Why Are SEO Audits Important?
A website search engine optimization audit is an analysis of your website to identify any issues that may be hindering your website’s ability to rank well in Google(or other) search engine results pages (SERPs). A website SEO audit can also help you identify opportunities that appeared on your website. No matter you are a marketer, website owner, or working for your clients, all SEO efforts you’ve put in are for keyword ranking and traffic growth in Google.
What You’ll Learn
In this blog post, we’ll show you how to perform your website SEO audit so you can start making improvements to your website. Also, we will introduce a few examples of SEO tools for such purposes. You also need to understand how to do SEO reporting and how to do your SEO reports, so you can master SEO audit results and nail down the number of action items required. Because Google is the leading search engine, so all tools and methods are referring to doing SEO audits in Google only.
What is an SEO audit?
Before we get started, it’s important to note that a website audit is different from a website assessment. A website assessment simply assesses your site in aspects of UX, usability, and other factors that face your users. An SEO audit, on the other hand, is a more in-depth analysis that includes an assessment of SEO issues, with a detailed action plan for fixing any identified issues. It usually starts from a technical SEO perspective which scans your website, then it should also look into on page SEO and off page SEO (backlinks) to further look into the whole situation and provide suggestions to improve the SEO performance.
From the definition from Ahrefs what is SEO audit, is said:
An SEO audit is where you find opportunities to improve a site’s search performance. It involves finding technical, on page, content, and link-related issues to fix or improve. Everyone’s SEO audit process differs, as there’s no universal approach.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get started!
How to Do an SEO Audit
Any good digital marketing campaign starts with a comprehensive SEO audit. By taking a close look at your website, content, and link-building efforts, you can identify areas that need improvement and make a plan for how to boost your search engine rankings.
One of the most important aspects of an SEO audit is assessing your website’s structure and architecture. We called this aspect technical SEO. Is your site easy to navigate? Are your pages properly linked together? If not, search engines may have difficulty indexing your site, which will hurt your chances of ranking well.
In addition to assessing your website’s structure, you’ll also want to take a close look at your content. Is it keyword-rich and informative? Does it provide value to your readers? If not, you’ll need to make some changes. Finally, you’ll want to examine your link building efforts. Are you building high-quality links from authoritative websites? If not, you’ll need to start working on a new link building strategy.
By taking the time to do a comprehensive SEO audit, you can ensure that your website is in tip-top shape and ready to rank well in Google or other search engines. The following paragraph is to offer a step-by-step guide to kick-start your search engine optimization.
Step 1: Choose Your Tools
SEO audit tools are software that helps you understand and improve your website’s SEO. SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages, and SEO audit tools can be incredibly useful in helping you achieve this. There are a wide variety of SEO audit tools available, from simple online tools to complex desktop software. Some SEO audit tools are free, while others must be purchased. SEO audit tools can help you identify SEO issues on your websites, such as poor keyword placement or missing title tags. They can also help you track your progress over time, so you can see how your SEO efforts are paying off. If you’re serious about improving your website’s SEO, then SEO audit tools are essential.
There are several different tools you can use to audit your website in Google. Some are paid and some are free. Here are a few of my favorites:
Google Search Console: This is a free tool from Google that gives you insights into how your site is performing in Google search results. You’ll need to verify your site with Google Search Console before you can start using it. Once you’ve verified your site, you can use the tool to see things like which keywords your site is ranking for, how many impressions and clicks your site is getting, and more. It should be your first SEO tool for your SEO reporting.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider: This is a paid desktop program dedicated to using for SEO audit and analysis. It crawls websites and analyzes them for common SEO issues like duplicate content, broken links, missing titles, and more. It’s available for Windows and macOS.
WooRank: This is a paid tool that provides an all-in-one solution for website auditing, competitive analysis, keyword research, and more. WooRank offers both a desktop program and a web-based platform.
Step 2: How to Identify Your Goals
Before you start your audit, it’s important to take some time to think about what you want to accomplish. Do you want to improve your SERP rankings? Drive more traffic to your site? Increase conversions? Once you know what your goals are, you can tailor your audit accordingly.
Step 3: Crawl Your Site
Once you have your tools set up and your goals identified, it’s time to start crawling your site! Crawling simply means scanning your site for any potential issues. We recommend starting with Google Search Console first. Use the “Coverage” report to see if there are any errors or warnings associated with your site. If there are, take note of them so you can address them later on in the audit process.
Next, use Screaming Frog SEO Spider or WooRank (or both!) to crawl your entire site. These tools will give you an overview of any potential issues on each page of your site. Again, make note of anything that needs to be fixed so you can address it later on in the process.
Step 4: Analyze Your Data
Once you have all of the data for crawling your site, it’s time to start analyzing your site’s data! Look for patterns in the SEO reports and try to identify any common themes among the issues that were found during the crawl process. Are there certain types of pages that seem to have more issues than others? Are there certain types of issues that seem to be more prevalent than others? Once you have a good understanding of the types of issues present on your site, you can start thinking about how best to fix them.
Step 5: Develop Your Action Plan
The final step in performing a website SEO audit is developing an action plan for fixing the issues, that were identified during the crawl process. Depending on the severity of the issue (and whether or not it can be fixed easily)in pages on your site, you may want to prioritize certain issues over others. For example, if you find that there are many broken links on your site, fixing those should be a higher priority than optimizing title tags since broken links can hurt your site’s SERP rankings while title tags will not have as much of an impact.
Conclusion:
Applying SEO audit to your site regularly is an important part of maintaining a strong online presence—but it doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming! By following the steps outlined in this blog post, you can easily perform a comprehensive website audit so you can identify any areas where improvements need to be made.
Bonus Track: Small Business Owners Note
If you’re a small business owner, you want to know when you need to do an SEO audit. Nevertheless, you know that search engine optimization is important, what exactly is an SEO audit? And how can you tell if your website needs one?
An SEO audit will identify any technical issues that could be holding back your organic search performance. These can include anything from site structure and code problems to content or link difficulties, so it’s important for all businesses in this sector of the industry!
So how do you know if your website needs an audit? Before you get to that point, you have to know what is SEO reporting. If you do, there are a few key indicators in the SEO reports:
Your organic traffic has flatlined or is in decline
You’re not ranking for key keywords
Your conversion rates are low
Once you realize one of the above indicators shown in the SEO reports, then you should get your SEO expert involved.
Bonus Track: How to form an SEO team
If you’re serious about improving your website’s search engine ranking, then you need to form an SEO team. The SEO lead will be centered on all SEO team members to move forward in one direction.
An SEO manager will be responsible for overseeing the team’s activities and ensuring that everyone is working towards the same goal. The ideal candidate will have experience with keyword research, off page link building, SEO report and on page SEO optimization. They will also be a strong project manager, able to coordinate multiple tasks and deadlines.
The content manager will be responsible for creating and managing all of the website’s on page SEO content, making sure that it is optimized for search engines.
Finally, the social media manager will be responsible for promoting the website across all social media platforms. By working together, these three individuals can help to significantly improve your website’s search engine ranking.
