What is SEO Audit?
The process of conducting an SEO audit is a crucial step in creating a website that will rank well on Google.
The process involves evaluating the website’s Technical SEO issues, Website structure issues, and On-page SEO issues. A complete SEO audit should take into account how well your site relates to best practices – which is the first step towards developing a plan with measurable results.
Why SEO audit is important?
An SEO audit is an important part of a website’s development and maintenance. It provides information about the site’s content, organization, code structure, design layout and, much more. In addition to pointing out what you’re doing well in Google’s eyes, it also points out weaknesses that can be improved upon – such as broken links or not having enough content on your site. Every website is different – so an SEO audit gives a tailored view of how well your website is doing in Google.
- Listen to your visitors
- Manually observe problems
- Perform technical spot checks
- Scan your site with an SEO audit tool
- Create a plan of attack
Below are some of the most common issues and information that are revealed by a proper SEO audit:
- Check to see if your site is mobile-friendly
- Check the canonicity of your site
- Check for basic crawl and indexation issues
- Manual SEO audit for on-page optimizations
- Analyze organic search traffic
- Check for content-related issues
- Check your site’s load speed
1.Check to see if your site is mobile-friendly
The way we search for information has changed. With more and more people accessing the internet from their mobile devices, Google now uses the mobile version of your site for both desktop and mobile searches. 60% of Google searches come from a mobile device so it’s important to make sure that your site is optimized for these users.
How do you know if your site is mobile-friendly?
Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to see if your site is ready for this change.
- Just pop your site into the tool.
- Then you’ll see whether or not Google considers your site optimized for mobile devices.
2.Check the canonicity of your site
Webmasters need to be mindful of the canonicity of their site. Checking the canonicity of your site is an important step in securing it. This first, and also the most important thing to do, is to check whether only one URL for your site is browsable.
Due to the nature of a web address, there can be various ways to type your website’s address into the internet browser.
For example:
http://yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com
https://yourdomain.com
https://www.yourdomain.com
Choose one “default” URL for your site. Normally you ought to pick a URL that already uses HTTPS. HTTPS is a confirmed ranking element today. Besides, it likewise keeps your site secure and builds trust. You can get a free SSL declaration for your site from Let’s Encrypt.
3.Check for basic crawl and indexation issues
Running a website manually can be time-consuming and tedious. There are many SEO checks that need to be made, and it is easy to miss something if you are not careful. To help with this, we have created a manual for the most important steps that you should take when checking your site.
First of all, run an SEO crawler over your site in the same way as Google would search for content on your site (the results will show any errors or crawl issues). To do that, log in to Google Search Console and find the Crawl Errors report under Site Configuration > Status > Crawl errors
You can use tools and analyze the resulting crawl errors (if any). Fixing these errors should be one of your main priorities.
- Beam Us Up
- Screaming Frog
- Ahrefs
Then, use Google Search Console to check whether your site is properly indexed. Recollect that if your site is not indexed, you will not get ranked, ever. Utilizing the Google search console will give you the number of pages of your site that have been appropriately indexed.
Google Search Console > Google Index > Index Status
On the off chance that your site is brand new, it may take some time before Google can properly index your site. There are approaches to speed up this process, however, when all is said in done, patience is typically enough.
4.Manual SEO audit for on-page optimizations
It’s a well-known fact that on-page SEO is too significant. If you probably don’t have time to optimize the meta tag on every page on your site. This is what to do all things being equal.
>>In the first place, identify your 5 most important pages.
>>Focus on important keywords.
>>Get less traffic than they moved in the day
>>Effectively rank well, however can possibly break the best 5. At that point, enhance your page with the strategies.
Focus on these 5 strategies:
- Include your keyword in your title tag
- Include your keyword in the first 100 words
- Add 5+ external links
- Add 5+ internal links
- Use LSI keywords
5.Analyse organic search traffic
Unmistakably, any SEO audit expects to identify ways to expand a site’s traffic. So it makes well to take a look at how the site is presently performing.
How to check Organic search traffic?
- head over to Google Analytics
- Acquisition > Overview > Organic Search.
And you’ll see how many people visited your site from search engines last month.
6.Check for content-related issues
Google hates copy content. Content copied across multiple pages on your site is awful. In any case, when it’s copied on different sites, it’s much more dreadful. Some SEOs get aggravated up about duplicate content and the potential site penalties locales could cause a result.
Google is smart enough to know whether you’re purposefully and perniciously copying content on your site to obstruct the SERP with your site’s URLs. Try to use rel=” canonical” in your unique content, and consistently ensure duplicate or partnered content links back to this standard content.
7.Check your site’s load speed
Your site’s and individual page’s load speed is both direct and indirect ranking variables.
More than 25% of guests will leave your website in the event that it takes longer than four seconds to load. To hold guests back from bouncing off your site, you must ensure it loads as fast as possible.
Google’s Page Speed Insights feature is valuable for examining the mobile speeds of your site, which are normally different than the same as browsing speeds. There are huge loads of things that can slow down a site, yet here are a couple of the clearest ones to look out for:
- A good hosting service
- Caching your website
- Optimize image sizes
- Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Minify your codes
- Analyze Structured Data Implementation
- Analyze Ranking Performance
- Assess Your Backlinks Profile
- Assess Inbound and Outbound Broken Links (404 and 500 Errors)
- Find Content and Keyword Gaps
- Content Performance Audit
End Point:
Effectively leading an SEO audit in 2021 is a great deal like running a race. Whenever you have finished your SEO audit and have identified issues that could be keeping your site down, the time has come to jump straight into fixing these. There is a huge load of factors that you can decide to get into.
Directing an SEO can not just help you with assembling a strong strategy toward the start of a new project or new site launch, however is a fundamental piece of ongoing success.
By discovering issues as fast as possible, you can fix issues that keep your site from achieving its full potential. There are different zones that you can audit, however by making these first steps, you’ll acquire an incredible understanding of your site’s overall health.
