How to Perform a SEO Audit
Are you aware of your website's performance?
SEO professionals emphasize the significance of routine audits. For those with limited SEO knowledge, conducting an audit may appear overwhelming. Nevertheless, in today's digital marketing landscape, comprehending this process is increasingly crucial.
In this blog post, we will share insights on conducting an SEO audit, including a checklist, exploring the newest tools, and providing tips for gaining a deeper understanding of the process's fundamentals.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a method to evaluate your website's health, prevent spam, and receive recommendations on how to enhance it. These audits are crucial due to Google's frequent algorithm changes aligning with new technology and search trends.
Performing a thorough SEO audit is a fundamental step for any digital marketer, whether done internally or outsourced. It allows you to assess your current SEO strategies, no matter how extensive or limited, and take prompt action based on the findings.
The cost of an SEO audit varies depending on the tools and the scale of your business and website. Different agencies offer different prices, so it's wise to gather multiple quotes for comparison.
Refer to our SEO audit handbook and toolkit for guidance on the process and access a downloadable toolkit to kickstart your audit.
Importance of an SEO Audit
An SEO audit is crucial for evaluating a website's overall health to ensure its usability in both internal and external contexts. It involves examining various factors internally, such as the sitemap, anchor text, and social media presence. Addressing issues like load time and identifying red flags are vital outcomes of a comprehensive audit.
Conducting an SEO audit is essential to prevent Google penalties that could harm your site's ranking. Many minor details can lead to penalties unknowingly, especially if you lack SEO expertise. External audits provide valuable insights on content quality, linking strategies, and more.
While performing a thorough SEO audit can be complex and technical, the potential revenue benefits are significant if executed correctly. Regularly monitoring your website's performance is key—perform monthly checks using recommended tools and seek an annual review from an expert.
Understanding the role of an SEO Manager can shed light on their responsibilities and the value they bring to optimizing website performance.
This article was crafted by Natures Agency at naturesagency.com.au
An SEO Audit: Key Areas Covered
An SEO audit acts as a thorough checkup for your system, assessing its performance compared to industry standards. Here are the primary areas that an SEO audit typically addresses:
Keyword Usage: The audit evaluates the effectiveness of your keyword usage, ensuring they are strategically placed to attract optimal traffic. Explore our Ultimate List of Keyword Research Tools to enhance your search engine rankings.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): LSI involves understanding the context and intent behind searches. With advancements in technology, particularly AI, search engines can grasp specific meanings better, including secondary and long-tail keywords.
Organic Search Rankings: By analyzing your performance in organic searches, an SEO audit can reduce your reliance on paid advertising, leading to cost savings and improved strategies for organic reach.
Competitive Analysis: Competitors regularly conduct SEO audits to evaluate their rankings, keyword strategies, and more. Staying informed about their tactics helps you stay competitive by monitoring meta tags, links, and other key elements.
Industry Trends: Monitoring industry trends is crucial for identifying content opportunities, understanding brand mentions across different sites, and staying updated on sector developments.
Identifying Technical Issues: An SEO audit can uncover backend problems that might be affecting your site's speed or search ranking. Engage a technical expert such as a web developer to address any coding issues efficiently.
Steps to Conducting an SEO Audit
To achieve optimal optimisation, there are several essential steps to follow during an SEO audit. Let's delve into each of them for a better understanding.
Performing Crawls and Site Audits
Wondering how to conduct an SEO audit? A successful audit always begins with a thorough site crawl. This initial step allows you to evaluate your website's current status and pinpoint any potential issues. Essentially, a crawl forms the foundation for the rest of your audit.
It's advisable to run an automated scan monthly to keep track of essential metrics such as bounce rate, conversions, and page views. This frequency is sufficient to uncover major issues, such as on-page errors like broken links, page titles, meta-data, or duplicate content. Should you encounter significant problems, it's best to seek assistance from a professional for a detailed audit. A more comprehensive review should be conducted yearly.
During a scan or full audit, your website is evaluated to identify any bugs, providing crucial insights for optimising your site for improved SEO and enhancing brand awareness.
Consider these key areas when conducting a technical SEO audit:
URL Structure: Are your URLs distinct, clean, and straightforward?
Content: Is your content well-crafted, well-structured, informative, and up-to-date?
Meta descriptions: Are they unique for each page and of appropriate length?
Links: Do you have an average of five links per page, and are they all functional?
Images: Are the image descriptions accurate?
Website structure: Is the layout clear and user-friendly?
A thorough examination will assess your landing page, its relationship with other pages, overall user-friendliness, site navigation, menu structure, and the effectiveness or potential hindrance of ads and banners.
Page Speed and SEO Audit Tools
Page speed plays a significant role in SEO audits, emphasising the need to assess and compare your page load time.
A fast loading website enhances user experience, while a slow one leads to higher bounce rates in today's age of short attention spans, which is less than ideal for conversion-focused websites.
Utilise top SEO audit tools for page speed optimisation. Google’s PageSpeed Insights examines your website's speed on desktop and mobile. YSlow offers suggestions like image formatting and compression for improved performance. Pingdom Website Speed Test provides a comprehensive analysis of each web page's components, sizes, and load times.
Conducting a speed test helps identify obstacles affecting your website's SEO. By pinpointing areas for enhancement, you can boost your site's overall performance.
Evaluate Your Website Architecture
Enhancing your site's SEO involves having a well-structured architecture. A solid architecture not only improves user experience for visitors but also assists search engine bots in ranking your site.
To achieve this, it is crucial to have a clear, logical, and organised structure that is reflected in a thorough and accurate sitemap submitted to your webmaster tool accounts. Equally important is a robust URL structure that aligns with your site hierarchy and follows straightforward naming conventions, avoiding symbols or numbers whenever possible.
For instance, a strong URL structure could appear as: www.naturesagency.com.au/seo-services
Additionally, a strong site architecture entails including all main web pages in the top navigation menu for easy access by site visitors and bots. Incorporating internal links that seamlessly guide users and bots from one page to another further strengthens your site's architecture, ultimately benefiting your SEO efforts.
Ensure Your Website's Content is Optimised
Content is a crucial on-page SEO factor that significantly impacts your site's performance.
Google favours fresh, unique content that aligns with searchers' needs and interests.
To enhance brand visibility and boost rankings, it's essential to ensure your website's content meets these criteria.
Conducting a content SEO audit is vital, so review existing content and focus on SEO when creating new material.
When producing content, incorporate keywords naturally and consistently, avoiding any 'spammy' associations.
Emphasise value and relevance when creating content for SEO success.
Utilise a content calendar to organise keywords for different content types and stay updated on content marketing and SEO trends to remain current.
Verify Your Tags
Use brief, descriptive title tags that precisely communicate the webpage's purpose. Lengthy titles may get truncated by search engines, so remember that less is more. Aim to incorporate a relevant keyword when feasible.
Meta-tags function as summaries of a webpage's content. When optimised effectively, they encourage searchers to click on your listing in search engine results to visit your site.
Alt tags for images provide text descriptions crucial for web crawlers. By providing accurate image descriptions (and incorporating targeted keywords naturally), you can significantly boost your SEO and enhance digital accessibility.
Ensure each page includes a rel="canonical" link in its HTML to avoid duplicate content issues. Blog post tags can aid in organising your site's content for web crawling, especially if you have a blog. If you're considering starting a blog, take a look at our 5 simple steps to get you started!
Check Your Backlinks
Sometimes, it's not just what you know but also who you know. Search engines often evaluate your website's quality and relevance to users based on the websites linking to it. In the past, there was a practice called 'link farming,' where sites exchanged links to boost SEO.
As SEO practices have evolved, focusing on quality rather than quantity of backlinks is crucial. If search engines detect questionable sites linking to yours, it could harm your site's reputation. Ensure your backlinks come from diverse domains as having links from the same site can affect your SEO negatively.
SEO Audit Tools
For those of us not well-versed in SEO, there are numerous tools available to aid in conducting a thorough audit. Below are some top SEO audit tools to consider:
Free for up to 500 URLs, with a license costing $209/£149 annually. Simply input the URL you wish to crawl, like www.naturesagency.com.au, and the tool will analyse it for you.
Essential for any digital marketer, offering various metrics and insights for improved SEO. It can be integrated with Screaming Frog to compare data such as sessions, page views, and bounce rates.
Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console and Google Trends):
Affordable tools from Google for regular SEO checks and viewing your page from Google's perspective.
An extension that quickly checks for working links, identifies broken links, and evaluates link structures.
Analyses your site's performance against competitors, covering rank analysis, link structures, trust metrics, site speed, and user-friendliness.
Included with a MOZ pro subscription, this tool aids in boosting page rankings for specific keywords and provides growth reports.
Allows you to see your web pages as search engines do, facilitating audits of technical content elements.
Known as 'the planet’s largest link index database,' Majestic helps identify valuable backlinks.
A robust SEO tool useful for assessing visual content performance, offering features like the Keyword Magic Tool and site audit tool. Plans range from $119.95 to $449.95 per month.
Utilise SEO for Boosting Engagement, Generating Leads, and Increasing Revenue
In the vast sea of content available, it can be challenging to reach and engage your target audience. Natures Agency will equip you with the necessary knowledge and resources to stand out in a competitive environment. Discover how to enhance SEO, leverage search analytics, develop impactful paid campaigns, implement search strategies, and more.
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