A Guide To Perform An SEO Audit That Works
An SEO audit is a technical process of analyzing the SEO performance of a website. It shows you if the performance of your site is good or bad compared with the best practices. Performing an SEO audit is the starting point in creating an SEO plan for your website, setting KPIs and getting measurable results.
It will reveal issues of your website that may affect your organic search performance. After learning these issues, you can fix them. Here are some types of issues you can find with an SEO audit:
- Technical SEO issues
- On-page SEO issues
- Website structure issues
- Off-site SEO issues
- User experience issues
- Content insights
- Competition marketplace insights
What Is The Process Of SEO Audit?
An SEO audit should be detailed and include the most critical areas of your site. It should check the structure and the content of your site while it shows you an overall result of your performance. It shouldn’t miss any part that could affect your SEO. Lastly, an SEO audit must include suggestions to the website owners with the parts they can improve.
It must be easy to read and understand. A website owner must be able to figure out the issues of his website. All the suggestions must also be clear and actionable. An SEO audit must show you both the issues and the actions you can take to correct them. After performing an SEO audit, you should always know the steps you need to take next.
What You Should Avoid When You Perform An SEO Audit
You shouldn’t be in a hurry with your SEO audit but wait to get it completed. Most website owners want to complete their SEO tasks as soon as possible, so they make mistakes. Each site needs a different time to get a complete audit. It can take up to six weeks if you have a big website, but a normal-sized website can finish faster.
Your SEO specialist must investigate your site, find issues that can affect your SEO, and give recommendations that will improve your site. Lastly, SEO specialists and agencies shouldn’t have a package for all their clients. Each site has different needs, even if there are some common technical parts and issues.
What Can You Analyze In An SEO Audit?
A basic SEO audit always analyzes the technical part of the website, like the structure, website speed, and errors in the pages. But advanced SEO audits analyze how you optimize your website pages for various keywords and check your off-page SEO strategy. Here is a list of elements that you can analyze:
Technical SEO Audit:
- Indexation analysis
- Status Codes
- Redirects
- Page Speed
- URL Structure
- txt
- XML Sitemap
- Canonical Tags
- Duplication
- Crawlability
- Domain Issues
- Off-page Analysis
- Mobile SEO analysis
- International SEO analysis
On-Page SEO Audit:
- Site Content Structure
- Keyword Research
- Page Copy Theme Analysis
- Keyword Density
- Meta Data Analysis
- Schema
- User Experience
- Images & Video
- Internal Linking & HTML Sitemap
Server Log Audit:
- Crawl Budget Analysis
- User Agent Analysis
If your SEO service providers go through all the elements above, they should come back with several suggestions for improvements.
What Can You Expect From An SEO Audit?
Most website owners request an SEO audit because they want to improve their SEO performance. They need to get better rankings on search engines, more traffic, and more revenue from that traffic. A big part of this process is to get actionable suggestions that will help them move forward.
An SEO specialist can perform the audit and then let you know about the results once completed or give you regular updates while they perform the audit. Both options give the same results, but the regular updates will allow you to start working on your site before the SEO audit is 100% completed. You can get these updates weekly or bi-weekly, depending on how your SEO specialist works.
Then, you should get suggestions about solving problems with your sites. They can include any part of your content or technical element. But you must get specific instructions on how to fix these problems.
SEO audits reveal opportunities that would help you to get more organic traffic. When you get suggestions about new opportunities, your SEO specialist must also give you guidance on using them.
It is important to have a roadmap about the necessary actions and how long it takes to do the suggested actions. Some SEO audits explain and what you can expect after following their instructions.
Why You Should Perform SEO Audits Regularly?
Your website is the online brand of your business. If your visitors need information about products or services, they will search for your site to learn more. When your site does not perform well or doesn’t follow the latest SEO practices, you lose traffic and potential customers.
The best way to ensure that your sites work properly is by performing SEO audits regularly. While an SEO audit checks your site’s elements for SEO purposes, these elements can also affect the user experience that you must maintain at a top-level.
Most websites add and remove content regularly. These adjustments can create errors that affect your site’s health. So, you need an SEO audit at least once per year.
Even if you don’t change many things on your site, the internet is changing. If you don’t update anything on your site, you will stay behind the competition. An SEO audit compares your site to the best SEO practices. If an element of your site is not relevant anymore, you need to remove it even if it was the best option a few years ago.
Lastly, you need to stay up-to-date with the latest updates of Google. Many websites have lost a big part of their organic traffic in the past because they didn’t adjust to the new algorithm changes.
When you get traffic from local SEO, you need to apply the latest strategies. Google keeps creating and updating local SEO features to give the best search results. An SEO audit compares your practices with the latest best practices and lets you know about them.