In this post, we’ll talk about everything related to SEO audit and why it’s beneficial to conduct one for your online business. From here, we’ll walk you through the factors involved in auditing your site to help your website rank on Google faster. Finally, we’ll share with you tools to help you facilitate your SEO audits effectively.
Why Do You Need an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit refers to the process of analyzing your site for different ranking factors affecting your performance in organic search.
A website audit helps you identify areas on your site that need improvement. For instance, if your website isn’t generating traffic, it could mean there’s something wrong with your site’s SEO. Therefore, performing an audit would help you uncover what those issues are.
The same thing goes for understanding why your website is ranking on top of search engines for your keywords. By auditing your site, you get to find out the reason how this came to be. From here, you can replicate the success of your performance onto your upcoming SEO campaigns.
Also, an SEO audit is not a one-and-done deal. You need to perform regularly scheduled audits on your website to monitor its performance and identify potential issues even before they cause errors on your site and its rankings.
What Factors Are Checked in a Site Audit?
As mentioned, an SEO audit helps give context to your website’s performance.
Think of an audit as a test your site needs to pass. The more boxes it checks based on certain variables, the better it is positioned to rank on Google for its keywords. Hence, the higher your search engine rankings should be.
To help you understand what boxes your website needs to check, below are the various ranking factors checked in an SEO audit grouped into three categories:
Technical SEO
This aspect of SEO deals with your site’s structure and architecture. The idea is to make your site easier to crawl by search spiders so it can index pages on your site for their most appropriate search queries.
Technical SEO is best left for professionals to deal with. At the very least, however, you should know the most vital issues related to this type of SEO. Below is a list of the most important factors within the domain of technical SEO:
- Website speed – Google prioritizes sites with high marks on their PageSpeed Insights. The faster your site loads, the better it is for users. That means your site won’t rank on top of search engines even if you have the best page about the topic due to slow loading times. Variables affecting page speed include server load time, image optimization, minifying CSS and Javascript files, and others.
- Mobile-friendly design – Thanks to mobile-first indexation, Google puts greater importance on how your site appears on mobile devices. This point is related to site speed, which means your site should not only have a responsive design but also loads fast on mobile.
- SSL certification – A site without an SSL certificate is deemed not secure by browsers and won’t rank as high on organic search. This is also important for sites that require users to enter sensitive information in their forms. Without SSL, online threats can easily swoop in and steal user data.
- Crawl errors – You want Google to crawl all your important pages on your site. If it can’t crawl them, the pages won’t rank, plain and simple. These errors are caused by issues with your server or robots.txt file.
- Broken links – These are links on your site that point to a broken page. They can be pointing to another website or are internal links. Fix the links found here to provide users with a seamless experience of browsing your site.
On-page SEO
This refers to ranking factors within your site, which means you have full control over these variables and edit them as you please.
At the very heart of this aspect of SEO is keyword research. You need to find the best keywords to rank for each of your pages.
However, researching for these keywords is not within the scope of on-page SEO. What it’s responsible for is how these keywords are used on a site page.
It busies itself with how optimized your pages are according to their respective target keywords.
That said, below are elements where you need to enter your target keyword for the page:
- Title
- URL
- Meta description
- Headers
- Content body
When optimizing for the content body, don’t mention the keyword just for the sake of it. The practice of keyword stuffing is deprecated because it compromises the quality of the content. What’s more important is to make the content as valuable to readers as possible about its keyword.
Off-page SEO
Known as the most important ranking factor, this type of SEO is about getting backlinks from other sites to point to yours, which is also known as link building. The more good links you build over time, the higher and sooner you’ll rank for your terms.
At the same time, off-page SEO could be counter-intuitive if you have toxic backlinks. It can damage your SEO and plummet your rankings if you’re not careful or vigilant.
Unlike on-page SEO, this involves variables you have no direct control over. Whether you can secure the link or not depends on a variety of factors but mostly hinges on the owner of the site where you want to get a link from.
However, you have the ability to influence the outcome by reaching out to the right people. Therefore, it’s imperative that you build relationships with webmasters to help increase your chances of securing backlinks.
Best SEO Audit Tools
For starters, Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free tools to help you set the baseline for your site audit.
The former deals with the volume of traffic your website is getting from different sources. More importantly, it shows you pages that are getting the most organic traffic.
The latter is concerned with how your website pages appear on Google. It details the performance of your pages according to impressions and clicks.
The tool also shows you pages with crawl issues and what you must do to fix them.
Another tool you should consider using is SEMrush. Its Site Audit feature helps you identify errors and warnings that are keeping your site from ranking higher on Google.
Using the tool, you can address these concerns and help optimize your website for crawling and indexing.
You Don’t Have to Audit Your Website by Yourself!
While the steps above should give you an idea of how to audit your website, fixing it based on the audit may be beyond your skill level.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t want to implement the suggested changes in your site if you don’t know how to do them in the first place. You might end up doing more harm than good.
This is where we at Romainberg come in. We have the expertise and experience to not only conduct a comprehensive site audit but also fix the issues to help improve your site’s SEO.
Fill out our contact form today and we’ll get back to you the soonest on how we can proceed with the website audit so you can get the most out of your site.
