If you want to rank well in Google’s search returns, an SEO audit is necessary. An audit of your website’s most influential aspects for SEO can help you determine what’s working and can be duplicated , what isn’t working and what needs to be improved.
You may even uncover something that is getting you penalized by Google! An SEO audit can also give you better insight into the content on your site and your traffic.
Now that you know why it’s important you might be wondering – what exactly is an SEO audit?
In this article, we’ll discuss:
What is an SEO Audit?
Don’t be initiated by the word “audit.” An SEO audit is really just a health check for your website.
An audit looks at all of the most important aspects of your site’s SEO in order to help you determine any issues that your site may have and how you can go about optimizing it further.
Any glaring issues that might be a part of a bigger problem such as unoptimized metalinks, incorrect keyword funneling and high page bounce rates could all be discovered with a comprehensive SEO audit.
SEO Audit – 15 SEO Elements an SEO Audit Can Fix
An SEO audit can uncover many things about your site that may be greatly impacting your SEO!
Hiring SEO professionals, like the ones we have at Advesa, will start the first step of consultation to better understand your SEO history and concerns.
From there, our SEO experts can perform audits and analyze your website to determine if there are any concerns affecting your website. Once the audit is complete, we’ll report findings and implement changes.
Our SEO audit findings can help fix many different aspects of your website including:
1. On-site optimization:
In the above image (taken from the flatlay Instagram account), we see plates and dishes dotted all around the space. Despite this, there is a certain organised chaos to the image and, even though there is potential for overlap and overload, the objects are spaced so that the photograph doesn’t feel cluttered. This is also a great tip in keeping the aesthetic minimalistic even when there’s a lot going on.
With flat lay photography, there’s always a method to the madness. Control your spacing and how far apart your objects of focus are to create an engaging visual piece.
2. Penalty recovery
An audit can also bring to light any penalties from Google that your site may be incurring. Whether it’s a manual penalty that has hit your website or an algorithmic one, you don’t have to worry – we can help you recover from it.
3. Site migrations
Few things can tank a website’s performance in the search results faster than a poorly implemented site migration. An SEO audit can determine if this has impacted your rankings and, if so, we can help fix these issues.
4. Traffic loss
An SEO audit will help review, diagnose and provide recommendations for dealing with traffic loss. What keywords have lost their ranking positions, which pages have a high bounce rate and other considerations all play a factor in optimizing your site’s traffic.
An SEO campaign can make the difference between a dead website and a thriving one. do you know these “7 steps to relevant content and long-lasting traffic?
5. Loose ends after a new website launch:
If you’ve just launched a new website or had a redesign, an SEO audit is particularly important. This will help identify loose ends, analytics implementation, site architecture, crawl path optimization, and critical SEO elements such as robots.txt and XML sitemap.
6. Mobile friendliness:
If your website is not optimized for mobile use, an SEO audit will uncover this very quickly. Our team will ensure your website is optimized on mobile devices so that your audience can view it with ease.
7. Crawlability and accessibility:
An audit will examine your site’s crawlability (errors, redirects), content accessibility and other important aspects of SEO. Any issues that are uncovered via the audit can be addressed to help with your rankings.
8. Drop in rankings:
If you’ve experienced a drop in the rankings, an SEO audit will uncover this and allow us to diagnose, minimize and reverse the damage to your site.
An SEO audit will help your site, but only if you’re already following these SEO best practices. Here’s 9 ways you can improve your rankings through SEO.
9. Page speed and load time:
Not sure if your pages are loading too slow? An audit can help. It will uncover which of your pages load too slowly for Google’s liking. With this valuable info, we can assist you with slow page speeds and loading times to ensure a great website experience for users (and therefore better rankings!).
10. Technical errors:
The best way to find out if your site is experiencing any technical errors – you guessed it, an audit. After uncovering any errors, we’ll fix those that are hurting your rankings so you can get back to improving traffic, leads and sales.
11. Site security:
This is vital to your site’s success, especially if you’ve got an ecommerce site or are handling customers’ personal information. An audit can discover any threats to your site’s security and then we can help make changes to ensure you and your customers are protected.
12. Site architecture and internal linking:
We’re here to help optimize your website structure and internal links, for SEO success. An audit will help determine where your site needs improvement in these areas and how to best make those improvements.
13. Duplicate content issues:
Google hates duplicate content! By conducting an audit, you can determine whether your site has duplicate content so that it can be addressed. Our SEO consultants can assist if you have duplicate content issues, which occurs accidentally or as a result of a poor technical implementation.
14. Broken links:
Finding and fixing broken links, which are links on your site that point to non‐existent resources, can improve user experience and ultimately your SEO.
15. Keyword targeting:
An SEO audit can help ensure your website is optimized for keywords to attract the right audience. If it’s not already, that can be fixed! Discovering the right keywords to use can also lead to new content ideas and filling in any possible gaps in your content.
3 Ways to Perform an SEO Audit
There are several options when it comes down to how you choose to perform an SEO audit. Here are a few of the best:
1. Use a tool to help you audit your site.
Some examples of useful SEO tools include:
- SEMrush – this auditing tool will examine your site for things like duplicate content and title tags, broken links, slow loading pages, incomplete meta data, etc. to help you discover where improvements can be made.
- MOZ – this tool will help you determine any technical SEO issues with your site. Other helpful tools offered by MOZ include on-page optimization and link research tools.
- Screaming Frog – the Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls your website and analyzes on-page and technical SEO.
2. Conduct the audit manually.
If you’re opting to do an audit manually, be sure to examine these following elements
- Technical aspects (e.g. back-end elements) like your hosting, indexing, redirects, page speed, site map, crawlability, etc.
- Front-end or on-page factors like your keyword use and user experience.
- Off-page aspects like link quality.
- Competitors and the way they are doing things.
3. Hire professionals to conduct the audit for you and implement any necessary changes.
When selecting the option that’s right for you, keep in mind that an SEO audit can be very time consuming and, if you’re not a techy-type person, the learning process can be a little tedious. Therefore, for most people, the best way to perform an SEO audit is to hire professionals who can help you conduct an in-depth and comprehensive report,
Key Takeaways On How to Perform an SEO Audit
An SEO audit is an important task that should be conducted every so often in order to keep your site competitive and your SEO plans on track.
It can help you to uncover vital errors that may be negatively impacting your rankings in the SERPs, including on-site issues, penalties your site is incurring, technical errors, issues with speed, security issues, site architecture, duplicate content issues, broken links and more.
There are many tools available that can help you conduct an SEO audit or you can do one manually yourself however, the best way, in most cases, is to have a team of professionals audit your site for you. This will ensure you are getting the best available suggestions and receiving help with the implementation of changes.
