What Is SEO Audit And How To Do It? 

When we talk about SEO audit, it is similar to your car going for an oil change. As you know, changing your car oil regularly can be one of the most significant ways to enhance your car’s life.

An SEO audit is like the technical infrastructure of your website and that’s why it is important to perform the SEO audit regularly for the long term success of your website.

Also, it is an extremely important component to keep your SEO strategy up-to-date to improve organic SEO traffic.

If you are not regularly optimizing your website for search queries, you are missing out on potential traffic and attention from potential customers.

And this is not only a single reason why you should take up SEO audit service but there are several many reasons why you should do that. Sometimes the search engines come with updates and the websites are demanded to be changed as per the update.

SEO audit gives a shape to your website structure and makes your website SEO friendly.

Search engines like, Google, Yahoo, Bing constantly keep on upgrading their algorithms to provide better search results to the users and you should be aware of these changes and keep on updating your website as per the changes.

In this blog, we are going to discuss what is SEO audit and how to do it.

What Is SEO Audit?

SEO Audit is the process of analyzing how well your website is doing and where it needs improvement.

SEO audit includes the finding out:

– To be able to scale your strengths and triumphs.

– Mistakes to be improved and low-hanging fruit to be snatched.

– What isn’t functioning and should be avoided.

– What isn’t working and has to be fixed.

Other times, you could have errors on your website which need to be improved. These are the reasons why SEO audit is important.

Now, let’s understand the types of SEO Audit.

Types Of SEO Audit

Apart from the reasons why you should perform an SEO audit, you must also have an understanding about the types of SEO audit.

If you have a big website, you need to go with different types of SEO so that you can prioritize accordingly your SEO audit.

So, let’s understand now how many types of SEO audits are there.

1. SEO Content Audit

SEO content audit refers to the improvement of accuracy, recency and the quality of content on the page you want to increase the traffic. This includes identifying the opportunities to optimize your page for featured snippets.

2. On- Page SEO Audit

This includes optimizing the backend elements of the page for search crawlers. Meta descriptions, meta titles, picture alt text and compression, and more would all be checked during an on-page SEO audit.

3. Off-page SEO Audit

An off-page SEO audit entails examining other sites and even domains that connect to the pages you want to optimize, as well as the amount, quality, distribution, and recency of these links.

4. Technical SEO Audit

On-page initiatives such as image optimization would be included in this sort of SEO audit, but performance metrics such as site speed and security would be the focus. A technical SEO audit would reveal possibilities to correct, remove, or restructure code, prevent spam, and migrate from HTTP to HTTPS, among other things.

5. Local SEO Audit

Local SEO refers to a collection of techniques that can help your company rank higher in local searches. A local SEO audit would include parts from the other audits in terms of listings (off-page), content (locally focused pages and posts), on-page (keyword insertion and targeting), and technical (site speed and security).

Steps To Perform SEO Audit

Now, let’s get back to our main question: how to do SEO audit on your website. There are some steps which we are going to follow.

Below I am going to provide you with some steps through which you can easily perform SEO audits. The steps comply with some On-page SEO audits, Off-page SEO audits and technical SEO audits.

Metadata Should Be Optimized

A meta title and a meta description are the two parts of a meta tag. They assist Google in detecting the content of the page it is crawling, and they are two of the most important elements Google considers when deciding how to rank pages. 

Page title and meta description plays an important role in boosting SEO traffic and CTR. 

They also work as advertising for your content by assisting individuals searching through search results in determining the substance of your website.

But you should ensure one more thing that is, don’t overuse the target keywords in your meta tags. 

The first 50-60 characters of your title are displayed by Google. So, make sure you keep your title in between that. 

Keep your titles under 60 characters, and you’ll avoid truncation 90% of the time. This free tool from Moz aids in the design of titles.

Your target keyword should appear in your title in its entirety.

Then comes a very important thing which is highly responsible for click-through rate, i.e., meta description. The optimal description length has fluctuated in previous years, but it is now between 155 and 160 characters.

If you are eager to know how to optimize meta description, watch this video. This simple video is going to help on every step of writing a meta description. 

Improve Your Information Architecture

Information architecture is the way information is organized on the website.

That implies rearranging internal linking structures on your website to convey equity to the pages that require it for the purposes of an SEO audit. Here are some pointers if your site’s structure is a jumble.

– Have User-friendly Website: Collaborate together with developers and designers to create user-friendly solutions that boost page authority without sacrificing UX (User Experience).

– Increase The Amount Of Blog Articles: Older posts are 20-30 clicks away from your homepage if your blog index only includes ten pages at a time (where the most equity lies). To bring those older entries closer to the homepage, increase the number of posts per page.

– Make Sure There Are No Overlapping Connections: For example, your blog’s “related posts” and “popular posts” sections, as well as the header and footer. To effectively utilize that prized link space, replace those duplicate links with connections to other pages to which you wish to convey equity.

Fix Thin Content

When it comes to material, If your pages are too thin, they won’t get any respect in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Panda, a 2011 Google algorithm upgrade that penalized pages with insufficient content, ensured this.

So, make sure your content should not be too thin. And if it is thin, you must improve that.

One such message for a manual action that Google might provide to websites or web pages is “thin content.” When the search engine discovers low-quality or shallow pages on your site, this justification is offered.

Here are a few more instances of improper practices that may result in a Google thin content penalty for your SEO:

1. Content that has been created through Tool. For example, content that is difficult to understand or text that has been piececomd together from various sources.

2. Affiliate pages that aren’t very thick. This refers to material from a single brand (or connected brands) being duplicated on several websites or domains.

3. Other people’s content. Scraped content, for example, or low-quality or irrelevant guest blog entries.

4. Pages that lead to other pages. Pages that don’t accurately display the main content and instead direct readers to another page to get what they’re looking for.

So, avoid such contents as much as possible.

Fix Duplicate Content

Google webmaster defines, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

The most obvious place to find duplicate content is the On-page. The reason why I am saying so is because, sometimes there you can get repeated titles like, H1, H2, H3 and more.

Do you know between 25% to 30% of the web content falls into the category of duplicated content?

If you are thinking copied content and duplicate content is the same thing, then you are wrong. Copied content is when somebody copies the content from the original source and publishes it on his own website.

Like duplicate content, copied material results in two web pages with similar chunks of information; however, unlike duplicate content, copied content is done on purpose, does not provide value to the reader, and typically contains a low-quality website.

Some Of The Most Common Duplicate Content Issues Are:

1: Printer-Friendly Versions of Pages

2: http/https or Subdomain issues

3: UTM Parameters and Session IDs

4: Pagination

5: Country/Language Versions of the Same Page

6: Copied Content

7: Syndicated Content

8: Boilerplate Content

Practices To Prevent Duplicate Content

– Use a self-referential rel=canonical link on your site’s pages to prevent spam scraper sites from taking credit for your material. This portion of the original page’s code identifies itself as the canonical reference for a page. Search engines might recognize your page as the ultimate source of truth if other sites reproduce the URL’s content.

– At all times, link to the canonical versions of your site’s URLs. Choose which version of a page is canonical if it has both a mobile and a desktop version, and then point all internal links to that page exclusively. Make sure all external links to that URL go to the canonical link as well.

Work On Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization for your content is extremely important for your website. Discovering fresh keyword chances would allow your company to branch out into new verticals that have yet to be explored. Keyword optimization allows you to refresh your database with new keywords on a regular basis, resulting in increased traffic, leads, and revenue.

Now the question that might be buzzing into your mind, what keyword optimization is.

Keyword optimization is a three-step technique that may assist a company to target qualified leads and direct them to its website from search engine results.

If you are eager to know about how you can do keyword research with the help of a tool, I would like to suggest to you one of the best tools you are ever going to find. Ahrefs Guide: The Most Comprehensive Guide Available on the Internet

You must put your target keywords in,

– URL

– Title

– H1(must)

– H2(1 or 2 target keyword)

– Meta title

– Meta description

– Body of the content

Read More: 11 Best Keyword Research Tools In 2022

Identify Chances For Link Building

Building links is an important aspect of gaining website authority, and no SEO audit is complete without advice on how to generate site-specific internal and external connections.

There are two types of links, Internal linking and External linking 

Internal linking is not very much difficult. It is just linking your one page with another page. For example, if you write a blog post and you explain some content in your blog then, after that you give a link to another blog of yours. That’s how you do an interlinking. 

As you can see here as an example,

Analyze The Page Speed

Page performance is critical, especially the page loading speed. This is due in part to the rise in smartphone searches.

Anyone looking for information on the internet on their phone isn’t going to wait for a slow-loading site. That implies the faster your site loads, the more likely Google would give you high organic ranks.

PageSpeed Insights would be your go-to tool for this. It gives you detailed information about page speeds and suggests ways to enhance them. You may assess page speed at both a site-wide and individual level:

How To Make Your Website Load Faster

– Reduce the size of your photographs. Image compression is your best choice if you want to enhance page speed quickly and effectively. Re-upload each picture specified in the report to your CMS using a basic image compressor like this one. Depending on the size of your photographs before and after, you might see a significant improvement in performance.

– Lazy loading should be used. This would ensure that your website’s “first paint” happens as rapidly as feasible.

– Look for common blunders. Here are a few frequent issues that may be slowing down your website.

Switching From Http To Https Is A Good Idea

Running on HTTP is a big no-no in today’s digital marketing world. HTTPS is more secure and quicker, and it’s one of Google’s ranking factors.

Manually inputting the several non-HTTPS iterations of your site domain—www.site.com; site.com; http://www.site.com—and ensuring they’ve all been 301 redirected to the HTTPS iteration is all it takes to ensure your site is operating on HTTPS.

Then you would want to look through the search index for any non-HTTPS URLs. You can see which versions of your site’s URLs are canonicalized by looking at the Index Status report in Search Console. Manually canonicalize the HTTPS versions if necessary.

Best SEO Audit Tools

For performing all the steps that I have mentioned above, you would need some tools and those are,

Search Engine Optimization Software: Any SEO software that is worth its salt. Ahrefs, Moz Pro, and SEMrush would all offer a site audit or crawl function that would allow you to scan your website and evaluate not just its overall search health, but also frequent inefficiencies that are pulling down its organic performance.

Google Search Console: It can be used in a variety of ways for SEO auditing, including keyword research, organic CTR, technical corrections, Core Web Vitals, and submitting any sites for reindexing that have been reoptimized as a consequence of the audit.

Page Speed Tools: Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix are both reliable and free tools.

Conclusion

So, here we have discussed all the steps that you need to perform in order to go with the SEO audit. All the steps that I have elaborated are extremely important and you cannot skip any of them.

And of course, SEO audits are important for the health of the website and should be performed regularly. It is not only important for the health of the website but also to keep the website updated as per the algorithms.

If you have any query or doubt, you can just comment it down and I am going to reply for sure!

For more marketing tips and services, you can schedule a free-of-cost 30-Minute Strategy session with our experts. In this call, our experts would discuss your business and provide you with the free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.

FAQs

1. What Is The Best Way To Get An Ecommerce SEO Audit?

Crawling your eCommerce website should be the first step in your SEO evaluation. There are a number of programmes that replicate the crawling process, and you can set them up to act like the search engine you want to use (Google, Bing, etc.). They’ll figure out which technological issues need your attention.

2. How Much Does An SEO Audit Cost?

The cost of an SEO audit is determined on the size and purpose of the website. Companies, on the other hand, charge anywhere from $650 to $14,000 each audit. Most businesses adhere to this standard range when delivering a full SEO audit report.

3. What Is A Technical SEO Audit?

Technical SEO entails changes to your site that make it easier for Google to crawl and index it, allowing it to offer the correct material to people at the right time. The following are some of the topics that a technical SEO audit will look at: The structure of the URLs on the site.

4. How Long Does An SEO Audit Take?

The fact that different SEO agencies and freelancers claim results in as little as a few hours to as long as six months doesn’t help matters. In a matter of minutes, you may locate software that can generate a suspicious audit. Even though it appears to be professional, such an audit is frequently misleading and off the mark.

5. What Is The Best Way To Audit An SEO Client Report?

A) Determine what you want to achieve.

B) In your SEO report, determine the KPIs you would require like, Engagement, Traffic, The percentage of people that convert, The effectiveness of keywords, Links, Page performance and speed.

C) Create and distribute your SEO report.