How to Do an SEO Audit

SEO, or search engine optimization, is crucial for driving organic traffic and boosting your online visibility. 

With 45.1% of all search result clicks coming from organic searches, having a well-optimized site can significantly impact your website’s success. 

However, maintaining effective SEO requires regular checkups to identify and fix any issues that might hinder your performance. This is where an SEO audit comes in.

What Is An SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a process where you evaluate all aspects of your website that impact its performance in search engines and identify opportunities for improvement. 

It includes an in-depth review of various elements of your website, identifying issues that may be hindering its ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Once these issues have been identified, you can take corrective actions to optimize your site’s search engine visibility and user experience.

Types of Audits

SEO audits come in various forms, each targeting specific aspects of your website to ensure thorough optimization. Here are the main types of audits you should consider for a complete SEO checkup.

1. Technical SEO Audit

A technical SEO audit ensures your website’s infrastructure is optimized for search engines. Crucial for high SERP rankings, it examines the site’s underlying code and structure.

A technical SEO audit addresses the following:

• Site structure: Evaluating URL structure, site architecture, and navigation.
• Crawlability: Identifying and fixing crawl errors, checking the robots.txt file, and ensuring proper use of sitemaps.
• Indexability: Ensuring important pages are indexed and removing unnecessary ones.
• Mobile-friendliness: Assessing mobile responsiveness and usability.
• Page speed: Analyzing load times and performance.
• Security: Ensuring the site uses HTTPS and checking for vulnerabilities.

2. On-Page SEO Audit

An on-page SEO audit aims to optimize individual web pages for specific keywords to improve search engine rankings. 

This audit ensures that your page’s backend elements are properly set up for search crawlers, making it easier for search engines to understand your content.

An on-page SEO audit examines several key areas:

• Content quality: Ensuring content is relevant, unique, and engaging.
• Keyword optimization: Proper use of keywords in titles, headers, and throughout the content.
• Meta tags: Optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags.
• Internal linking: Evaluating the structure and effectiveness of internal links.
• User experience: Assessing the site’s readability, design, and overall usability.

3. Off-Page SEO Audit

The purpose of an off-page SEO audit is to analyze external factors that influence a website’s ranking. 

This involves looking at other pages and domains that link to the pages you’re aiming to improve, focusing on the quantity, quality, distribution, and recency of these links. 

Key elements of an off-page SEO audit include:

• Backlink profile: Assessing the quality and quantity of backlinks, and identifying and disavowing toxic links.
• Social signals: Evaluating your presence and activity on social media platforms.
• Brand mentions: Monitoring online mentions of your brand and ensuring they are positive.

4. Content Audit

A content audit evaluates the quality and performance of a website’s content. It identifies opportunities to enhance accuracy, recency, and quality, boosting traffic and improving rankings. 

This process may also involve optimizing for featured snippets and passage ranking.

Key elements of a content audit include:

• Content inventory: Creating a comprehensive list of all website content.
• Content performance: Analyzing metrics like page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates.
• Content gaps: Identifying missing topics or areas for new content.
• Content optimization: Updating and repurposing existing content for better performance.

5. Local SEO Audit

A local SEO audit aims to optimize your website for local search queries and enhance its visibility in local search results. 

Key elements of a local SEO audit include:

• Google My Business: Ensuring your listing is complete and accurate.
• Local citations: Verifying the consistency and accuracy of business information across local directories.
• Reviews and ratings: Analyzing online reviews and managing your reputation.
• Local keywords: Optimizing for local keywords and geographic-specific terms.

By understanding and performing these types of SEO audits, you can ensure your website is fully optimized for search engines and users. 

Benefits of an SEO Audit

Conducting an SEO audit provides numerous advantages that can significantly impact your website’s performance and overall online presence. Here are some key benefits:

1. Enhanced user experience

Audits often reveal areas where user experience can be improved, such as navigation and mobile-friendliness (mobile devices account for 63% of organic search engine visits). A better user experience can lead to increased engagement, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion rates.

2. Increased organic traffic

Optimizing your site for relevant keywords and ensuring your content is high-quality and relevant helps attract more targeted traffic from search engines. 

3.. Better conversion rates

An audit helps identify barriers to conversion and provides insights on improving calls-to-action (CTAs), forms, and overall site functionality. 

4. Competitive advantage

SEO audits help in understanding competitor strengths and weaknesses and identifying opportunities to outperform them. This information can help you optimize your site and stay ahead of competitors in search engine rankings.

14 Steps to Do an SEO Audit

Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit involves a series of systematic steps. Here’s a detailed guide to help you through the process:

1. Collect benchmark data

Begin by gathering performance metrics to understand your website’s current state. Record current traffic, top-performing pages, bounce rate, load times, organic traffic, conversion rates, and backlink profiles. This establishes a baseline for comparison after implementing changes.

2. Crawl your website

Use available online tools to crawl your site. Website crawling involves an automated process that fetches and analyzes web pages to index content. This helps identify issues such as crawl errors, broken links, duplicate content, and other technical problems that need fixing.

3. Verify indexing status

Ensure all important pages are indexed. Sometimes, pages might not be indexed for various reasons, preventing them from showing up in search results. Remove any unnecessary pages from the index to keep the indexing clean and efficient.

4. Test mobile-friendliness

Mobile SEO is crucial since most searches come from mobile devices. Use a mobile-friendly test to ensure your site is responsive and provides a good user experience on mobile devices. 

5. Analyze page speed

Utilize Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze and improve your site’s load times. Page speed is a ranking factor, and slow loading times can negatively impact user experience and search rankings. Remember to focus on high-impact suggestions to optimize load times across all pages.

6. Evaluate content quality and optimize keywords

Review your content for relevance, uniqueness, and engagement. Ensure each piece of content adds value to your audience. Conduct a keyword analysis to check for proper keyword usage, density, and placement in titles, headers, and content. Avoid keyword stuffing and aim for natural integration.

7. Review meta tags

Meta tags, including title tags and meta descriptions, help search engines understand your website content. Optimize these tags to ensure they are compelling and keyword-optimized. 

8. Assess internal links

Internal links are an important factor in SEO, so evaluating the structure and effectiveness of your internal links is a crucial step. 

Internal linking helps users navigate your site and distributes link equity efficiently. Ensure your links are logical, helpful, and relevant to the content.

9. Conduct a backlink analysis

Backlinks are crucial for SEO, but only 5% of web pages currently have them. This presents a unique opportunity to get ahead of your competition.

Use a backlink analysis tool to evaluate the quality and quantity of backlinks to your site. Then, identify and disavow any toxic or low-quality links that could harm your rankings. A strong backlink profile crucial in establishing your site’s authority and credibility.

10. Optimize your content

Update existing content to target relevant keywords better, enhance readability, and ensure the information is up-to-date. 

For example, you can add or update multimedia elements such as images, videos, and infographics to make the content more engaging. In addition, use headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs to improve readability.

11. Check your site’s security

Verify that your site uses HTTPS and check for any security vulnerabilities. A secure site protects your users’ data and boosts your search engine rankings.

12. Analyze social signals

Evaluate your presence and activity on social media platforms. Social signals, such as likes, shares, and comments, can indirectly influence your SEO by driving traffic and increasing brand awareness.

13. Manage reviews and ratings

Analyze online reviews and manage your reputation. Positive reviews can enhance your site’s credibility by up to 73%, making it more attractive to users and search engines. Address any negative reviews promptly and professionally.

14. Track and measure results

After implementing the changes from your SEO audit, continuously monitor your site’s performance using tools like Google Analytics. Track changes in key metrics such as traffic, rankings, and conversions to measure the impact of your improvements and adjust your strategy as needed.

Conclusion

Now that you have a comprehensive guide to conducting an SEO audit, it’s time to put it into action. Start by collecting benchmark data and systematically work through each step to identify and fix issues on your site. 

Regularly performing SEO audits will help you stay competitive, adapt to changes, and continuously improve your site’s performance. Begin your audit today and take the necessary steps to optimize your website for better search engine rankings and user experience.