How To Perform An SEO Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide

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SEO

25 Apr, 2024

seo-audit-steps

Introduction

If your website’s page ranking is gradually getting poor, then what would you do?

You might try a new strategy, work more on content and SEO, and try different channels to get a higher reach. 

However, one of your first steps should be to perform an SEO audit. There are different elements involved in these audit aspects and it is important to concentrate on the ones that affect your business the most.

For instance, an audit should be exhaustive primarily. Both the structural and content elements affecting your SEO visibility should be covered. It ought to provide you with an all-inclusive perspective of what is taking place in your present situation. 

Any gaps that could lead to unneeded or incorrect advice from inexperienced individuals can have an adverse effect on your website. It is essential to approach experts that can offer comprehensive SEO audit services for your brand.

You need an easy-to-understand to learn and recognize how SEO issues impact your objectives, online priorities, or earnings as an entrepreneur. All recommendations from your SEO on-page audit services should be made in a manner that links them to your main company goals.

Your SEO audit strategies should be realistic. There should be a realistic route to completion, with each recommendation prioritized regarding its predicted impact and level of effort.

Our website SEO audit services experts have provided an all-inclusive guide for your brand:

  • Understanding What Is SEO Audit
  • 10 Fundamental Steps For Website SEO Audit  

Looking for Professional SEO Audit Services?

  • Improving website performance
  • Better positioning of a website
  • Increase in Website Traffic and Ranking
  • Audit Your Competition

Understanding What Is SEO Audit

An SEO audit is a process to find issues or errors that restrict your website from ranking on Google and other search engines.

An SEO audit is composed of several different SEO elements, including:

  • Can Google properly index, crawl, and display your website
  • Looking for on-page SEO issues
  • Examining potential concerns of your off-page SEO on different websites that are similar to or link to your site
  • Confirming the quality of the user experience on your website (for both desktop and mobile users)
  • Optimizing your content for keywords
  • Search your website for redundant or weak material
  • Establishing and maintaining thorough reporting to monitor the success of your website

The Significance Of SEO Audit

With the help of a comprehensive SEO audit, your brand’s website can stay away from:

  • Losing organic traffic as a result of bad site health
  • Neglecting sales possibilities or losing to competitor brands
  • Poor indexing restricts researchers from landing on your website
  • Being penalized by Google for bad backlinks

In summary, an audit of your website might identify issues that can be losing of visitors and sales.

Different Types Of SEO Audit

SEO site audit services providers further share expertise on different SEO types.

Types of SEO Audit

  • Off-Page SEO Audit: An off-page SEO audit would look at different pages and even additional domains that link to the pages you want to enhance, and it may look at the quality, quantity, distribution, and relative frequency of these connections.
  • On-Page SEO Audit: Meta descriptions, meta titles, picture alt text, image compression, and other factors would all be examined as part of an on-page SEO audit.
  • Content SEO Audit: This refers to finding possibilities to enhance the truthfulness, relevance, and quality of the information on the sites you want to drive more traffic or rank higher.
  • Technical SEO Audit: A strong technical SEO audit service will find possibilities to change from HTTP to HTTPS, stop spam, and more. It will also find opportunities to fix, rearrange, or remove code.
  • Local SEO Audit: In terms of listings (off-page), on-page (keyword insertion and targeting), content (locally-focused pages and posts), and technological factors, a local SEO audit will be slightly smaller but still incorporate features from each of the aforementioned assessments (site speed and security).

Prominent SEO Audit Tools

SEO Audit Tools

  • Google Analytics: The goal of this SEO audit tool is to increase site traffic, thus to evaluate the results of your efforts, you'll need to set up Google Analytics. This is the best SEO audit tool for constantly evolving businesses. 
  • SEO Software: For a complete site audit or site crawl tool, SEO audits services would suggest programs like Ahrefs, Moz Pro, and SEMrush. These programs let you crawl your website and identify typical inefficiencies that are hurting your site's organic performance as well as general search health.
  • Google Search Console: Google Search Console can be used in a variety of ways for SEO auditing in terms of keywords, organic CTR, technical improvements, Core Web Vitals, and submitting different pages you have optimized again as reindexing in your SEO audit.
  • Page Speed Tools: Both GTMetrix and Google's PageSpeed Insights are trustworthy free tools. The Page Speed score,  is one of the KPIs in GTMetrix and is graded from A to F, and is supplied as a percentage. We receive a thorough list of more than 25 metrics impacting the page speed in the breakdown. We receive a rating for how well each metric is doing. Site owners may view in depth how Google interprets the performance capability of their sites using PageSpeed Insights. Some of the indicators used by the program to determine PSI scores, such as Core Web Vitals, get incorporated into Google's ranking formula.

Fundamental Steps For Website SEO Audit

1. Recognize Link Building Opportunities

Building links is an essential component of gaining website authority, and no SEO audit would be complete without suggestions for creating both internal and external connections that are specific to the website.

The page with the highest page authority (PA) and domain authority is where you want to link from (DA).

They are still generally reliable, and they are helpful when choosing which websites or pages to link to.

 

SEO link building services

When constructing internal links, you should also take customer experience and information architecture (IA) into consideration for SEO audit. Not all links should come from reliable sources. What would be the most helpful location to direct a website user to from a specific page? What would encourage them to buy your goods or services?

If your target hasn't already linked to you and you've sorted by Domain Authority, you can contact content managers by email, Twitter, Condor, or other social media platforms to request links back to your homepage in exchange for sharing their material on your social media accounts.

2. Examine Website Changes

The intriguing phrase IA or "information architecture" usually means that specific information is aligned."

To convey equity to the sites that require it, your website's internal linking structures must be redistributed for the sake of an SEO audit. Here are a few tips to get rid of messy website structure:

Create user-friendly solutions under the expertise of developers and designers to boost page authority without compromising on UX (User Experience).

More blog articles per page are preferred. Older posts will have fewer clicks on your homepage if your blog index only shows five pages at a time. Increase the number of posts per page to bring older posts on the same page.

3. Content Management

What kind of stuff ought you to be viewing?

Content Management System

  • Select pages: Perhaps you've discovered pages whose performance or ranking has declined. You may also have received a stack of pages your client wants to be audited if you provide SEO services.
  • Prime pages: Depending on the size of your site, export your top 25, 50, or 100 pages by traffic, and check that each has been adequately strengthened.
  • It's all: After crawling your website, the majority of site audit tools in the SEO software I mentioned above will provide an extensive report on content length and quality.

Then you can export pages with bare minimum or no content and determine what has to be fixed on a page level for each one.

4. Trace Duplicate Content

The brighter side is that you'll analyze the identical sections of your website, similarly to what you did for thin content when you detect duplicate content. Some SEO services agencies become enraged when they hear about duplicate content and the possible site penalties that may ensue. Here's how I see it:

Google is smart enough to scan deliberate content copies from your site to jam the SERP with links. Most likely, you are not. If there are traces of duplicate content, it has happened by mistake.

5. Keyword Optimization

There are some pages on your site where it won't be possible to properly optimize for target and secondary keywords, similar to when you beef up weak content. Let's say your company sells software to schedule employees. 

Employee scheduling software is segregated into multiple sections on your website. The keyword "best employee schedule software" has the highest search volume and the lowest amount of competition.

Keyword Optimization Cycle

Saying "we're the best" on your homepage is generally not a wise decision, even though you'd like to rank for that keyword. That phrase is best used in a blog article.

Nevertheless, you should make every effort to ensure that all of your sites are as keyword-optimized as they can be to help them rank in organic search results. To achieve that, you must first run a keyword search.

6. Use Optimized Meta Tags

Meta tags comprise a meta title and meta description. They are two of the main factors Google considers when deciding how to rank pages and help it understand the page content is indexing. They also serve as advertisements for your content by assisting users who are browsing search results in understanding the page content.

The first 50–60 characters of your title are shown by Google. The title is then abbreviated with an ellipsis. Not only might this result in the crawling of important keywords being skipped, but it also plainly looks poor in the SERP.

The ideal description length has fluctuated in recent years, but it is currently between 155 and 160 characters. Here's a formula to live by when it comes to content: target keyword + supplementary keywords (if organic) + descriptors/CTA = in the black. Therefore, SEO audits are imperative for higher Google ranking.

7. Update Page Regularly

Making even small alterations to a page appeals to Google to crawl that particular page. As a result, regular updates help the search engine visualize your relevant and fresh content.

  • Add fresh data and analysis: A blog post regarding Google algorithm updates, for instance, is due for an update if a new algorithm update just dropped.
  • Insert keywords: Choose related, auxiliary keywords that have demonstrated to be traffic generators and add them to your page.
  • General maintenance: Compress images and update or remove any broken links as part of general housekeeping. Slow load times are caused by heavy graphics.
  • Thinning content: Eliminating content from your website constitutes a fourth sort of content update. Contrary to popular belief, pages on your website that receive little to no organic traffic may be harming your overall organic rankings by bringing down the overall ranking value of your website in Google's view.

8. Perform Page Speed Analytics

Now that Google no longer has its Page Experience Update and Performance Update, page speed holds a lot of significance. Amplified mobile searches could be the main cause individuals do not prefer a slow-loading page. 

This implies that the quicker the website loading speed, the higher the likelihood that Google will rank you higher.

9. Scan Website Mistakes

Improper images and broken links are the primary causes of 404 errors, commonly termed as "page not found,”. For instance, anyone who clicks a link on a page of your website to material that has now been removed will receive a 404 error.

404 errors are bound to occur when your site’s structure and content change with time. But, if there are broken links in random places, your internal linking system may be disrupted. Additionally, these changes make it a hassle for individuals to switch pages.

10. Move To HTTPS

Running on HTTP can be dangerous in the current digital marketing environment. Safer and quicker HTTPS is one of the influential ranking parameters of Google. Let us find out the differences between HTTP and HTTPS based on factors such as HTTPS vs HTTP security, HTTPS vs HTTP security, protocol, and much more.

Difference Between HTTP And HTTPS

It is as easy as manually inputting the different non-HTTPS iterations of your website domain—www.site.com, site.com, and http://www.site.com—and verifying that they have all been 301 redirected to the HTTPS iteration to examine if your site is operating on HTTPS.

11. Determine Manual Actions

In the situation if your website overlaps Google's Webmaster Quality Guidelines, Google is likely to initiate a manual action against it.

Previously, this was known as a manual penalty. It implies that until Google reverses the decision, your website's rankings will decline and you will be unable to position as high as you did before.  Either a page-specific initiative or an overall-website initiative can be taken.

In the worst situation, your entire website will be deindexed and will not even rank for your particular brand.

In Search Console, you may see if you've received a manual action. A "Security and Manual Actions" tab with a manual actions link can be found in the menu on the left-hand side.

A single click on it,leads you to a page loading status. Ideally, you will notice a green tick indicating that there are no problems.If you see a problem stated, read this guide to learn how to fix it and revoke the manual action.

Additionally, we provide useful guidance for navigating and eliminating manual penalties.

12. Clear Sitemap

The XML sitemap of your website lists the key pages that Google should index. Issues with improper URLs in your sitemap will appear as faults in your Site Audit report.

These problems occur if your sitemap file comprises URLs that redirect to various pages, provide status codes other than 200, or point to identically contented web pages.

Remove any inaccurate pages from within your sitemap first as a temporary solution.

13. Consider Previous Links

A list of URLs that were excluded is also included in this report. As per SEO audits services, these include web pages that Google is not presently indexing and comprise:

  • Pages with a no index feature omitted
  • Website redirects
  • Anomalous crawling
  • Issues with canonicalization
  • Crawled pages that are not indexed
  • 404 Not Found errors
  • Pages that your robots.txt file has blocked

These exclusions can occur for a variety of reasons and aren't necessarily necessary to resolve.

For instance, it's possible that you just moved to a different website. Using no index tags, you can also prevent faceted navigation.

SEO audit services can evaluate the report and take action in the worry areas.

14. On-Page SEO Audit

On-page SEO involves issues like:

  • The improvement of header tags, description descriptions, and title tags
  • Using appropriate image alt tags
  • Making content that is optimized
  • Creating a network of internal links

On-page SEO audit gives you an opportunity to monitor and take charge of controllable components and improve optimization chances.

On-Page SEO elements

It takes time and constant initiative to run an effortless SEO audit. It can be challenging to put forth so much effort only to see effects emerge gradually months after implementation.

The excellent news is that you have easy wins that can instantly enhance your website and website SEO audit services can guide you in it.

15. Determine Indexed URLs

Look at the number of indexed URLs after performing a "site: search" on Google.

On occasion, you'll be astounded by how many pages Google has indexed.

How many products are listed on your e-commerce site, if you have one? How many articles and pages have you produced in your CMS if your website only generates leads?

This is only a fast check to see if the count of indexed results matches your expectations.

If not, you can have a problem with thin or duplicate content pages that need to be fixed in your SEO audit.

It's useful to know that you may use the Google Search Console Removal tool to de-index or ban specific pages from showing up in the search results. 

Examples include the rapid appearance of tens of thousands of indexed URLs in an e-commerce store with 5,000 products; this is typically due to dynamic navigation that is indexable.

On the other side, if the outcome is lower than you anticipated, you can discover that your website isn't properly being crawled or indexed.

16. Work On Broken Links

Broken internal links lead to a bad user experience. When a visitor hits a link on your website, they anticipate being directed to that specific page, not given a 404 error. As per the website SEO audit services excluding this also gives search engines like Google a poor quality signal.

76% Of Consumers Avoid Brands That Lead To Poor Experience

It's as simple as updating the internal link with the proper URL or removing the link to fix issues.

You may also learn which pages pass the most "link juice" by visiting the Internal Linking Report to see which pages have the highest "Internal LinkRank."

It may be wise to link to abandoned pages from more powerful pages with greater Internal LinkRank if it makes perfect sense to do so.

17. Perform Backlink Audit

Links are still a significant ranking element. A backlink audit can be used to check for possibly harmful connections in addition to developing a plan to outline your rivals.

Not all links boost your position. Links that Google deems to be an attempt to rig your search engine results are prohibited by their Webmaster Guidelines.

When conducting an SEO audit, it's crucial to look for poisonous links, especially if this is your first time dealing with the website in question. We have a helpful tutorial that will walk you through poisonous backlinks if you're not familiar with them or if you just want a reminder.

A good Backlink Audit tool can help you find hazardous connections so you can remove them before they have a bad effect on the performance of your website.

There are a number of "toxic backlinks" that may be hazardous (you may filter for these in the tool's "Audit" tab). In our tool, some detrimental elements that affect a backlink's toxicity level include:

  • Backlinks from unindexed websites
  • Links coming from websites that have lots of duplicate pages
  • Links from link directories that point back

Conclusion

A thorough forensic SEO audit takes much longer to complete and hence you need experts that can perform SEO audits seamlessly. At JanBask Digital Design we use the best SEO audit tool and strategies suitable for your business. 

Connect with our professionals to know how to do SEO.

Looking for Best SEO Services?

  • boost your brand’s visibility
  • Reach Potential Audience
  • Increase in Website Traffic and Leads
  • Drive User Engagement

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Anderson BarnesFernando WoodEduardo BennettAli PriceMalakai Sanders Recent comment authors
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K

Killian Watson

A key component of continued success is doing an SEO audit, which may assist you in developing a strong strategy at the beginning of a new project or site launch.

S

Stephen Brooks

I don’t know SEO step-by-step like an SEO audit report, I truly need this article. appreciate you for sharing this content.

O

Orion Kelly

This article gives very good information on how an SEO audit is crucial since it identifies issues with a site’s SEO, allowing you to fix them and begin ranking where you should.

M

Malakai Sanders

Thanks for giving information on prominent SEO audit tools.

A

Ali Price

You can solve issues that hinder your site from operating to its full capacity by identifying problems as soon as feasible. While you can audit other areas, starting with these will give you an excellent understanding of how your site is doing overall.

E

Eduardo Bennett

Good to know about the steps for SEO audit.

F

Fernando Wood

Thanks for sharing this great information here. Before this, I had some doubts and now my doubts are clear. Thanks

A

Anderson Barnes

I keep seeking for a straightforward guide that I can share with people, but the information I discover is typically either too complex for a novice or not practical enough even for an experienced user.


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