You know the importance of SEO. It’s one of your strongest allies in the battle for relevancy and organic traffic through digital marketing. Yet, for this element to fire on all cylinders, you need to know which tools to use, which strategy to implement, and how to react to the ever-evolving world of SEO. That’s where an SEO audit comes into play.
An audit is an essential foundation for your SEO efforts. However, if you’re a beginner in this side of marketing, you probably have one question: what is SEO audit? This guide will provide the answer and explain how to perform an SEO audit successfully.
What Is SEO Audit?
Before going any further, let’s start from the beginning. What is an SEO audit, exactly? As with any other kind of auditing, it reviews the search engine optimisation processes and assets that are used, ensuring they perform to an optimum standard.
In terms of what are SEO audits, this is where your SEO processes are analysed in order to spot issues, discover opportunities, and gain insights that can help you refine your efforts.
An SEO audit can help reveal:
- Website structural issues
- Technical SEO problems
- User experience concerns
- On-page and off-page issues
- Keyword and competitor insights
- Content gaps and opportunities
However, there is a problem. Due to how complex SEO is, with many different moving parts involved, trying to perform an audit can quickly become overwhelming. This is why separating your SEO audit into different categories can help, particularly if you have a large website. Although, some of these categories are a little more confusing than others if you’re not an expert.
For instance, you may have seen mention of an SEO audit before and looked at the more complicated technical subcategories of the process – leaving this question: what is technical SEO audit?’ This is just when the ‘technical’ side of SEO is analysed, which many tend to leave to professionals (like us) to get right because of its comprehensive and challenging nature. You can do the same for content, on-page, off-page, and local SEO elements.
Still, as an introduction, below, we have put together a simplified step-by-step guide on how to do an SEO audit. This isn’t a specific ‘how to conduct a technical SEO site audit’ or ‘how to do on page SEO audit’ guide, just a general one that covers the core aspects.
How to Perform an SEO Audit: a Step-by-Step Guide
Now you know what are SEO audits, the next part of the process is to learn how to do an SEO audit. This step-by-step guide will show you how to SEO website audit the right way.
Step #1: Check for a Single URL
When you think of how to do SEO audit, you may believe each task is difficult and time-consuming. That’s not the case, as evidenced by this easy starter step! This involves ensuring your website is only accessible from either a www URL or a non-www URL.
For instance:
- https://www.yoursite.com
- https://yoursite.com
If your website is accessible from both versions, that’s not good. The reason is that search engines could index both of them, which could lead to issues revolving around duplicate content.
Step #2: Connect to Google Search Console
There are many tools out there that can help with your SEO efforts. One of the best solutions, however, is the Google Search Console. Free to use for all users, the Google Search Console supplies a set of tools you can use to discover issues and resolve these proactively, as well as gather value data to refine your SEO strategy.
This step is all about connecting to Google Search Console and ensuring your website is verified on this platform. Once done, you can start instantly benefitting from this powerful suite of tools.
Step #3: Find (and Fix) Broken Links
What is an SEO audit without fixing errors on your website? That’s where this important step comes into the picture. If a user clicks on a broken link, they will be served up with a 404 error – which is far from ideal.
Sure, Google has stated that 404 errors are not a ranking signal – but that doesn’t hide the fact it is detrimental to the user experience. Fortunately, there are various tools available that will identify broken links. Then, it’s a case of fixing these ASAP, whether that’s by restoring the page, redirecting to another or deleting the link.
Step #4: Optimise Page Speed
No ‘how to SEO website audit’ list is complete without mentioning page speed. Simply put, you want your website to run as fast as possible. Even a slight delay can be detrimental to your search ranking and the user experience.
By running an analytics test with PageSpeed Insights, you can identify what problems are holding your page speed back, fix them, and make your site fast and responsive.
Step #5: Optimise Content
What is SEO audit without evaluating the meat of your site? That meat is your content –the foundation for any SEO campaign. So, when you’re wondering how to audit a website for SEO, one of the biggest factors is analysing and fine-tuning your content.
First, ensure your website isn’t home to any duplicate content. You’ll also want to avoid any thin content; in-depth, high-quality and informative pages are the way to go. Furthermore, find opportunities to add updates to your pages when possible – Google and users love updates!
Step #6: Use a Sitemap
Using a sitemap is a regular on ‘how to do a technical SEO audit’ lists – and for a good reason. A clear hierarchical style is not only beneficial for website visitors but also for Google; this style helps the search engine understand and index your pages.
Step #7: Discover Backlink Opportunities
When you think about how to do an SEO audit, your focus will generally be on your website. However, off-page elements also play a role, particularly when they’re as integral as backlinks.
It’s important to scope out link building opportunities that will boost your site’s authority. On this topic, you should also assess your current backlinks and disavow any low-quality, spammy links. These could be hurting your SEO and search ranking.
Step #8: Keyword Optimisation
Keywords are vital for any SEO campaign. As for how to conduct SEO audit for keywords, you’ll want to first put in the research. There are various free keyword research tools available, and these can be utilised to find relevant, valuable search terms for your content.
Once you have a list of keywords, you’ll need to insert these seamlessly and naturally into your content. You don’t want them sticking out like a sore thumb or overloaded in one place – Google won’t take kindly to keyword stuffing.
Conclusion
You know what is an SEO audit. You know how to do an SEO audit. The next step: performing your own SEO audit! With this guide as your support, you can find flaws, remedy them, and push your SEO campaign to new heights. Of course, if you’re a beginner or simply don’t have the time to do an SEO audit yourself, you can always entrust the task to our specialists here at Click Intelligence.
Our teams are masters of the trade and can perform a full audit of your SEO, as well as curate and deploy a brand-new, fully optimised campaign to take your website and traffic to the next level. Get in touch if you’d like to have a no-obligation chat about our SEO services – we’re only an email or phone call away.
