How to do an SEO Audit?

There are multiple ways to conduct a website SEO audit. It depends upon your expertise and how much you want to go in-depth for creating an audit. Below, we have listed a whole process that can teach you how you can do a website SEO audit in Manchester.

What is SEO Audit?

SEO Audit is a process of evaluation of the SEO effort you have put into your website. For example, how is your website On-Page SEO, and what kind of link have you built for your website? Are there any technical SEO issues on your website? The audit will help find out the answer to these three questions. It will help you to find out the key areas of improvement and the errors that may prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your website.

Not only this, the audit will also help you to find out growth opportunities. It provides insights that can help you create a winning SEO Strategy. For example, you can target more keywords, enhance user experience, or create new content to increase your visibility.

Tools you need for SEO Audit?

Multiple tools are available free and paid to perform an SEO Analysis. We will recommend some of the best tools we use in our SEO Agency in Manchester. Here is the list of tools you can use.

Google Search Console.

It’s a free tool provided by Google that enables you to review your site performance. You can analyze how many pages are performing well and how many are stuck or not getting traffic. It also shows you the technical errors on your website.

Screaming Frog.

It is a very popular tool that can crawl your site effectively. It comes with free and paid versions. The free version has limitations, such as it allows you to crawl only 100 URLs. If you have a bigger site, then you can consider a paid version of your website.

Ahrefs.

Ahrefs is also a paid tool that helps you to generate audits automatically. All you need is to put your site URL and it will crawl and show your website effort. We use this tool mainly for backlinks audits and competitors’ website audits in our agency in Manchester, UK.

Apart from these tools, you can use SEMrush and sitebulb. But you must know that all these tools are for help, not for creating audits. With the help of these tools, you can collect and analyze data and prepare your website SEO Audit Report.

Types of SEO Audit.

There are several types of SEO audits. Each focuses on different aspects of your website.

1. Technical SEO Audit.

Its focus is on the technical aspects of your website. For example, site speed, mobile friendliness, crawl errors, and making sure search engines can crawl and index your website effectively.

2. On Page SEO Audit.

It focuses on On page element of a site. For example, you have to analyze the content and structure of every individual page. It checks title tags, meta description, Keyword usage, and internal linking.

3. Off Page SEO Audit.

It focuses on your website backlinks profile. With the help of this, you can evaluate the quality and relevance of the backlinks pointing to your site. It also helps you check the types of anchor text you have used.

4. Content Audit.

It solely focuses on content quality and its effectiveness. It looks at whether your content is solving user problems, whether it is relevant, and meeting the keyword’s intent. Also, it is optimized for the targeted keywords with the entities.

5. Local SEO Audit.

If you have a local business in Manchester, you can consider a local SEO audit. With the help of this, you can audit your website and Google My Business Profile (GMB). You can check local citations and reviews and make sure the site is optimized for the local search.

6. Competitive SEO Audit.

It helps you to understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. It looks at their keywords, top ranking pages, backlinks, and content strategies. It gives you insights into how you can outperform them.

How to do a comprehensive SEO Audit?

To perform a technical SEO audit, you can use Screaming Frog and also check things manually.

Check these…

1. Make sure the SSL Certificate is active on your site.

2. Make sure to check duplicate versions of your site.

A website can be run with these four versions.

https://example.com
http://example.com
https://www.example.com
http://www.example.com

Technically, your website should be running with one version, either www or non-www. All other versions should redirect to the final version. For example, if https://example.com is my final version of the site, the other version should be redirected to the final one. You can check these issues manually, and you can also use a tool as well.

To check this issue, simply visit the website https://httpstatus.io/ and put your site URL in the box. Click on Canonical Domain Check and below you will find the results.

3. Find crawlability and indexing issues.

To find crawling and indexing errors, you have to crawl your site with the Screaming Frog. You can also check individual pages with the “Detailed SEO Extension.”

To crawl the site, open the Screaming Frog, put in your site URL, and click on Start.

Once the crawl is completed, make sure to check errors such as 404 not found, no-index pages, 301 redirects, and redirect chain. Additionally, you can also check canonical, Hreflang, and many more things.

However, if you want to check a particular page, whether it’s indexable or not, open the page on your website and click on the “Detailed SEO Extension.” The Extension will provide all the details regarding a page.

Apart from this check, you can also check technical errors in the Google search console. Open the Google search console, click on Pages, and here you will find the title “Why pages are not indexed.”

4. Next, make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

To check this, you can use different sites. Earlier, there was a tool called Google mobile-friendly test. Since it is retired, so you can use any tool. If you are unable to find any reliable tools, you can check the site on your mobile device. You can also check in the browser, open your website, do a right on it, and at the end click on inspect.

Another window will open. Click on the toggle button, and there, you will find your website in a different mobile view.

In this modern time, it is necessary to have a mobile-friendly site. Google prioritizes mobile indexing first, and according to a study, the website got over 60% of traffic from mobile devices.

5. Website Page Speed & Core Web Vitals.

The most important thing you must check is website Page speed and core web vitals. It doesn’t matter if your website has good quality content or you have 100s of authority links in your site backlinks profile. If the page speed is not up to the mark. You will be losing money on the table. To check the site speed and core web vital. Visit the Google site. https://pagespeed.web.dev/

6. Make sure to check your website sitemap.

A sitemap is a type of file that includes your website’s most important pages that you want to rank in the search engine. The first thing you need to do is submit your website sitemap in the Google search console. As I said earlier, your sitemap should be clean, and it should not have any broken page URLs, Redirect page URLs, canonical URLs, or pages that are not important. When you put your site pages in the sitemap, that means they are added to the priority list. So, make sure to add the important pages of your site.

On Page SEO Evaluation.

To perform an On-Page SEO Audit, you can use tools such as Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and more. If you have a site with limited pages, you can check On site SEO manually. To check with the Ahrefs and SEMrush, put your site URL connected Google search console. Both tools will complete the crawl and show you Page errors.

The same is the case with Screaming Frog, as soon as it completed the crawl 100 percent. You can see the on-page seo details of every page. You can check the URLs, Page titles, meta description, H1 missing or duplicates, and images that are not optimized. The tools do not stop here; you can also check many more things in that, such as low content pages, Grammar errors, readability issues, and much more.

You can also check the internal links of a single page. You need to copy the URL of a page and place it in the screaming Frog, and it will show you all the internal links a page has. You can check the links to see if there are any broken ones. You can fix them instantly.

After checking all of these errors, make sure to fix them ASAP. All of these on page element plays a vital role because they help google understand what your pages is about. Title and meta descriptions are also useful for the users, as they appear on the search results. And they can directly impact the Click Through Rate (CTR).

Off Page SEO or backlink profile analysis.

Off Page SEO or link building is as important as the other parts of SEO, just like on-page, content, and technical. If you have authority and relevant links in your website backlinks profile, they will give you great benefits. And help you rank on your targeted keywords.

However, if there are toxic, low-quality backlinks present in your site backlinks profile, you won’t grow, and it will lose all the traffic. That is why it is important to consider backlinks profile audit to get out the toxic backlinks. It would help if you also made the anchor text not over-optimized. Because we are supposed to make Google realize that the backlinks coming to our site are natural. And we are getting them without any off page activities.

There are multiple ways to do the backlinks audits, such as automatic and manual ways. If you do it automatically, you have to use these tools.

To do the backlinks audit with SEMrush, you need to open the tools and click on “Backlinks Audit.”

After that, click on Create Project, enter your domain, and give it a name (optional). Once you do that, it will ask you the campaign scope; just click on the Root domain and start the backlink Audit. It will take time and then show you the results.

After the audit competition, it will show different metrics. One that you need to pay attention to is over toxicity score. After that, you can check Backlinks to Review. When you find out how many toxic backlinks your website has, you can prepare a list of toxic backlinks and submit it to the Google Disavow tool. But before that, make sure to double-check check there are no authority backlinks in the disavow file.

Your turn to do an SEO Audit.

Now, you have to go through all the steps that can help you perform a detailed SEO Audit. Give it a try for your site and fix the issues. Once you fix the problems such as on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO, you will notice the growth has started.