If you own a business, you must have a website that works for you to compete.
This indicates that it draws enthusiastic visitors who are likely to purchase your goods or service. It needs to do well in search results for this to happen. Your website’s content, design, social media presence, and email marketing should all be optimized to draw people to your site, and you should constantly be on the lookout for ways to make them better.
You can make sure that all your search engine optimization initiatives are contributing to that objective by doing an SEO audit. Anyone who is marketing online would benefit greatly from learning how to conduct an SEO audit and interpret the findings.
How to perform an effective SEO audit
To ensure that all bases are covered and all relevant factors are taken into account, an agency or marketing team conducting an audit typically follows an SEO audit checklist. In general, an audit should adhere to a meticulous, sequential process.
Crawl your site
The first step in an SEO audit is arguably the most crucial. Crawling your website can help you find a number of problems with it. You may crawl your website using one of the many SEO audit tools available, which will save you a ton of time.
Just enter your website’s URL, and the program will handle the rest. It will examine your website in the same way that Google’s or other search engines’ algorithms do, and it will make the same judgments about it.
When it’s done, it will provide you a breakdown of numerous website elements to assist you spot any issues. These issues may include insufficient word counts for the material, broken links, duplicate content, and an excessive number of redirects.
All of these things have the potential to lower your search engine performance. Once you have this information, you can modify your website to address the problems.
Check indexing issues
You can perform a manual search of your website using your preferred keywords in addition to using a tool. Consider how many of your pages appear in those search results and where they are displayed. Are they at the top or close by? You will get a basic idea of your site’s performance from this.
This is another way to see if your website is being correctly indexed. You can see how many of your pages are being indexed by search engines by conducting a search for the main URL of your website.
If a page isn’t being indexed, there can be an issue with the meta robots tag. This element tells search engines how to handle the page’s content when indexing it. If it is broken or used poorly, then your page will not be indexed.
Browse for duplicate content
Your SEO efforts may be harmed by duplicate material. Search engines will penalize you if they discover that your website has material that is identical to that of another. Ensuring it is original is a necessary component of creating pertinent and reliable information.
It’s crucial to thoroughly analyze your website for duplicate material because occasionally companies don’t even recognize that they have it. Anything that might be considered a duplicate should be removed or rewritten.
Duplication need not come from other websites. If a search engine discovers duplicate content on your website across multiple pages, it will appear as though you are stuffing your site with information that isn’t actually helpful.
Be careful not to fill space by repeating or copying information from your pages. Spend some time producing interesting, unique content for your website. These efforts will be recognized by search engine algorithms, and you will receive credit for them.
Check site and page speed
You might be surprised by how quickly users will leave a page that is taking too long to load. Unfortunately, you don’t have the minute or even the thirty seconds you might think you do. In fact, a user will decide that it isn’t worth it to wait for your page to load in as little as two to three seconds. You are undoubtedly losing visitors if your website loads slowly.
Examine each component that affects how quickly a page loads. This implies that your pictures and movies should be smaller, and that the server hosting you should be fast enough for your needs. If not, start straight away making such adjustments.
Do a backlink audit
An audit of your backlinks looks at the connections going to your website. In a sense, you are putting their authority and reliability to the test. Search engine algorithms will give your site less respect if the websites connecting to it are not respected.
You want the pages that are linking to you to rank well on search engines and have a high domain authority. Your website is probably being negatively impacted by any backlinks from websites that are no longer updated frequently or do not contain material that is relevant to yours.
The finest backlinks are those that point to pages with anchor tags that are identical to yours or quite similar to them.
Analyze organic traffic
Any website traffic that arrives without the aid of sponsored advertisements is referred to as organic search traffic. In essence, these are visitors who arrived via search engines. Since these people are supposedly more inclined to want to read your material, organic traffic is significantly more likely to have a higher conversion rate.
If they had been looking for something like what you have on your website, they would have done so. You can use a variety of web tools to track your organic traffic and gauge the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
Once you have this data, you can exclude visitors who used certain search terms. This will assist you in determining which keywords are effective and which ones are not. You can also do a simple search of your company name to screen out visitors.
Finding new consumers is a crucial part of expanding your business, and organic traffic that arrived at your website without Googling your name is likely brand-new to your company. The keywords bringing you the most effective hits might be the focus of your marketing efforts.
Find broken links
When it comes to SEO, user experience is key. People will leave your website soon if anything on it does not offer a simple and enjoyable experience. Broken links are annoying for website visitors and can give the impression that your page is unmaintained and unprofessional.
A broken link is one that results in an error, such as a 404. Make sure you regularly examine your website’s links, both internal and external, to ensure that they are pointing to relevant and valid material.
Final Thoughts
In the realm of digital marketing, things change quickly, and if you want to stay ahead of your rivals, your SEO approach must adapt as well. The best way to evaluate your website’s rating and determine what needs to be done to put it on the route to page one is to do an SEO audit.
