SEO Audit: Essential for Finding Your SEO Mistakes
What Is An SEO Audit?
In a general sense, an audit is a standard procedure carried out as a health measure for your website regularly. Taking SEO into context, the SEO audit is a process of analysis of the presence of your business in correlation with the best practices by creating an implementation plan.
Elements Of A Technical SEO Audit
Following are some of the key processes which compile to form an ideal SEO audit:
- Research of competition
- Indexing and crawling
- Accessibility
- Link Analysis
- Keyword analysis
- Content evaluation
- On-page optimization
- Site architecture and design
- Business strategy and online branding
- Execution of the audit
“For people to discover your website, you need to build pathways and big, flashing signs that lead them there. In digital marketing terms, this means you need links, links and more links.” – Luisito Batongbakal
What an SEO Audit Should Be?
An SEO audit should cover all the grounds related to structural and content components which directly or indirectly affect the visibility of your SEO. With this, it should provide an elaborated detail of the current action of strategy.
In addition, it should be easy to understand from the perspective of a business owner to know about the effect of SEO on the goals and revenues.
Lastly, it should also have a clear plan of action and completion.
What an SEO Audit Should Not Be?
An SEO audit should be done with ease and conviction and not in a hasty manner. An SEO audit is not done without addressing the root causes of the issues developed.
Also, an SEO audit is based on a situational analysis for sharpening the focus areas and not creating a one-stop solution for all problems in one.
How To Perform An SEO Audit?
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Following is a basic check-list that you can follow one by one to perform a complete SEO audit:
- Benchmarking of your rankings depending on the performance of competitors
- Checking duplicate versions of your website
- Checking your website’s indexed URLs
- Checking for manual actions
- Analyzing the speed of the website
- Confirmation of the use of HTTPS for your website
- Checking for issues pertaining to mobile-friendliness
- Analyzing further issues in indexing
- Understating the page experience of your website
- Auditing your on-page SEO
- Fixing broken internal links
- Cleaning your sitemap
- Checking your redirects and toxic links
- Finding and fixing duplicate content issues
- Fixing issues with orphaned pages
- Comparing your content to the top-ranked pages
How it works
Tools Required For The SEO Audit Process
Auditing the SEO isn’t an easy job and involves a lot of statistics and demographics. All these processes are taken care of by optimal modern tools like Google Search Console, GTMetrix, Screaming Frog, Page Modified, SEOmator, SEMrush site audit, Google PageSpeed Insights, Ahrefs Site Audit Tool, DeepCrawl and OnCrawl.
What Is Analyzed In An SEO Audit?
Following are those elements that are looked upon during an SEO audit:
- Technical SEO audit elements – Secure Sockets Layers (SSL), the loading time of site, the mobile responsiveness of the website, image file size optimization, blocked resources, canonical URLs and XML sitemap.
- On-page SEO audit elements – Page titles, meta descriptions, headings, image alt text, mixed content issues, duplicate content and broken links.
- Off-page SEO audit elements – Toxic backlinks, referring domains, ‘dofollow’ and ‘nofollow’ links and anchor text.
What to Expect During and After and SEO Audit?
During an SEO audit
An SEO audit should ideally take place in between 2-6 weeks. In this duration, an SEO specialist analyses and creates SEO opportunities for your website and conduct periodic checks on the progress.
After an SEO audit
A presentation is given by the SEO specialist, in which all the findings and recommendations are discussed with the rest of the concerned team members. It will also create a comprehensive analysis of the performance of the website.
Why It’s Important to Audit?
Given that the website of a business forms the core of receiving and providing information, a periodic check-up of its performance is essential.
Also, considering that content is altered on the website, audits help in the fixation of critical issues produced due to these alterations.
FAQs
What is an SEO audit?
It is a process of analyzing the existing practices of a business to create an implementation plan.
How much does SEO audit cost?
The cost of SEO audit usually boils down to ______ per month, depending on the scale of business.
Why do you need an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is done to consistently check the health of your website and its performance based on the changes done from time to time.