How To Do An SEO Audit Of Your Website
Introduction:
Do you get your regular health checkup done and take care of your health?
Just as you create the identity of a healthy person in your community with the help of a good diet and exercise, similarly a website is also a digital identity of your business.
But do you ever analyze your website and see how many visitors are coming monthly, how many are converting into customers, how many backlinks are being created for the website, and due to which reasons your website is ranking today?
Like other people, you may also not do it.
But do you know that many times we do not even know, and some pages of our website are not even getting indexed, let alone ranking.
This happens due to some internal and external factors of the website, studying, analyzing and optimizing, which is called a website SEO audit.
By doing an SEO audit of the website, your chances of ranking in SERP increase a lot.
Do you know that nowadays it is very important for every business to have an online presence, and for that the website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) should also be strong. But do you know that to improve the SEO performance of your website, it is very important to first conduct an SEO audit?
If you have never done an SEO audit of your website, then you will not be able to know the actual performance of your website. Through SEO audit, you can identify which issues are taking your website down in search engine rankings. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced digital marketer, SEO audit is a very important step to optimize your website.
In this guide, we will tell you 10 simple and effective steps through which you can do a proper SEO audit of your website, which can improve the ranking of your website. So, let’s get started!
So without delay, let’s start today’s blog with SEO Audit Meaning.
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What Is an SEO Audit?
If we understand the meaning of SEO Audit, then we can say that it is a process under which you analyze the errors or problems of your website due to which your website is not ranking on the first page of Google.
It includes all small and big technical and fundamental errors.
We use some free and paid SEO auditing tools to find and fix these errors.
By using these tools, we get to know a lot of new information, which helps improve website ranking.
Why is an SEO Audit Important?
You know that the website is a digital asset of your business, through which you attract your target customers to your business and create awareness.
But, today in such a highly competitive era when many people are doing the same kind of business, it is becoming difficult to take your business to your target audience.
With the help of inorganic method (Search Engine Marketing), you can take your website to the people in a short time, but when it comes to organic method (Search Engine Optimization), it takes some time.
Moreover, there are some small and big mistakes which we do not even know about.
In such a situation, you need a website SEO audit, in which a complete SEO audit checklist has to be made, which provides you the following benefits (SEO Audit Benefits).
1. You can optimize your website for search engines and users, analyze its technical framework, structure, mobile friendliness, and loading speed.
Even a single second delay in loading can increase the bounce rate of your website, due to which you can lose convertible traffic.
2. You start to know which are the SEO factors that are left to be optimized or have been over optimized, due to which it is now considered a Blackhat SEO technique.
With this, you can rework on your already implemented SEO strategies and correct your mistakes so that the search engine can understand your website pages and do crawling and indexing.
Because if the search engine does not access it, then your website will be included in the list of those 91% websites which get almost no organic traffic.
3. With the help of this process, you can find out where your website stands in lead generation and conversion.
By implementing this strategy based on SEO Audit Checklist, you can know which pages have proper CTA, which do not, and which pages need to be redesigned and their layout needs to be modified, so that the conversion rate can increase.
4. This audit process helps in finding your website errors which are spoiling your user experience.
These errors include – Broken Links, Error 404 Redirect, Hidden Content, Speed, Mobile Friendliness, Schema Error, Sitemap Errors, Content Structure (Heading, Subheadings, and Body), etc.
5. Along with this, you get information about website structure issues, by improving which you can improve your user experience.
So we understand that you must have got the answer to your question about the importance of SEO audit.
So far we have understood what is SEO Audit and SEO Audit Benefits, but how do we know when this process should be implemented?
When should a website SEO audit be performed?
Just like it is important to take care of your health, it is also important to take care of your website’s health.
With this, you can eliminate current website errors, and you can also control the future impact today.
In such a situation, whenever you feel that the information posted by you is not reaching your target audience, or the bounce rate of your website is increasing too much, you should perform the SEO audit process.
But here the question arises, how many times should this process be performed to get the best result?
Many experts believe that by implementing this complete process 2-3 times a year, you can make your results predictable to a great extent.
By executing the complete audit process, you can keep your site up to date according to the latest developments, which also gives you a competitive advantage.
But, because there are some changes in the search engine algorithms every day, you can also do minor audits of the website in a month or two.
In Minor Audit, instead of analyzing all the factors, you analyze only a few factors and see how much the algorithm change is affecting them and whether there is any problem in crawling and indexing of your newly posted content.
Let us now talk about how to do SEO Audit and what steps are included in this complete audit process.
To do an SEO Audit, you need some tools, which are called SEO Audit Tools.
With the help of these tools, you can find the errors of your web pages and resolve them.
So, before knowing how to do SEO Audit, let us understand some important SEO Audit Tools.
Tools You’ll Need for an SEO Audit
Manually checking the errors and improvements of a website is a very tedious task.
Some SEO Audit Tools are specifically designed for Site Audit.
Google Search Console: This is a free tool that helps you find and resolve the crawling and indexing issues of your website.
With the help of this tool, you can check and analyze Security Issues, Crawlable Issues, Sitemap Related Issues, Click Through Rate, Any Technical Error, etc.
Google Analytics: With the help of this tool, you can analyze your website performance in search engines.
Through this, you can see your website traffic, clicks, impressions, etc. and can tweak your SEO strategies based on this data.
Page Speed Tools: With the help of Page Speed Tools, you can analyze the page loading speed of your website and find out the factors that are responsible for increasing the loading speed.
For this, you can use free tools like Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix.
Schema Markup Testing Tool: If you are creating the schema of your website, then you would like that the code on the backend is created properly and there should be no errors.
In this way, with the help of a correct schema, you will be able to deliver your business details to your users.
With the help of this free tool, you can test & validate your schema.
SEO Tools: SEO tools allow you to analyze the health of your site and tell you which are the factors that are bringing down your site performance.
These tools include Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, Screaming Frog, BuzzSumo, Copyscape, etc.
These tools provide you the facility to analyze On-Page SEO Factors, Off-Page SEO Factors, Competitor Analysis, Broken Links, Blocked Robots.txt Files, Keywords, Content Structure, Low Quality & Plagiarized Content, etc.
Check My Links: This tool is available as a Chrome Extension which provides the facility to analyze the profile of almost all the links of your website.
Through this, you can find & Analyze Broken Links, Structure of Internal & External Links, Backlinks Profile, etc.
After understanding SEO Audit Meaning and SEO Audit Tools in detail, let us now talk about SEO Audit Checklist and see what are the steps that are necessary for Website SEO Audit.
How to do an SEO audit of the website?
If you want to fix your website errors and want your digital shop to come to the notice of people, then you will need to perform website SEO.
While performing this process, you have to follow these 10 steps so that you will be able to fix as many errors as possible and rank in SERP by making dead pages live.
Let’s understand this 10 Step SEO Audit Checklist.
1. Crawl your website with the help of an SEO tool:
To find and fix website errors, first you have to crawl your website with the help of an SEO tool.
For this, you can use any tool like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Semrush.
You have to copy your URL and go to the selected tool and click on Site Audit to let the website crawl.
After a few seconds, you will get the results, in which you will see various factors that tell about the health condition of your site.
2. Check the browsability of the duplicate version of your site on Google:
Duplicate version shows different web addresses of any website, which shows which address is being indexed.
For example, any website can have different web addresses, such as,
- http://yourdomain.com
- http://www.yourdomain.com
- https://yourdomain.com
- https://www.yourdomain.com
A user does not see much difference here, but in the eyes of the search engine all these URLs are different.
Only one web address of your site should be indexed, you have to put a 301 redirect on the other addresses so that if the user clicks on any of your other addresses then he lands directly on your main address.
3. Check the Indexed URLs of your site:
Indexed URLs means URLs that have already been crawled & indexed by the search engine and are ranking on a page in SERP.
To find such pages, you can use the “site:yourdomain” directory.
All you have to do is go to Google and search site:digitalazadi.com
The number of indexed URLs is written at the top of the results shown in front of you.
To cross check this, you can go to your Google Search Console and match it with the number of indexed URLs mentioned there.
This will let you know how many URLs are not indexed, which simply means that the page has not been crawled and does not exist anywhere in the search result.
Along with this, you can also use the Screaming Frog tool to know the Indexed & Non-Indexed Pages, which crawls your site just like Google.
This lets you know if the page is blocked because of its duplicate/thin content or if you have accidentally blocked it with the robots.txt file.
This way you can also analyze your robots.txt file, which is a file that tells search engine crawlers which page to read and which not to.
This way you can resolve these errors and allow the page for indexing.
4. Check the manual actions sent by Google on the site:
Many times when a website does not follow Google Webmaster’s Quality Guidelines, then some penalties or manual actions are imposed on them by Google.
These penalties are imposed on a specific page of the website or the entire website, which are responsible for deranking a website.
Until Google removes these actions, that specific web page of yours cannot rank higher in SERP.
So you have to keep checking these manual actions during auditing and if some such actions come, then you can resolve them to a great extent with the help of this guide.
5. Analyze On-Page SEO Factors:
It is very important to analyze the On-Page SEO factors in the SEO audit process.
On-Page SEO factors include analyzing and correcting Headings, Subheadings, Title Tag, Meta Description, Alt Tags, Keyword Placement, etc.
To understand the On-Page SEO factors in detail, do read this blog of ours.
By analyzing all these factors with the help of an SEO tool, you can generate a report where you get to know which factors need to be optimized & corrected and which factors are already optimized.
6. Manage Internal & External Links and Fix Your Broken Links:
Internal & External Linking is considered to be an excellent SEO Ranking Factor.
This strategy helps you to link one of your content with other relevant content.
You can link the content of your website (Internal) as well as any relevant web page of any other High Domain Authority website. (External)
Here you have to see whether proper linking has been done and only relevant information has been linked, so that the reader can get some additional information which will benefit them.
But, many times we do not know that some of the web pages we have linked do not exist anymore.
In such a situation, broken links are created which do not take the users anywhere and hurt the user experience.
In such a situation, it is important to audit the broken links, which you can analyze & fix with the help of free tools like Google Webmaster and paid tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog.
7. Find Duplicate & Thin Content Issues and Fix Them Immediately:
Duplicate Content means content that is posted repeatedly on different pages of the same website or is very similar to each other.
Duplicate content makes it difficult for search engines to understand the right content, which affects ranking.
Similarly, Thin Content is a type of content that is created without keeping in mind the original context and relevance.
Duplicate & Thin Content is also seen as a Black Hat SEO Tactic where website owners try to manipulate their ranking with its help.
But, you have to stay away from such activities at all costs and keep finding & removing them with the help of SEO tools like Ahrefs & Semrush.
8. How to check Mobile Friendliness & Web Page Loading Speed:
Due to the increase in the number of mobile users, it has become very important to make websites mobile friendly nowadays.
But, it has been seen many times that people do not test their website for mobile users and ultimately lose many of their customers.
You can use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test Tool to test mobile friendliness.
Along with this, it is also very important to pay attention to the website page loading speed, otherwise, it can increase the bounce rate of the website, which gives a negative signal to Google, and your website does not rank.
To improve mobile friendliness and loading speed, you have to optimize your navigation, font size, content layout, heavy media files, etc.
9, Perform a Backlink Audit:
Useful & Relevant Backlinks take your website’s SEO to the next level. So don’t forget to include it in your SEO Audit Checklist.
According to a study done by Backlinko on 11.8 Million Google Search Results, backlinks are still more important than other ranking factors.
When you get a backlink from a high domain authority website, it’s value is very high, which also increases your site authority.
You can use tools like Ahrefs & Ubersuggest to perform a backlink audit.
With their help, you can analyze your current backlink profile and see how to bring more high-value links.
Along with this, you can find the backlinks of your competitors and work towards outperforming them.
10. Audit the Website Content:
Lastly, it is important to audit your content. You will optimize other SEO factors and errors, but to find out the content quality and relevance, you will have to perform a content audit.
Sometimes there are some low-quality pages which are getting very little traffic. In such a case, you can update the content of those pages and optimize it according to the search engine and send it for indexing again.
However, if that page has become completely dead and you feel that it needs a lot of optimization, you can also delete that page.
But while deleting, do not forget to direct the link juice of that page to any of your relevant pages by applying a 301 redirect.
FAQ – Website SEO Audit
1. What is SEO audit?
Answer:
SEO audit is a process in which you analyze the SEO performance of your website and in this you check factors like technical issues, on-page SEO, backlinks, content quality, and site speed, so that you can also improve the search engine rankings of your website.
2. Which tools are required to do SEO audit?
Answer:
Some popular tools for conducting SEO audit are:
- Google Analytics (to check user behavior)
- Google Search Console (to check indexation and crawling issues)
- SEMrush/Ahrefs/Moz (for backlink analysis and keyword research)
- GTmetrix/PageSpeed Insights (to check website speed and performance)
- Screaming Frog (to identify technical SEO issues)
3. How often should SEO audit be done?
Answer:
SEO audit should be performed regularly. You can do a full audit once every 3-6 months. If you are redesigning your website, or Google algorithm is updated, then it is very important to audit at that time also.
4. What things are checked in SEO audit?
Answer:
In SEO audit you check some important things like:
- Site speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- Keyword optimization
- On-page SEO elements (Title tags, meta descriptions, header tags)
- Backlinks and internal links
- Technical SEO issues (404 errors, redirect issues)
- Content quality and relevancy
5. What is the benefit of doing SEO audit?
Answer:
SEO audit helps you to know about the issues of your website so that you can optimize your website. This improves your website rankings, increases organic traffic, and gives you better engagement with your audience.
6. What should be done after SEO audit?
Answer:
After SEO audit, it is very important to fix the issues you have identified. You will have to improve site speed, repair broken links, eliminate duplicate content, and follow SEO best practices. These steps will boost the overall performance of your website.
7. How much time does SEO audit take?
Answer:
The time of SEO audit depends on the size and complexity of the website. An audit of a small website can take a few hours, while an audit of a large website can take a few days to complete. You have to analyze every step carefully, so patience is important.
8. Can SEO audit be done for free?
Answer:
Yes, there are some free tools that you can use for SEO audit like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and GTmetrix. But if you want a detailed analysis, it would be better to use premium tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Screaming Frog.
9. What are the most common mistakes while doing SEO audit?
Answer:
There are some common mistakes:
- Skipping mobile-friendliness test: Ignoring mobile optimization is wrong for SEO today.
- Ignoring website speed: Slow loading negatively impacts website rankings.
- Not fixing broken links: Broken links hurt SEO.
- Keyword stuffing: Using excessive keywords can make the content unnatural.
10. Is SEO audit a one-time process?
Answer:
No, SEO audit should be an ongoing process. Search engine algorithms and website trends change regularly, so it is important to do an SEO audit of the website at periodic intervals. You also need to continuously optimize your website.
Do you want to get your website SEO audited?
If you want your website to rank better on search engines and increase traffic, a detailed SEO audit of your website is a must! Our expert team can do a customized SEO audit for you, so that you can take your website performance to the next level.
So, contact us now and start your SEO audit! If you need more SEO tips, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog.
Also Read
“Top Free SEO Tools For Website Management & Optimization”
“How To Build An eCommerce Website Step By Step?”
Conclusion:
For any business, its website is responsible for everything from traffic generation and brand awareness to lead generation and lead conversion.
However, sometimes, some errors occur in the website that the website owner is not aware of, and due to those errors, a lot of information does not reach the people.
In such a situation, we need to implement the Website SEO Audit Process, which we read in this blog today.
Through this blog, we have answered in detail questions like what SEO Audit is, what are SEO Audit Benefits, how to do SEO Audit, and Website SEO Audit Checklist.
I hope this blog post provided you with the insights you were looking for. If you found it helpful, please share it with your friends and community so that they too can benefit from this information.
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