What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is the process of examining how well your online presence aligns with best practices; it is the first step in developing a measurable implementation strategy. The audit has to be thorough. Your SEO audit should address the structural and content elements that together make up your online presence. It should give you a sense of what’s going on in your present situation in the broader context of things. Incomplete information may lead to inappropriate suggestions.
Your audit should be simple to grasp. If you’re a business owner, you need to be able to see how problems with search engine optimization (SEO) are impacting your company’s online objectives, goals, or income. All suggestions should be directly related to your company’s overall goals, beyond the goals of the SEO strategy.
Why is it Important to Audit Your Website on a Regular Basis?
As the “center” of your online presence, your website needs constant maintenance to keep it running smoothly. Keep in mind that your website is an evolving digital asset and not something that stays the same for years on end. There is certain to be some turnover in the amount of material included on your site each year. For this reason, periodic audits are essential. Paradox Media suggests that annual website audits be performed at the very least. Your teams will be able to address urgent problems immediately.
After doing an audit, you should focus on other areas of SEO to ensure continued success. In any case, establishing a solid technological groundwork is just the beginning of what will lead to SEO success. If your company’s success is contingent on clients visiting a physical location, it is essential that you monitor the SEO strategies used by your competitors, stay abreast of the latest best practices recommended by search engines, and continue to employ local SEO best practices. These should follow your SEO audit and regular SEO maintenance since they are all essential components of a winning SEO strategy.
Types of SEO Audits
SEO Content Audit
This means searching for ways to enhance the relevance, freshness, and quality of the content on the sites you want to rank higher for or for which you want more visitors. You may use Google E-A-T as a guide. E-A-T, which stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness,” is not an update or an algorithm. Rather, it describes the degree to which a user may have trust in your website, taking into account factors like the content’s authority and depth. A SEO content audit may also look for ways to improve your site’s ranking in the featured snippets, the related questions, and the knowledge panel.
On-Page SEO Audit
When discussing search engine optimization (SEO), this term is often used to describe the process of enhancing a page’s infrastructure to better accommodate spiders. Checking the meta descriptions, meta titles, alt text, and compression of images is only the beginning of an on-page SEO audit.
Off-Page SEO
To do an off-page SEO audit, you would examine not just the pages inside your own domain, but also the sites within any other domains that connect to the target pages. This analysis may focus on factors like the number, quality, distribution, and relevance of these links.
Technical SEO Audit
This specific SEO audit will look at both on-page factors like image optimization and off-page ones like load time and security. The results of a technical SEO audit may be used to make improvements including removing unnecessary code, rearranging existing code, implementing spam protection, upgrading from HTTP to HTTPS, and much more.
Local SEO Audit
The term “local SEO” refers to a collection of procedures designed to improve your company’s visibility in local results. You may expect a local SEO audit to be shorter than the others, but it will still cover all the bases in terms of listings (off-page), content (locally focused pages and posts), on-page (keyword insertion and targeting), and technical (site speed and security).
Contact Us for a Free SEO Audit to Help Optimize Your Website
A Quick SEO Audit Checklist
There are a number of steps to making sure that your SEO audit covers all the bases. Although it’s advisable to focus and approach SEO audits on a site-by-site basis, these are issues which affect all websites equally.
- Check for Indexing Issues
- Check for Duplicate Versions of Your Site
- Run a Site Crawl
- Check for Manual Actions
- Check for Mobile-Friendliness Issues
- Analyze Your Site’s Speed
- Analyze Your Core Web Vitals
- Analyze Your Internal Links
- Check Your Organic Traffic
- Benchmark Against Your Competitors
- Find Keywords You’re Missing Out On
- Find Missed Backlink Opportunities
- Audit and Improve Your Top Pages
- Monitor Your Rankings
Â
In conclusion, the suggestions you are provided with after an SEO audit should be practical. Each suggestion should have a clear plan of action, with a priority, an estimated effect, and a corresponding amount of work. Any SEO audit final report should clearly lay out next steps in an understandable format. If you are ready to start an SEO audit, we recommend you use a professional SEO audit company. These companies will be able to identify any issues and suggest solutions.
