Your site is fully operational, but it isn’t attracting visitors, and your traffic is dropping. You’re not the only one who is going through this issue. The vast portion of the content does not receive any organic traffic from Google. A website audit is a solution to this problem. A Website SEO Audit can help you improve your rankings, as well as the number of visitors and conversions to your site. If you’re unsure where to begin, this guide will walk you through the process step by step.
What Is a SEO Audit?
An SEO audit identifies problems that can prevent your site from ranking on Google and other search engines. An SEO audit consists of multiple parts, including:
- Make sure your site is correctly crawled, indexed, and rendered by Google.
- Checking websites for on-page SEO problems.
- Check your off-page SEO to identify potential issues on other sites that link back to you.
- Verifying the site has a good user experience (for desktop users and mobile).
- Keyword-optimizing your content.
- Combining websites for thin content or duplicate.
- Maintaining comprehensive reporting & Setting up to track your website’s performance.
Reasons why a website should get audited
Unless your business is primarily managed through social media accounts, your website should be the hub of all your online presence. You will lose organic search traffic if you don’t regularly check your website for potential SEO gaps. Search engine algorithms change constantly, and it can be challenging to keep up if you aren’t an SEO specialist.
- Website SEO audits will allow you to assess the reliability of your website’s structure and how it has been optimized for search engines. It will also help you determine how user-friendly it is to navigate the site and find relevant content.
- An audit will help identify missed SEO opportunities and search for SEO errors (such as keyword stuffing, poor content, and errors in internal linking).
- This audit will evaluate the effectiveness of the website’s lead generation and conversions.
Some Benefits of an SEO audit
A professional SEO audit is essential for any company looking to grow online. An SEO audit by professionals can help revive websites in decline and find growth opportunities. This combination of strategies provides a holistic approach to SEO health.
1. Increase Engagement with Faster Speed
Users will be less likely to leave if your site loads quickly. A site that loads quickly will reduce your bounce rate and maximize your conversions.
Website speed can measure how quickly a website responds when a request is made. Google has made the speed site a priority. If your site loads quickly, it will rank higher.
Google shared its best practices for speeding up your website. These are some simple steps that you must follow for speed issues:
- Do a speed test.
- Examine the HTML code of the website
- Be sure to keep images and other content tiny.
2. Ensure Your Site Is Optimized For Mobile
3.8 billion people will have smartphones by 2021. That’s 48.33% of the world’s population. !
It is important to remember that 60% of all Google searches are made on mobile devices. Your website may not be mobile-optimized, leading to a significant loss of traffic and conversions.
Consider your mobile user experience. Check your site’s mobile speed with Think With Google.
Mobile users expect every site to be mobile-friendly. To ensure exceptional UX on all devices, look at the layout and design of your web pages.
3. Indexing Your Site Only in One Version
Google can index different versions of your site, which is not a good idea!
When keyword research.
- Your keywords should be included in the body copy, headers, and metadata
- At least 5 links from the outside and 5 links from within your site.
- Make sure your blog posts are optimized to cover relevant topics, popular questions, and current topics.
- Keep your copy short and to the point, keep your sentences concise, and avoid using too many keywords.
- Use LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing). It is a language that is semantically similar to your keywords.
- Answering a question for your audience? Optimize it to get a valuable feature.
4. Gain insight into your competition
It is essential to evaluate your strategy against your competitors to make the best SEO strategy.
A competitor analysis can help you find opportunities similar websites are missing. You can view their top-performing pages, highest engagement content, and organic traffic.
5. Locate and Kill Zombie Pages
Your site’s zombie pages are those areas that do not receive traffic, and they are not indexable by search engines because of technical issues or poor content. You must hunt them down and destroy them so that they don’t harm your rankings. !
When you type “site:yourwebsite.com”, Google will show your total number of URLs. It may shock you to see how many URLs it contains, and you’ll have to get rid of any that are too high.
An SEO audit can help you identify unnecessary areas and which content should be removed. It will help drive traffic to the areas you want your visitors to see.
These are just a few examples you should delete from zombie pages:
- Press releases that are out of date
- Advertising campaigns from the past
- Pages with thin content
- Archive pages
- Boilerplate copy and duplicate content
6. Broken Links can be repaired
Nothing is more annoying than clicking on a link to take you to a page that doesn’t exist anymore and giving you a generic 404 error page!!
Your SEO audit should highlight broken links, and they can lead to a poor user experience, increase your bounce rate, and decrease your authority.
Broken links can lead to a situation in which users might not return to your site because they believe you don’t keep your content current and cannot trust you.
Use Google Search Console’s Index report to find broken pages Google can’t index. To locate broken or internal links, use a software program.
Performing an SEO Audit: Tools You May Need
You don’t need many tools to conduct an SEO audit.
We will use five main tools throughout the audit process:
- Google Analytics – Google Analytics gives metrics and data on site performance using their search engine.
- Google Schema Markup Test Tool – When you create a schema for your website (which we will discuss in a bit), it is essential to ensure that the code is correct and without any errors. You can use the Google Schema Markup Testing Tool to verify and test your schema for errors.
- Semrush Website Audit Tool – This provides a detailed, top-down view of your site’s performance. Next, we will discuss the Site Audit tool.
- Google Search Console – Google Search Console allows you to see if your website is correctly indexed and how it appears in the SERP.
- PageSpeed Insights – PageSpeed Insights PageSpeed Insights measures page performance for mobile and desktop platforms.
Way to do an SEO audit
Before beginning the audit process, run a site crawl using site auditing software. You can download the Site Audit Tool free of charge. However, any other site audit tool should be able to do the job.
As we go through each step, we will refer to the insights in this report. Depending on how large your site is, it may take some time.
Go to the site audit tool.
- Click “Set up” next to an existing project or “Add new project” at the top of your screen.
- Complete site audit settings – the basic settings are ‘Limit of pages checked’ and ‘Crawl source.
- Except for the limit of pages that have been checked, you shouldn’t be required to modify any settings. It will depend on the size of your website. You may have to modify URL parameters or bypass restrictions.
- Start your site audit, and then let the crawler do its thing. Verify your website in Google Search Console if you
- haven’t done so already.
Elements of an SEO website
These are the elements of an SEO website analysis.
1. Analyze content
Correct metadata, proper keyword research, content mapping, etc.
2. Technical audit- Boost Your Rankings
It is like a technical check-up for possible problems, such as crawl errors, indexing issues, and hosting.
3. Analyze usability
It is about how easy it is to use the website interface and how clear it is designed. Are there distracting colors or fonts? Is there a breadcrumbs navigation? Do lead forms require too much information?
4. Analyze backlinks
It refers to the quality of the external links that lead to your website, including their trustworthiness and anchors.
5. Page Speed- Boost Your Rankings
SEO’s best friend is page speed, and it is one of the most important factors determining a site’s visibility on Google. This conversation has grown even more since Google announced the core Web Vitals update and page experience.
The update combines the Core Web Vital metrics, which relate to page speed, with other experience metrics to create a page experience signal.
Bounce rate and conversions are also directly related to page speed! It is often the first to be mentioned when people say, “it’s boring, but it works!” Page speed optimization and load time reduction can often yield rapid results for a company’s organic presence. It sets the tone for improving the search experience.
6. Audit Page Speed
To evaluate the key templates of the site, use Google’s page speed insight tool. You can also find this data in the Google Lighthouse data on the web. dev.
SeoClarity’s page speed analysis provides a valuable point of view, and it combines all the issues across the site to prioritize the impact. You can also track page speed weekly and monthly to make it easier to evaluate your progress.
Also Read: How To Run An Effective Local SEO Audit
7. Recommendations for Page Speed
- Each web page should load in less than two seconds. It is the threshold that has been used in most studies. It
- also indicates how long an average web user can expect to wait.
- To improve page speed, get to grips with your biggest detriments.
8. Common Page Speed Mistakes
- Bloated images and unreadable code
- Too many render-blocking materials
- Caching policies are not being followed. The browser must remember the image each trip instead of cache it.
- Images and CSS can be delayed until they are needed but instead load as a render-blocking resource. You don’t have to load a huge image in a menu flyout. It will only appear when the user hovers over it.
The Bottom Line of Boost Your Rankings
No matter how big or small your site is, a regular SEO audit should be performed. Even if your site is performing well, there could be problems that will affect your ranking. You can also find areas for growth with the free website SEO audit. You don’t need to hire a third-party specialist or order website audit services from another company.
The four primary areas of SEO audit are the technical audit (crawl mistakes, indexing, problems in sitemap), content audit, keywords, duplicate, weak and outdated content, and backlink audit. ), usability audit (page loading speed, mobile-friendliness, design, user behavior, and navigation issues), and backlink audit (refers to the quality of backlinks, their number, and presence of toxic backlinks).
After you have checked your website for these metrics, gather the data into one report. Next, set goals for improvement – improve on-page SEO, remove duplicate content, modify titles and descriptions, etc. – and then track the results during your next website audit.
You now know how to manage an SEO audit. Let’s ask ourselves this question: When was the last time you conducted an SEO site audit.
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