In SEO, everything can run perfectly for a day, and eventually, new issues and technical hindrances may arise. On a daily basis, a website is vulnerable to hundreds of malware and black-hat SEO attacks, weakening its protection, especially if it has no SSL or a security plugin. In addition, the algorithm update of the search engine can completely change the entire search engine results and ranking. If a website is unmanaged and unaudited, there could be no significant increase in traffic and revenue alongside stagnant rank on the search engines. That’s why SEO audit should be considered as a significant practice to manage and analyze the condition of the website.
What Is An SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is an evaluation process of a website to check its ability to rank on Search Engine Results Page, including the health performance, backlinks, keyword use, content creation, and other major determinant ranking factors. The purpose of an SEO audit is to identify the foundation and layout program of a website and examining its potential if it still can function or generate results.
When doing an SEO audit, it will reveal the following condition of these elements and attributes:
- Technical SEO issues
- Possible off-site problems
- On-page SEO issues
- User experience hindrances
- Content gaps and opportunities
- Competitive market analysis
Importance Of SEO Audit
It’s obvious that an SEO audit is important because it examines and identifies the weaknesses and lacking functionality of a website. It is a tool for improvement and gets a better insight into what could be the next strategy for more effective marketing. It is comparable to a monthly inventory that checks all the items of the business, and it’s the same thing with SEO audit minus the items. Since it’s a systematic evaluation, there could be different areas that will be exposed that caused some of the major inbound marketing to become slow and ineffective. Website owners who constantly do an SEO audit seek improvement and success for the business itself and the whole team.
Characteristics Of An SEO Audit
Do:
- An SEO audit should be comprehensive – it should both cover the structural and content components that affected the online visibility of the website. Any missing or lacking components should be addressed immediately to avoid worsening the problem.
- An SEO audit should be interconnected, in all forms. As a business owner, one should be able to connect and trace all the causes of the problem that affected the holistic aspect of the website.
- An SEO audit lastly, should be actionable – after addressing the problems, there should be a clear action and tangible programs to target these problems to avoid reoccurrence.
Don’t:
- An SEO audit shouldn’t be rushed – the process of uncovering the issues and problems in the website should not be rushed considering that it takes more than months to fix all of it depending on the intensity.
- An SEO audit shouldn’t be for all – even though an SEO audit evaluates and examines the issue of the website, there should be a specific solution for each issue thus, doing a deep analysis of the data slowly.
SEO Audit Strategy
There are four typical SEO audit strategies namely, technical analysis, on-page analysis, off-page analysis, and competitive analysis and keyword research.
Technical Analysis
From the word itself, it mean to analyse the loading speed, accessibility, and overall function of the website for search engines to crawl and index the content and other major factors.
- Accessibility
Accessibility refers to the user’s and search engine’s ability to examine and evaluate a website, checking the robot.txt files and meta tags to access the website. A robot.txt file will allow the search engine to index the website, and if the website has no presence on this type of file, the search engine will find it difficult to index, thus jeopardizing its ranking.
- Indexability
Indexability refers to the process of indexing the website for it to be visible on the Search Engine Results Page. It goes hand-in-hand with accessibility, and if a website has an indexability issue, it will not be indexed in any of the search engines.
On-Page Analysis
When talking about on-page, it always targets the internal elements and attributes of a website such as content, meta description, and meta title, URLs, audio and video, and other visual presentations. When doing an on-page analysis, make sure that the contents being put on are of quality standard, helpful, and suggesting relevance. Also, the keywords are well-distributed on the content alongside the meta title and meta description.
- Eliminate duplicated content
Although duplicated content has lesser chances to be penalized by Google and other search engines, it can potentially jeopardize the content strategy of the website, either the duplicated or the duplication.
- Avoid keyword cannibalization
Overuse of keywords can be simply ineffective in generating traffic and attracting potential visitors. Google and other search engine will have a hard time ranking the website with excessive use of keywords.
Off-Page Analysis
Off-page analysis is all about increasing the domain authority of a website. The higher your DA score is, the greater the ability to rank. Earning a score in DA is through backlinks and that’s why it’s vital to generate quality backlinks from credible websites.
- Stop gaining poor backlinks
Poor backlinks won’t do anything good to a website, instead jeopardizing the DA score and deeming its content as less relevant.
Competitive Analysis & Keyword Research
This part discusses the competition on the keywords research in the market. It’s crucial to know the existing keywords on the internet and resort to making a unique, long-tailed keyword to fill in the gap. Keywords are the tool for attracting web visitors and driving website traffic, so it’s important that the keyword of a website delivers clear intent and meaning behind a query.
Levels Of SEO Audit
Good SEO Audit
This refers to the use of a software tool to uncover the condition of a website. It produces a one-for-all generic report regarding technical SEO issues, and it’s simply inexpensive perfect for newbie website owners.
Better SEO Audit
This is where an SEO practitioner and expert come into play. They are the individuals who have the ability to do an SEO audit on a website and they can identify SEO problems that analytics can’t.
Best SEO Audit
This is the last level, and it refers to the investment in a reliable SEO agency and entrust the SEO audit of a website. These agencies have the complete data analysis and SEO report for website owners while using quality SEO tools to fix existing issues.
How To Do An SEO Audit
Before diving into the basic steps of doing an SEO audit, it’s important to know first the different SEO audit tools that will help in tracking and analyzing the various SEO issues and problems.
These are the SEO audit tools:
- Google Analytics Tool
- Google Search Console
- Google PageSpeed Insight
- Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
- Ahrefs
- Copyscape
- SERP Simulator
- Web Page Word Counter
Here are the generalized steps in doing an SEO audit
Step 1: Checking the existing and arising issues
This refers to the use of a software tool to uncover the condition of a website. It produces a one-for-all generic report regarding technical SEO issues, and it’s simply inexpensive perfect for newbie website owners.
Step 2: Address the findings of the SEO analysis
After checking the websites and referring to the results of the SEO analysis, there should be an immediate proposal of these issues while continuing to deeply examine also the content if there are any duplication and keyword cannibalization. In addition, make sure to check the loading speed of the website and any other data-based errors.
Step 3: Analyzing the organic search traffic
This third step refers to the process of understanding the organic search traffic that ponders the earned traffic of a website and evaluating the changes in the search engine.
Step 4: Backlink analysis
This is the very important step because with backlink analysis, the condition of the website in regards to the number backlinks being earned by a website will be examined and analyzed as a preparation to create a solution.
Step 5: Content gap analysis
This is the part of the creation of a content to fill in the knowledge gap in the market and to be able to provide unique, quality content for the whole population.
