What is SEO Audit?
Website SEO audit is a process of evaluation of a website’s performance. For example, how well is your website ranking against your targeted keywords? Does your website bring conversions? Are you targeting the right keywords on your business site? Is the search engine able to crawl and index your website easily? It is a health check that looks at On page SEO, Off Page SEO, and technical SEO of the site.
The purpose of a website SEO audit is to find out the key areas for improvement and what is holding your website back that won’t let your site rank in the search engine. It also checks if there is anything that is disturbing users on the site. For example, the pages of the website are not loading quickly, and the CTR button on the site is not working. It helps you to prepare a detailed SEO audit report that highlights what needs to be fixed to rank the site and bring conversions.
Why is SEO audit important?
Imagine you have built a great website and invested a lot of money in content creation, On page SEO, and link building. Despite spending a lot and putting in effort, your website won’t bring traffic and conversion. What will you do in that case? The best thing is to consider an SEO audit or deep analysis that helps you to find out the root cause. Once you get the root case, you can fix it, and your website starts performing better in the search results if you want to bring visitors to your site and get conversions. You need to work on every aspect of your site to make it better for the search engine and the user as well. Learn how to do detailed website SEO Audit.
Components of an SEO Audit.
As a Leads Oriented agency in Manchester, we strongly recommend understanding the key component of a complete SEO audit.
1. Technical SEO Audit.
A technical SEO audit is the process of looking at the back end of your website. It helps to understand how search engines crawl your website and index its pages. Technical SEO audit includes website speed, crawlability, indexing issues, mobile friendliness, or any issues that prevent search engines from understanding your site. When we do SEO audits, we mainly analyze these areas.
1.1 Crawlability and indexability.
This includes checking your sitemap, robots.txt file, and canonical tags to make sure search engines can easily find and understand your pages.
1.2 HTTPS vs HTTP:
You have to make sure your website uses HTTPS, which is more secure and preferred by search engines like Google.
1.3 Mobile Friendliness:
You have to make sure your website works well on mobile devices since many people search on their phones.
1.4 Page Speed and Core web vitals:
Page speed and core web vitals are crucial components of an SEO audit. A fast-loading website is not only important for user experience but also for search engine ranking. Core web vitals, which measure the user experience of your website, are key metrics to consider during an SEO audit.
1.5 Technical Errors:
This looks for broken links or any other technical issues that could stop search engines from crawling your site properly.
1.6 Structure data:
It helps to make sure you are using structure data (schema markup) on your website. It helps search engines understand your website content better. It also helps your content appear in rich results.
2. On Page SEO audit.
On-page SEO audits focus on the content and each element on a single web page. It helps to make sure your website content is optimized. Every web page of a site has a hierarchical structure. It makes sure that all the visible parts of your website, like the title, meta description, and links, are optimized for both users and search engines.
2.1 Meta tags ( Title, description, and headers )
Meta helps search engines understand what your pages are about. You have to make sure your title and description of each page are clear and optimized according to your targeted keywords.
2.3 Keyword optimization and entities.
Check your website page content and make sure pages are optimized with the right keywords and entities. Make sure to use your targeted keywords in your content naturally and include the relevant entities. Entities help search engines understand the context of your web page.
2.4 Internal linking structure.
When you build internal links around your website pages, it helps the user navigate your site and helps the search engines understand the structure of your content. You have to make sure to build internal links with the right anchor text.
2.5 Content Quality and Relevance.
Your content should be helpful, well-written, and match what users are looking for. It should also answer user questions and provide value to keep visitors engaged.
3. Off-Page SEO Audit.
An off-page SEO audit looks at factors outside of your website that affect your search engine rankings. It includes backlinks, social media presence, and mentions of your brand across the web.
3.1 Backlink Profile and Domain Authority.
Make sure to check the quality of the websites that link to you. Authority backlinks coming from reputable websites help your website rank higher. If your website backlinks profile has low-quality, toxic backlinks, they can destroy your website rankings.
3.2 Social Signals and Brand Mentions.
Look at your presence on social media and how often your brand is mentioned online. This can increase your website ranking and build trust.
Tools For SEO Audit.
Tools are helpful for gathering data and identifying issues. Tools are unable to do a detailed audit automatically. There are several tools available that can help make your audit easier and more effective. However, in our SEO agency in Manchester, we use the following tools.
1. Google search console.
Google Search Console is a free yet effective tool that helps you monitor your website performance in Google search results. It shows you indexing issues, search traffic, and any errors that need fixing. It also shows your website crawling stats and how many links your website has gotten from different websites.
How Google Search Console Helps Identify Indexing Issues.
Google search console can show you when you need to conduct a website SEO audit. For example, with the traffic graph, you can get an idea of whether your website is performing well or Losing traffic. Google search console can also tell you if any pages are not getting indexed properly. It helps you fix issues like blocked page errors or missing sitemaps.
2. Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free tool, like Google Search Console, that helps analyze user behavior on your website. Google Analytics enables you to track your website traffic and user behavior. It provides insights into which pages are performing well and which one needs improvement. For example, you can identify pages with high Bounce rates, track user engagement, and monitor conversions. By understanding user flow, you can see how visitors move through your site, which pages are popular, and where they drop off. Google Analytics can help you collect data, and based on this data, you can make decisions to improve content, User experience, and conversion rates.
3. Screaming Frog.
Screaming Frog is a popular tool. It can crawl your website and identify technical issues. It gives you a complete overview of your website, including how many pages your website has, how many pages are broken, and missing title tags, meta descriptions, and pages that have duplicate content.
How can you use Screaming Frog for audit?
To use Screaming Frog, you need to enter your website URL, and it will start calling your website. Once the website crawls completely, it will provide a report of any problem it finds. For example, it can help you find broken links, 301 redirects, redirect chains, Pages missing title tags, meta descriptions, and more.
4. Ahrefs.
Ahrefs Is a comprehensive SEO tool that helps you analyze your website backlinks profile, keywords ranking, and competitors performance. It also has the option of an SEO audit. Once you put your website in, it will automatically crawl your website on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO and highlight the errors, if there are any. Additionally, it helps track keyword rankings over time so you can see how well your efforts are performing.
SEMrush.
Just like Ahrefs, SEMrush is another powerful tool that provides an extensive range of features for keyword research, backlink analysis, and competitor analysis. SEMrush also offers a great feature for website audits. Just like Ahrefs, when you put your site URL, it will start crawling your site. Once it is complete, it will highlight on-page, off-page, and technical SEO errors. It will generate a PDF report that you can use to explore what is on the website and what needs to be fixed.
