When we talk about SEO audits, it’s akin to changing your car’s oil. As you may be aware, changing your automobile oil regularly is one of the most fundamental ways to extend the lifespan of your car.
An SEO audit is similar to your website’s system design, which is why it is critical to do the SEO audit regularly to ensure your website’s long-term success.
It’s also critical to keep your SEO strategy up to date to boost organic SEO traffic.
You’re losing potential traffic and attention from potential clients if you do not constantly optimize your website for search.
And this is not the only reason you should use an SEO audit. Sometimes search engines release updates, and websites are required to modify in response.
SEO audits give your website structure shape and make it SEO friendly.
Search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and Bing continually improve their algorithms to deliver better search results to visitors. You should be aware of these changes and keep updating your website accordingly.
SEO Audit Defined
SEO auditing determines how well your website is performing and where it can be improved.
The following are the results of an SEO audit:
- The ability to scale your strengths and victories.
- Mistakes must be corrected and low-hanging fruit to be harvested
- What is broken and should be avoided.
- What isn’t working and must be repaired.
Other times, your website may include problems that need to be corrected. These are the reasons why an SEO audit is essential.
Let us now look at the many forms of SEO audits
SEO Content Audit
SEO content auditing refers to improving the accuracy, timeliness, and quality of information on the page where you wish to attract traffic. Identifying possibilities to optimize your page for highlighted snippets is part of this.
On- Page SEO Audit
This involves optimizing the page’s backend parts for search crawlers. During an on-page SEO audit, meta descriptions, meta titles, image alt text and compression, and other factors would be examined.
Off-page SEO Audit
An off-page SEO audit comprises investigating other websites and even domains that link to the pages you wish to improve, as well as the quantity, quality, distribution, and recency of these links.
Technical SEO Audit
This type of SEO audit would include on-page measures like image optimization, but the emphasis would be on performance metrics like site speed and security. Among other things, a technical SEO audit would uncover opportunities to update, remove, or rearrange code, prevent spam, and transition from HTTP to HTTPS.
Local SEO Audit
A local SEO audit would contain elements from other audits such as listings (off-page), content (locally focused pages and posts), on-page (keyword insertion and targeting), and technical (site speed and security).
SEO Audit:How to Start?
Ensure google indexes only one version of your site
Yes, a single page of your site may be indexed in different ways by Google.
Test all versions of your website to ensure it all redirect to your primary version, which is usually the one with “https” but no “www.”
The https version of a website is an important security indicator for any firm, particularly those who do commercial transactions on their website.
Google takes this into account because it determines if a website is safe or not.
Remove bad pages
You may have heard that the more content your website has, the better. However, this is not always the case.
That is why Google values domains with valuable pages. Any page with few visitors, few external links, and duplicate or low-quality material may be considered hazardous.
If you have damaging pages (spoiler alert: you do), your site will suffer as a result.
Harmful pages appear in a variety of formats, the most prevalent of which are:
- Old news information that is no longer being visited.
- Content that is out of date.
- On-page SEO that is of very low grade.
- Product pages from the past.
- Pages from the archive.
- Pages containing little or no unique content.
- Pages for internal searches.
If you’ve had a blog or eCommerce for more than a year and haven’t cleaned up your hazardous sites, we’re guessing you still have some of them on your account, which is hurting your rating.
Do you have any doubts? Estimate the amount of pages in your domain, including all category pages, products, articles, and other pages.
Make sure your site is mobile friendly
Google has already declared that being mobile-friendly is a criterion that directly influences a website’s ranking in SERPs.
Google is likely to continue making improvements in this way; after all, algorithm upgrades strive to follow the natural flow of people.
Make your website faster
Following the same logic, having a slow website ensures that your users will have a terrible experience, which, of course, Google opposes.
It’s difficult to expect users to wait for slow websites to load in an age of highly efficient webpages and quicker internet connections.
According to a Google survey, 53% of visitors using mobile devices abandon entering a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
It’s not a surprise that this is one of the most essential ranking variables.
Sites might load slowly for a variety of reasons, including too many photos, hefty media formats, poorly written code, and server issues, among others.
Organize your site in a simple way
The organization of a website, often known as its information architecture, relates to how all of its pages are arranged and linked to one another.
The design of a website determines how quickly you (and search engines) can navigate between pages and access content.
In a nutshell, good site architecture has a simpler structure and fewer layers. The further a page is in terms of clicks from your homepage, the more difficult it is for visitors and crawlers to reach it.
Structures that are shallow and well-connected make it easy for both search engines and visitors.
Another direct impact of a site’s architecture on SEO is linked. The closer a domain is to the homepage, the more authoritative it is.
Every website has a secret hierarchy in its structure, and if you haven’t established it at the time of development, yours may not coincide with what you require.
Find pages google is not indexing
You might have pages that Google is not indexing, and if you want all of your material (that is not damaging) to perform effectively, you must ensure that search engines can readily find all pages.
Larger sites with a high number of pages are more prone to indexing mistakes.
The Screaming Frog tool can also assist you with mapping pages that have indexing issues. It functions similarly to a Google Crawler, displaying all information on the indexing of your pages.
Final Takeaway
You may have a strong SEO plan in place, but without regular auditing, you may overlook vital KPIs and possibilities and lose ground in critical areas of your SEO campaign.
SEO audits enable you to detect problems with your methods and rectify them to improve your exposure, ranking, and traffic, thus increasing your conversions and bottom line.