Most of you know the importance of performing SEO on a website. In the same way, an SEO audit is also important to maintain the quality of a site. There will be many problems on your site like slow loading, broken links, bad backlinks, duplicate contents, errors, etc.
Auditing your site will help to identify problems related to your site and you can correct them. You can also make your site up-to-date with all new developments that can help you to compete with other sites.
What is SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a process that evaluates various search engine optimizing elements of a website. After completing this audit, you can improve various weakness associated with your site. This will improve the overall website value. There will be some important areas you need, to audit on a website.
You will get an idea about various areas to audit in your site to get better performance. Here are some advantages of performing an SEO audit
Advantages of performing an SEO audit of your site:
Doing SEO audit of your website is essential and can bring many benefits. Here are some advantages
Improve content quality:
By auditing your site, you can find out whether there is any problem associated with the quality of your content. This will help you to improve your site standard.
Avoid Google penalties:
You can update every negative element on your site like spammy or duplicate contents. If your site contains many such negative contents you will get the penalty from Google. Avoid it by performing an SEO audit more often.
Improve user experience:
SEO audit basically helps to get rid of all flaws from a site and hence improves user experience. This can lead to an increase in your site traffic and hence the site ranking will also improve.
Get an idea of what to do:
When you search your site for improvements you cannot find many things to change when you do manually. But, there are many tools that you can use that can give a good idea of actionable steps.
Performing SEO Audit Process:
Before starting an SEO audit, the first process you need to carry out is site crawling. After gathering various data from the website, you can analyze its performance well. First, let’s check some basics about crawling
Crawling:
In this process, a particular tool is used to review pages of a website and map the site to understand various topics it covers. Basically, crawling checks the site architecture and use this information to compare with other sites in the same field. There are tools that can give you insight into your site.
It shows the search engine’s view of your site, though this is not fully accurate by using these approximate results you can modify your site structure to make it easily accessible to the website.
A popular tool that you can do to check website crawling is Screaming Frog. This tool has a free version also which give you the following features
- Find broken links
- Find out duplicate content
- Generate XML map of a site
- Collect data from HTML on a web page
- Analyze titles and meta tags of your website pages
- Integrate with Google Analytics
Using free version, you can check up to 500 URLs of your site. If you want to check more URLs then a Pro version is also there.
You can enter the URL to search spider and there you will get the full report related to your site in Excel sheets. Use this to make suitable changes to your site structure.
Another tool you can use for checking the broken link is Xenu Link Sleuth. It can create XML map, check titles and meta descriptions and check for missing alt text messages.
But the problem associated with this tool is that it is only available for Windows. This is also a very good tool you can use for website crawling. Now, you got all the data from your site’s internal structure.
Generate conversion:
The main aim of Search engine optimization is to generate conversion. When we optimize a site, we will expect some results like improved site traffic, more downloads, etc.
If the visitors are not interested in your site then your ranking will be lower. So, it is very important to entertain your customers with something.
You can monitor conversion types such as making a purchase, signing into a newsletter, watching a video, etc.
Make your site accessible:
Site accessibility is very important to engage more visitors to your site. For example, if your site is mobile friendly it can get more visitors. Most people use a mobile device to access the website nowadays.
You can check them on a mobile-friendly test by entering your URL. It will show you whether your site is mobile friendly or not.
Analyze your site:
Site analysis is very important to know how well it is performing among all other sites. There are tools out there with which you will get all analytical data of your website.
Google search console and Google Analytics are good to try. Both are free tools with which you can measure website conversion and errors associated with indexing the site.
Know the best performing and worst performing contents. Make necessary changes for the worst performing contents.
Find out site loading speed:
More than 47% of customers expect to load a site within 2 seconds. So, page speed is a very important factor you need to consider.
Nobody wants to wait more than 3 seconds to load a site. Check your site speed using any available speed test tool link Pingdom Website speed test.
You can compare your site loading speed with your competitor site and know your site performance. If your page takes more time to load, optimize the speed by changing various settings.
Caching your pages is a good idea to reduce loading time. Make sure you give the user a better experience by reducing page loading time.
Check for XML map:
An XML sitemap allows the search engine to determine the URLs available on your website. It will help search engine to crawl your website easily.
Check whether your site has got XML map and if not, create one using various online tools available.
After creating an XML sitemap, submit it to Google search console. This will help to make your site structure clear to the search engine.
Content:
Creating quality contents is the best SEO strategy according to most marketers. But this is a challenging task to create versatile contents. Now everyone tries to be competitive and it is very difficult to get noticed. Check for duplicate contents using any plagiarism checking tools. This is very essential to check its uniqueness.
Interact with your followers to know more about your content quality. Content exploring tools are there where you can search most popular content from your genre. Ahrefs content explorer and Buzzumo are good for this purpose.
You can conduct a content inventory which contains all the contents of your site. Check for highly performing contents or whether there is any problem related to any of your content.
Content review is also important while conducting an SEO audit. You can do this using any tools such as screaming frog. Enter all your URLs and it will show all details related to your content.
You can find out active contents, errors and deleted ones from this report. After analyzing this report, you can filter out inactive pages and irrelevant contents.
Look for content length also. There is no specific word count to improve your site quality. You can produce content with any length but the main point is that to include relevant, useful content after thorough research.
Even though your content is lengthy but doesn’t have any useful stuff in it, Google considers its a low-quality site.
Google will not entertain duplicate contents. If your site contains multiple duplicate contents then there is a chance to get a penalty from Google. There are tools available to check duplicate contents.
Optimization:
Optimization of your site ensures the best ranking as well as improves its quality, pay-per-click advertising, etc. By optimizing your site, you can improve user experience by indexing site and ranking search engine for keywords.
Optimization on page:
Title tags are important and they represent the topic of a particular page. You have to define the title tag well and it should be relevant to the topic.
Try to include keywords naturally and the number of characters should not be more than 55. Make sure to put the original title tag without duplicating any other titles.
A meta description is a small description of the topic. You can see it below title tags. Make sure to include a two-length meta description and by reading this viewer will get an idea of the topic you are going to explain.
Make your site URL structure specific and brief so that you can keep the site navigation organized. It will easily help to navigate the user and search engine towards your site. Review the site URL and make it appropriate.
Edit Robot.txt file:
This file tells the search engine spiders the pages they need to crawl. You can prioritize the site and prevent crawlers from duplicate indexing content.
If there are any pages you don’t want spiders to crawl, you can do it by modifying the contents on the file. You can create this manually as well as automatically using tools.
Canonicalization issues:
While optimizing your site make sure that there is no duplicate web address of the same page. Make sure to avoid this issue while auditing your site.
If there are multiple web address of the same page then it will confuse the search engine and you can avoid this canonicalization errors by reporting
Keyword research:
Keywords are important to improve your SEO ranking. While checking the website for keywords choose an appropriate tool for that. There are many tools available where you can search for competitive keywords.
After getting them to arrange into a proper category and include it in your site.
Also, compare your competitor site and evaluate the basis of their ranking. If you can implement it on your site you can improve your site visibility.
Authority:
Link Authority is a very important ranking factor according to Google. Even though your content is of good quality and there no site linked to your site, then it will affect ranking. It is very important to check the genuineness of links related to your site.
Link audit:
Conducting links audit is very important to know the number of links to your site and all details related to backlinks.
You can use Google search console, for it. It is very important to make sure to disavow bad backlinks that may affect your site quality.
If your site contains many backlinks and some of them are spammy then Google considers your site as a low-quality one and it directly affects your site ranking.
Disavow bad backlinks:
Evaluate every link related to your site and disavow if you found any site that doesn’t add value to your site. You can use Ahref tool to find bad backlinks and disavow it using the Google Disavow tool.
Useful tools for SEO Audit Process:
- Backlink checkers- Ahrefs, Majestic
- Accessibility and performance checking- Txt analyzer, Yslow Meta Tag Analyzer
- Duplicating content and plag checkers- Copyscape, Plag spotter
- Page speed checker- Page speed insights
- Broken link checker- Xenu Link Sleuth, W3C link checker
- Complete SEO audit tools- Screaming frog, SEM Rush site audit tool
Final words:
These are some important SEO auditing processes you can carry out. They will help you improve the site appearance, quality, and user experience. Always give more value to your users and give the best from your site.
It is always advisable to do SEO Audit more often so that you can identify any errors or problems related to your site.
Anyone can do this with the help of tools available online. No need to possess any technical knowledge to identify problems. Some tools give you suggestions that can help to wipe out the issues. Prepare your site well for search engine and get good site ranking.