performance. In the Search Console, you can click on crawl errors and select the ‘Not found’ tab to check errors and look into to determine the real issues.

—- Site Security – Google gives preferences to secured websites. The secured website helps users and even slightly improves your search rankings and traffic.

—- Indexation – You can go into Google dashboard and click on Google Index to check Index Status to see the total number of indexed pages.

—- HTML Validation – You can use an HTML validation tool to determine any website errors to improve the website accordingly.

—- XML Sitemap – It’s crucial to ensure that the website has an XML sitemap for bots to scan the webpages.

# Google Search Console – It has a dashboard for webmasters and SEO experts to check up the status of a website in search.

With the help of this tool, Googlebot can find linked pages elsewhere online that you might not know existed whereas regular crawlers are limited to what’s linked to your website.

You can also check your disavow file where you’ve asked Google not to take into account when assessing your website’s spammy links.

# Competitor’s SEO Analysis – It’s an indicator of success to get how well your website performing in comparison to rivals in the industry.

You can consider the following tasks to an SEO audit checklist:

—- You should compare up to 5 competitor websites local and global rankings.

—- You need to mark-down all websites’ organic rankings for certain keywords.

—- You can review the homepage copy of all websites.

—- You should check UX of every website and NAP details.

—- You should inspect links from testimonial websites and social media.

—- You should examine publishing dates of high-ranking blogs.

—- You should observe linked images and ALT text.

List of Known SEO Audit Tools –

The SEO audit tools can assist you in conducting website and SEO audits. These tools are good starting points for learning more about your website’s performance.

Here is a list of few available tools in the market:

# WooRank – It’s a free tool for a single URL. It’s available on 14 days free trial. It provides a range of useful SEO and website information on the WooRank website.

The free version will include information about:

On-page and technical SEO information.
Keyword usage data.
Website technologies and webpage performance.
Broken link information for the given webpage.
Speed optimization information.

The paid version starts at $50/mo and provides keyword tracking, competitors’ keyword ranking, search ranking changes, website uptime monitoring, and basic website crawling to find errors.

In the paid version, you can get advanced reviews, competitor analysis, social insights, and integration with Google Analytics, and Google Search Console.

# SEO SiteCheckup – It’s a free tool for a single URL. It’s also available on 14 days free trial. It provides a free website and SEO audit report that delivers useful information.

SEO SiteCheckup free report information and top features that include:

On-page and technical SEO information.
Backlinks and social media.
Google Analytics use.
Broken link information for the webpage.
Speed optimization information.
Mobile-friendliness, usability and page image.
Keyword usage data.

The paid version starts with $25/mo that provides additional features such as backlink analysis, website uptime monitoring, competitor analysis, keyword position tracking, broken link checking, and competitor analysis.

#UpCity – It provides a free report card for a single URL. The free report allows you to include a targeted keyword to focus on the analysis.

The report will include a wide range of areas like rank analysis, link building, on-site analysis, current indexing, and website accessibility.

The free report will include information and features about:

Link building analysis and opportunities.
On-page analysis.
Current indexing check.
Keyword usage data.
Website accessibility and performance check.
Rank analysis for a targeted keyword.

# Site-Analyzer – It’s a website optimization tool that will analyze a website and generate a multi-point SEO audit report.

This tool provides capabilities for crawling an entire website, performing On-page analysis, backlink analysis, competitor tracking, ongoing rank tracking, and more.

The analysis report is based on 50 criteria that include server configuration, text content, multimedia content, HTML tagging, internal and external networking, and page popularity.

# SEranking – It’ll include a wide range of tools and options with competitor research in backlink and PPC, B2B features like page change monitoring, and social media management.

This tool includes the top 10 search results by finding and eliminating On-page weaknesses. You can get accurate keyword position tracking with the real-time position of your website’s keywords in SERPs.

# SEMRush – It’s powerful keyword research, monitoring, and tracking tool. It’s also a useful tool for competitive research, PPC analysis and research, backlink audits, website SEO audits, and domain comparisons.

It can generate a wide range of analytics reports that includes automated weekly and monthly reports. SEMRush provides a number of social media tracking and analysis features, an informative blog, and a series of SEO-related webinars.

# Ahrefs – This tool improves search traffic, monitor your place and research your competitors. It also helps you to learn your competitors ranking and tell about what you need to do to outrank them.

This tool provides keyword research, backlink research, content research, competitive analysis, rank tracking, and web monitoring.

Conclusion – Search engine optimization has become one of the crucial elements for website success. It’s necessary to conduct a proper SEO audit to succeed in the competition. A timely SEO audit is required for a website owner to give a face-lift his SEO strategy as when needed. The regular checking-up of your website for errors and performing an SEO audit is a must to keep a healthy online presence.