How to do an seo audit: Step-by-Step Guide

In today's digital race, having a well-optimized website is crucial to gaining voluminous organic traffic, achieving top rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs), and increasing business conversions. 

While there are numerous tactics to enhance SEO, the first step to a robust SEO strategy is conducting a detailed SEO audit. 

An SEO audit is a thorough examination of your website, considering various factors that influence your site's visibility in SERPs. It helps uncover areas of improvement, rectify errors, and discover opportunities to make your website more search-engine friendly. 

This definitive guide offers step-by-step instructions on conducting an SEO audit effectively, focusing on vital aspects like the site’s performance, content quality, technical SEO issues, and much more. Let's delve into it now.

What Is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a meticulous process that examines a website's effectiveness in gaining visibility in search engine results. It involves evaluating various elements on your website - from URL structure, meta tags, keyword usage, site speed, content relevance, and internal and external links to more complex aspects like the site's architecture and coding. 

The objective is to identify potential technical issues, user experience problems, and missed search engine optimization opportunities that could impact your website's performance. By conducting an SEO audit, you obtain a holistic view of your website's strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to devise effective strategies for improvement.

Why Should You Conduct an SEO Audit?

Conducting an SEO audit is pivotal for numerous reasons. 

First, it uncovers technical flaws and content gaps in your website that could hamper its ranking on SERPs, hence providing a roadmap for improvements. 

Second, it helps keep a pulse on your website's health, enabling you to proactively address any issues before they escalate. 

Further, an SEO audit is a great way to benchmark your website against industry standards and your competitors, helping you stay ahead. 

Lastly, it streamlines your SEO efforts towards what truly matters, facilitating efficient utilization of resources, enhancing ranking, increasing organic traffic, and ultimately boosting conversions.

Essential SEO Audit Tools

There are a plethora of SEO audit tools available; however, three major ones that offer comprehensive insights into your website's SEO performance include, 

• Google Search Console - To monitor your site's presence in Google SERPs and flag any indexing issues. 
• Google Analytics - To access provides detailed stats about your website's traffic and user behavior. 
• Scalenut Traffic Analyser: To monitor and track your content and website performance at an accurate level. 
• Webtune: To automatically identify on-page seo issues such as missing meta tags, alt text, canonical tags, etc and deploy fixes automatically to your webpage. 

Harnessing the power of these tools can significantly improve the precision and efficiency of your SEO audit.

Step-by-Step SEO Audit Process

Performing an effective SEO audit involves a thorough step-by-step process. It starts with checking for indexing issues, ensuring your site is optimized for mobile users, and analyzing site speed and Core Web Vitals. 

Then, it covers the identification and rectification of duplicate content issues, conducting a site crawl to find technical errors, reviewing internal and external links, assessing organic traffic and benchmarking against competitors. 

The process is completed by identifying missed keyword and backlink opportunities, optimizing on-page SEO, and monitoring your keyword rankings. Each step is pivotal to ensure your website is fully optimized for search engines.

Step 1: Check for Indexing Issues

Indexing issues can hinder your website pages from appearing in search engine results, significantly affecting your site's visibility and traffic. Therefore, checking for indexing issues stands as the first step in an SEO audit.

One easy way to check if your website has been indexed is by using the "site:" operator followed by your website URL on Google's search bar. For example, you can type "site:yourwebsite.com" and hit enter. Google will display the list of pages from your site that have been indexed.

However, for a more detailed check, Google Search Console serves as an excellent tool. Under the 'Coverage' section, you can see the 'Index coverage status report', which gives valuable insights into:

• Error: Pages that couldn't be indexed due to a specific issue.
• Valid with Warning: These are pages that are indexed but have some problems.
• Valid: Successfully indexed pages.
• Excluded: Pages excluded from the index by Google.

Resolution of indexing issues can boost your website's visibility, drive organic traffic, and potentially improve search engine rankings.

Step 2: Ensure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly

With increasing smartphone usage, having a mobile-friendly website has become imperative. Google also uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor, making it crucial to ensure optimal performance of your site on mobile devices.

There are several ways to check if your site is mobile-friendly. Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool is one of the easiest methods. It shows how Google's bots view your site and provides suggestions to fix potential issues.

Consider these factors while optimizing your site for mobile usability:

• Design: Use a responsive design that automatically adjusts the website layout based on the device's screen size.
• Speed: Mobile users demand quick loading times. Compress images and leverage browser caching to enhance load speed.
• Readability: Ensure that your content is legible on smaller screens without users zooming or scrolling horizontally.
• Navigation: Use large, easy-to-tap buttons and minimize the use of drop-down menus for seamless navigation.

By optimizing your site's mobile-friendliness, you can provide a better user experience, potentially enhancing your ranking and conversion rates.

Step 3: Analyze Your Site's Speed and Core Web Vitals

Website speed plays a pivotal role in user experience and is a significant Google ranking factor. Today’s digital consumers demand fast, seamless website experiences, which makes it vital to analyze and optimize your site's speed.

Several tools help assess your website speed, including Google's PageSpeed Insights. It provides a score for your site's load speed on both desktop and mobile devices and suggests areas for improvement.

Alongside speed, Google's Core Web Vitals have become critical metrics measuring user experience. The three main factors include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measure of loading performance. A good LCP score is 2.5 seconds or faster.
• First Input Delay (FID): Quantifies interactivity. A good FID score is less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. A good CLS score is less than 0.1.

Google Search Console's Core Web Vitals report provides data on these aspects of your site, helping you rectify any issues in the browsing experience.

By optimizing both site speed and Core Web Vitals, you can significantly enhance the user experience, potentially aiding your site's ranking.

Step 4: Identify and Fix Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content is argued to be a significant SEO concern as it confuses search engines about which versions of the content deserve rankings. Therefore, identifying and fixing duplicate content issues is critical for your website's SEO performance.

Tools like Webtune automatically identify duplicate content that requires canonical tags and let you deploy the solution in just a click.

To access Webtune, head to Webtune.ai. 

Step 1: If you are a first-time user, create your account and sign up for the free trial. 

Step 2: Once you log in, connect your domain to your Webtune account.

Step 3: Now, under the On-page issues dashboard, you can find the canonical tag issue option. Click on it to find a list of duplicate pages.

Step 4: Under the canonical tag issues header, you can access the list of pages that require canonical tags. 

Unlike traditional methods, you don’t have to sort through your inventory to find duplicate content. Webtune does the heavy lifting by curating pages with similar content. 

You can approve each suggestion manually or let Webtune deploy the fixes automatically with just a click. 

Once identified, here are ways to address duplicated pages:

• 301 Redirect: Implement 301 redirects to guide search engines and users to the correct page version.
• Rel=Canonical: Use a canonical tag in HTML to tell search engines about your preferred version of a page.
• Improve Content: If multiple pages cover similar or identical topics, consider combining them into a single comprehensive piece or modify each page to highlight different aspects of the topic.

By eliminating duplicate content, you can ensure that your valuable content gets the recognition it deserves, boosting your site's visibility and SEO performance.

Step 5: Run a Site Crawl and Find Technical Errors

Conducting a site crawl is akin to performing a health check-up of your website. It helps uncover any technical SEO issues that might be limiting your site's potential reach and visibility on search engine results.

SEO tools like Screaming Frog offers comprehensive site crawling capabilities. These tools scan your entire website and highlight potential errors and issues, including:

• Broken Links: Broken internal or external links can harm your site’s user experience and ranking. Identify and fix them promptly.
• Missing Meta Tags: Meta tags (e.g., title tags, meta descriptions) play an essential role in SEO. Ensure each page has unique and optimized meta tags.
• 404 Errors: These errors indicate non-existent pages. Implement 301 redirects to guide users to live, relevant pages.
• Slow Loading Pages: Slow pages affect user experience and rankings. Check the load time and optimize any slow-loading pages.

Addressing these technical errors is crucial to improving your website’s accessibility and enhancing SEO performance.

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Step 6: Analyze Your Internal and External Links

Internal and external links significantly contribute to the SEO of your website, making it imperative to analyze and optimize them.

Internal links connect different pages within your website, enhancing navigability and spreading link equity across your site. A well-structured internal linking architecture can improve the crawling and indexing of your pages by search engines.

External links, on the other hand, point from your website to other sites. High-quality, relevant external links can enhance the value and credibility of your content.

Here are ways to optimize these links:

• Relevant Linking: For both internal and external links, ensure that they are relevant and add value to the reader.
• Anchor Text: Use descriptive anchor text for your links, making it easy for users and search engines to understand what the linked page is about.
• No Broken Links: Regularly check and replace any broken links to maintain a good user experience and SEO.

By analyzing and optimizing your internal and external links, you can enhance the user experience, improve page indexing, and boost the SEO effectiveness of your website.

Step 7: Assess Organic Search Traffic and Benchmark Against Competitors

Assessing organic traffic is critical to understanding your website's performance, as it signifies the number of users visiting your site through unpaid search results. 

Tools like Google Analytics provide detailed data on your website's organic traffic, offering insights into how effectively your SEO tactics are working.

Benchmarking against competitors is another vital step in an SEO audit. It helps you understand where you stand and identify strategies that are working well for your competitors. Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs offer competitor analysis features, allowing you to compare keywords, backlinks, and more.

Tips for effective benchmarking include:

• Identify Competitors: Define who your top online competitors are. They might differ from your direct business competitors.
• Analyze their Strategies: Look at what SEO strategies your competitors are implementing - right from their content approach to the use of keywords, backlinks, etc.
• Leverage Learnings: Apply your learnings from the analysis to your website without copying them entirely.

Assessing organic traffic and benchmarking against competitors provide valuable insights that can help you refine your SEO strategies for enhanced results.

Step 8: Find Missed Keywords and Backlink Opportunities

Unearthing missed keyword and backlink opportunities can serve as a valuable opportunity to drive more organic traffic to your website.

For keyword opportunities, tools like Scalenut Keyword Gap help compare the keywords your competitors rank for and those you don't. You can identify new keywords and phrases to incorporate into your SEO and content strategy.

To discover backlink opportunities, you can use tools like Ahrefs' Backlink Gap tool. This tool shows you domains that are linking to your competitors but not to you, representing possible avenues for generating valuable backlinks.

Here are steps to leverage these opportunities:

• Expand Keyword Usage: Use newly discovered keywords across your website, blogs, product descriptions, metadata, and more.
• Outreach: Reach out to the domains that are linking to your competitors and offer them compelling reasons to link to your site.

By identifying and exploiting missed keyword and backlink opportunities, you can boost your website's visibility, ranking, and traffic.

Step 9: Optimize On-Page SEO and Improve Top Pages

On-Page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing individual web pages to rank higher in SERPs and attract more relevant traffic. It includes aspects like title tags, content quality, keyword placement, URL structure, meta descriptions, image alt text, and more.

On the other hand, improving top or important pages means optimizing the pages that generate the most traffic or have the potential to attract significant traffic.

Here's how to optimize on-page SEO and enhance top pages:

• Improve Meta Tags: Make sure every page has a unique and keyword-rich title tag and meta description.
• Quality Content: Ensure your content is high-quality, relevant, unique, and offers value to the reader. It should also be properly structured for easy reading.
• Keyword Optimization: Use your target keywords naturally within the content, URL, and meta tags.
• Optimize Images: Use descriptive file names and alt text for your images. Keep their size minimal to enhance page speed.

By optimizing on-page SEO and improving your top pages, you can provide a better user experience, boost page rankings, and increase organic traffic.

Step 10: Monitor Your Keyword Rankings

Monitoring your keyword rankings is crucial to understanding how your SEO efforts are translating into search engine visibility. It allows you to track the performance of your target keywords over time and make necessary adjustments.

Several tools, such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, provide keyword ranking data. They allow you to see where your site ranks for specific keywords, how these rankings change over time, and how they compare with competitors.

When monitoring keyword rankings, consider:

• Keyword Performance: Analyze not only the current ranking but also the performance trend of your keywords.
• Page Performance: Identify which pages are ranking for which keywords. This can help you understand what kind of content resonates best with the target audience.
• Changes Over Time: Keep an eye on how your keyword rankings change over time, especially after making any significant changes to your website or SEO strategy.

Regularly monitoring your keyword rankings can provide valuable insights for refining your website's SEO strategy and enhancing its overall performance.

Conclusion

In conclusion, an SEO audit is a crucial tool in maintaining and improving your website's performance in SERPs. 

From identifying technical glitches to uncovering missed keyword and backlink opportunities, a comprehensive audit helps you unlock the hidden potential of your website. 

Regular website audits ensure that your online presence aligns with the ever-evolving SEO best practices, helping you stay a step ahead of your competitors. Remember, audits are not one-time exercises. 

They should be part of a broader ongoing SEO strategy aimed at maximizing your website's visibility at all times. While the process may seem tedious initially, the end results - increased organic traffic, higher rankings, and better conversions - make it worth the effort.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should I perform an SEO audit?

The frequency of SEO audits largely depends upon the dynamics and size of your website, budget, and resources. Ideally, smaller websites should undergo an audit every six months, while larger websites should consider monthly audits, considering the volume of content changes and updates.

Can SEO audits help improve my website's conversion rate?

Definitely! An SEO audit pinpoints several on-page and off-page elements affecting your website's usability and visibility, thereby influencing conversions. By identifying and rectifying these common issues, you can enhance the user experience and improve site navigation, content quality, and page load time, eventually boosting your conversion rate.

Are there any free SEO site audit tools available?

Yes, there are several free tools for SEO audit, such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics, that can help you perform basic audits. However, for a more comprehensive audit, premium tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz offer more detailed insights and functionalities.

How long does it take to see results after an SEO audit?

The results of an SEO audit can vary based on the complexity and size of your website, the changes implemented, and how quickly search engines index those changes. Typically, you might start seeing improvements after a few weeks or months. Regular audits and consistent optimizations can drive long-term SEO benefits.

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