How to do a website SEO audit [SEO Audit Guide 2020]

1.    Introduction

When was the last time you did a search engine optimization audit (SEO Audit) on your website? Running a website is not just about uploading content and promoting your product and services. You must always ensure that your site is SEO friendly. Search engines are continuously updated with new technologies. SEO audit will help you identify the latest developments and update your website. Through the website audit, you will recognize the problematic areas on your website and plan to fix them. Search engine marketing is always growing, and if you’re not keen, you might find your site being left out of the new developments. 

Digital marketing is experiencing massive technological advancements. Thus, you need to partner with the best digital marketing experts to carry out an SEO audit on your website regularly. You need to stay ahead of the competition for your website to continue being ranked high in search engines. Unless you’re a digital marketing expert, it could be challenging to do an SEO audit on your website. 

2.    So, what is an SEO audit?

A search engine optimization audit is a process of evaluating your website search engine friendliness. The SEO audit checks various areas on your website to help you attain higher rankings on search engines. By looking at your website, you may not know its health status unless you get an expert to run an audit. A thorough SEO audit is vital for every digital marketer. That’s the only way to analyze your SEO efforts and their effectiveness. You also get insights and identify the areas that need to be updated or repaired. 

3.  Which areas does SEO audit cover?

As mentioned above, an SEO audit is a checkup on your website to determine its functioning compared to the market demands and environment. However, there are essential areas that the SEO audit should cover and they include;

• Keyword usage; the SEO audit will analyze how well you use your keywords to attract traffic on your website. 
• Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI); LSI refers to intent and context behind every search. It’s an artificial intelligence technology that accounts for the results from any search on search engines. It determines the relevance, intent, and context and gives the internet users the most related search results. LSI accounts for things such as long-tail keywords, primary and secondary keywords.
• Organic Search Rankings; just in case you have been spending on sponsored ads, you should always consider reducing those costs. The SEO audit can help you to check how your website is doing in the organic searches. In turn, you can use that information to know if you can lessen the need to pay for ads. On the other hand, the data will also help you develop new strategies to ensure organic reach. The SEO auditor will also guide you on achieving excellent organic search ranking without spending a lot on ads. 
• Keeping up with the competition; the digital marketing space has millions of players, and therefore, you need to remain on top of the game. Always remember your competitors are running SEO audits to ensure that they stay ranked high on search engines. They check their links, Meta tags, keywords, and everything else to keep them up there. Therefore, to match that competition and even better your business rivals, you have to run regular SEO audits on your website. 
• Understand Problematic Code; the SEO audit also looks at your website back end to identify bugs and problems that could be slowing down the site. Bugs could also be pushing your website down the search engines’ ranking. Now you can get a web development expert to help get rid of the bugs on your website. A good SEO auditor should refer you to website technical experts on the market. 

4.    Steps for carrying out a website SEO Audit?

1. Crawling and Site Audits

A useful website SEO audit should start with an all-encompassing site crawl. This will enable you to analyze your website and find out all issues your site could be having. Typically, the website crawl will give you the starting point before proceeding to audit other areas. It’s always advised to run automated scans on your website at least once per month to monitor the minor issues such as page views, conversions, and bounce rates. Regular scans give you knowledge about your site health; if there are significant issues, you will notice them early enough. On-page errors resulting from duplicate content, broken links, meta-date, or page titles can easily be identified through the site crawling. Some errors on your website, you can fix them, but just in case, it’s something beyond your knowledge, get in touch with professional SEO auditors to help you. 

You don’t need an expert to run the regular website scans. You can do it yourself, but don’t try to fix anything you don’t understand. Consider the following areas when carrying out SEO check;

• URL Structure; Check if your URLs are clean, simple and unique 
• Content; ensure your articles are well-written, informative, adequately formatted, and fresh.
• Meta descriptions; Check whether they are on each page if they are unique and in the right length. 
• Links; page links should be about 5 per content, make sure they’re there and working. 
• Images; Check if the pictures have the right descriptions and are relevant to your page. 
• Website structure; it should be clear and user-friendly 

On the other hand, an effective website SEO audit will analyze your landing page, its relationship with other pages, and the overall user-friendliness of every page. The site crawl will be essential in checking if everything is running well, as it should be as per the market demands. Remember, you are competing with millions of website owners to attract more traffic. 

• Page speed

Your website page speed plays a vital role in attracting traffic and enhancing user experience. Internet users enjoy visiting sites with impressive loading speed. Slow websites lead to bounce rates and could cost you big time. Therefore, it’s advisable always to do a page speed audit to determine your page loading speed on both desktop and mobile search engines. You can use various tools to analyze your page speed, such as Google PageSpeed Insights. The tool will analyze both mobile and desktop loading speeds. 

You can also use the YSlow tool for auditing your page loading speed. The YSlow will analyze and show you the loading speed of all your webpages. On the other hand, the tool provides you with suggestions on what to do and areas that you can fix, such as formatting your content correctly and compressing the pictures. Some of the suggestions you can quickly correct them, but others may need to hire an expert. 

Alternatively, you can use Pingdom Website Speed Test. This is another tool that you can use to analyze your webpages loading speed. The tool offers are comprehensive information about your webpages, such as size and the specific page loading time. 

Page speed test helps you determine the elements on your website that are obstacles to achieving your SEO goals. You will get the vital information on your web pages loading speed, and the suggested areas that need to be fixed. Now you can comfortably optimize the recommended areas and enhance your website loading speeds. In turn, you will improve your website’s user experience and boost your traffic in the long run. 

• Analyze your website Architecture

An excellent website structure plays a vital role in SEO. The site’s user experience is mostly dependent on the architecture of your website. Google bots that determine your website search engine ranking will also have an easy time to crawl on a properly structured website. Therefore, your site should have a logical, clear, and well-organized structure to reflect a complete and accurate sitemap. Besides, a strong, unique and straightforward URL structure is also essential. 

At this level of web SEO audit, you might need to hire an SEO expert to assess your site’s structure. Therefore, you will identify the pages or areas that need to be rectified after getting the SEO audit report. At that point, you will consult with your website builders or get experts to rearrange your site structure.  

The website architecture assessment is all about making it easy for search engine bots and visitors to access information quickly. For instance, a good website architecture includes all main webpages in the navigation menu. Once the bots or website visitors click the menu bar, they find almost all vital pages there. Internet users will also have an easy time to maneuver in your website. Again, ensure that you include internal links in your pages. All these will make your site architecture SEO-friendly. 

• Website Content 

Content is a primary on-page SEO factor that influences the effectiveness of your website. Google is regularly updated with the latest AI technology that detects high-quality and content relevance to serve the searchers’ needs. Besides, content is used in the ranking of websites in various search engines. 

Good content should be relevant to your niche. In short, content is what attracts traffic on your website. Therefore, you must audit your web content to ensure that you have used the right keywords correctly. In SEO, relevance, value, and uniqueness are vital. Also, make sure you use the target keywords without conveying your services and products as spammy. If possible, get an SEO expert to help you optimize your content. 

• Check your site tags. 

Meta-tag serves as a webpage content description in the eyes of search engines. In search engines, when an internet user searches for a keyword, the results link comes with a description, and that’s the meta-tag. It gives the searcher an overview of what your content is all about. Internet users, read the meta-tag first before deciding whether to click on your link or not. On the other hand, including a rel=canonical link in each of your website page HTML prevents duplicate content issues. Blog post tags help you organize your website content for easy crawling. Auditing your meta-tags ensures that you improve your website chances to be ranked high on search engines. 

• Backlinks 

Search engines determine the quality of websites based on the quality of the sites linked to them, and that means you much watch out for any sites you connect to your site. Search engines prioritize quality websites when ranking sites. Thus, when your website is linked to other authoritative and quality sites, it gives you an upper hand in SEO. When doing an SEO audit, make sure you check your backlinks. Always link your website with authoritative, trusted, and quality sites. 

5.    Conclusion; Where to get professional website SEO audit services?

A website SEO audit should be done frequently to keep your site up to date with the new search engine technologies. The best professional web SEO audit services sometimes may not be easy to get, especially with the thousands of digital marketing agencies today. However, take your time to choose the best SEO professionals to help you audit your website. Remember, SEO is not a day event; it is a process that will help you get high rankings on search engines. Maintaining your site’s top ranking also needs an SEO expert who understands the search engine optimization dynamics.

Although there are simple audits that you can do yourself, you will sometimes need a professional SEO audit to keep your website competitive. There are Web SEO auditing tools that can only be used by experts. Besides, some website areas can only be optimized by an SEO expert. Therefore, hire a professional to audit your site for SEO, and fix all areas that could be hindering you from attaining high rankings. You can partner with a digital marketing agency to be checking on your website regularly and keep it up to date with the latest SEO advancements.

We’re the leading digital marketing firm in the region, and you can always get in touch with us for SEO services, including website audits. We have been in the industry for many years now. Thus, we have a good understanding of the digital marketing space. Working with professionals guarantees quality services and value for your money.

Author Bio-

Shanta Narang is a Passionate, amiable, dynamic, and result-oriented digital marketing professional with over 12 years of experience in SEO, content management, brand marketing, business management, and educational counseling. She facilitates digital transformation initiatives for organizations to help them grow in the online platform. Being a DM Specialist, She helps companies to succeed in their business with the help of the latest trends and technology.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin

Twitter- https://twitter.com/SEOwithShanta

Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/seowithshanta

Linkedin- https://www.linkedin.com/in/seowithshanta/