An SEO audit is the process of following a checklist or tool to determine how well a website performs against best practices for search engine optimization. Google SEO has more tweak to follow before you will be able to rank in page 1.
This helps businesses understand what areas of their websites are performing at an acceptable level and where they can use improvement.
But more importantly, it helps businesses understand where they’re missing out on sales because people can’t find their products and services via a simple internet search.
An SEO audit doesn’t have to be overwhelming, especially if you break it down into small steps.
When you’re running a small business, you don’t have the time or resources to waste on marketing that isn’t working. That’s why it’s important to perform regular audits of your marketing activities, and one of the most important audits is an SEO audit.
An SEO audit will show you how well your website is performing from a search engine optimization perspective, and highlight areas where you can improve. It will tell you the keywords that are driving traffic to your site and ensure that you’re getting the full benefit of your content.
There are a number of tools available for performing SEO audits. Some are free, some aren’t, but all of them will give you valuable information about your website. How in-depth you go with your analysis will depend on how much time and effort you want to put into improving your search engine optimization.
Conduct a technical SEO audit. The first step in an SEO audit is to perform a technical analysis on the website from both a back-end and front-end perspective.
Check for basic on-site problems. After conducting a technical audit, you should begin to assess how well the site ranks for certain keywords, which can be done manually by plugging in the URL and keyword into Google and checking where it ranks.
Conduct an off-site analysis. The next step is to check links pointing to the website in question.
Perform a keyword analysis. Before you can do anything else, you need to understand what keywords your target audience uses to find your product or service.
Perform a competitive analysis. The final step in an SEO audit is to examine how your competitors are ranking for terms related to your target keywords.
The first stage is the most important, so it’s important that you get it right.
- Do a Google search for your website or blog and see where you rank for your target keyword (and related terms). If you want to be on page one, you should already be there. If not, this is the first area that needs work.
- Look at which pages are ranking in the top 10 results for your target keywords. Are they blog posts? Product pages? A combination of both? This is a good way to get an idea of which type of content to create more of moving forward.
- Look at the meta title and description for each of the pages that rank in the top 10 results for your target keywords. How does yours compare?
- Look at the URL structure for each of the pages that rank in the top 10 results for your target keywords — are they short, clean URLs? What about yours?
- Using Screaming Frog, crawl your entire website or blog and make note of any errors (404s, 500s, etc.) that need fixing as well as duplicate titles or descriptions (which can impact rankings).
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the rankings, relevancy and visibility of your website in search engines. When done correctly, SEO produces a highly targeted stream of organic traffic that’s more likely to convert into leads and sales.
While it’s never been more important for companies to have an effective SEO strategy in place, it can be difficult knowing where to start. One way to get a quick snapshot of your website’s current performance is by performing an SEO audit. Go here for a quick SEO audit.
An SEO audit goes through your entire website and looks at how individual pages are performing. It checks the site’s overall structure, technical elements like meta data and sitemaps, as well as factors like site speed and mobile friendliness. This can help you identify any areas that need improvement so you can make changes accordingly.
