How to Perform an SEO Audit in 7 Steps Are you seeing how the positioning of your website is getting lower and lower? If your online business is slowly sinking into the depths of the second page of Google. You may have neglected some aspects of your online presence.
It’s easy to make mistakes in digital marketing. Both small start-ups and those companies that have had a website for years are in danger of disappearing from their potential buyers.
To prevent this from happening, companies need to conduct SEO audits. They can do this either by hiring a team of SEO and web analytics experts or by putting themselves. In the hands of a good SEO agency (which is usually more common). Thanks to this audit, we can identify our strong points to exploit them, as well as the weak ones, to improve them.
But before explaining how to do an SEO audit, I think it is convenient that the concept of SEO audit is well defined.
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What is an SEO Review?
An SEO review is a comprehensive examination of the various aspects that affect a website’s organic positioning to diagnose problems and detect opportunities for improvement.
It is essential to remember that not only are internal elements of the website studied, but we must also analyze other types of external elements such as our online authority or external links.
Why do an SEO Audit? – Perform an SEO Audit
Now are some reasons why you may need to do an SEO audit. The main one is that this analysis will allow you to maintain the general health of your website. Additionally, remember that user behaviour and technology are constantly changing, so your website must evolve continually.
Of course, there may be more specific reasons why you want to do an SEO audit. For example, see if your most important pages are visible to Google, if there are 404 errors, if your content interests users, or if your link-building strategy is working.
Additionally, it is vitally important that an SEO audit focuses on evaluating whether your website or your clients offers a good user experience. Or, put another way, if it meets Google’s Core Web Vitals.
Google Core Web Vitals – Perform an SEO Audit
The Core Web Vitals are the new metrics with which Google measures the user experience offered by a specific website. Every time we conduct an SEO audit, we know that the findings will be used to optimize; this is where the Core Web Vitals come into play.
Different tools help us determine and detect problems that affect the user experience. Through the implementation of the Core Web Vitals, what is intended is to establish some simple criteria for the best experience that a website can offer. Currently, Google pays special attention to three main metrics: LCP, or largest contentful paint; FID, or first input delay; and CLS, or cumulative layout shift.
These three categories, or metrics, look at a website’s different aspects. Let’s see:
LCP (Largest Contentful Pain): measures the loading time of the content, taking as reference the most prominent content element without the need to scroll down. For Google to detect that your website is within these loading standards, the time must be below 2.5 seconds.
FID (First Input Delay): Measures the time from when a user acts on a website (for example, clicking) until the browser reacts or, technically speaking, returns a response. This metric seeks to measure responses to user interactions. According to Google standards, the FID of a page will be good if the reaction occurs below 100 milliseconds.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Unlike the previous two metrics, CLS measures how often the layout is updated or changed while users browse a page. This is closely related to the visual stability of the site and can arise when some elements scroll across the screen when a user is navigating the displayed page. The CLS value of a website must be below 0.1 to be considered optimal.
Who Should Perform the SEO audit? – Perform an SEO Audit
The cheapest solution, one of the reasons you may find yourself reading this post, is to try it yourself. Today, millions of tools on the Internet will allow you to know how to do a good SEO audit of your website. Uncertainty, you want to know just how to get started, keep reading and don’t miss a single detail!
An additional alternative would be to hire a professional team of SEO analysis experts to become part of your company. If you do not have a significant economical, it can be a single person and gradually expand your staff. This would be in charge of carrying out an audit and later carrying out the changes you would have to make based on the audit results.
Analyze your SEO off-page. Finally, you can also trust an expert SEO agency to conduct a thorough SEO audit of your website. Perhaps this alternative is the most appropriate since, on some occasions, it is more complicated and requires a larger budget to have a department just for this pu Once you have understood what an SEO audit is, let’s move on to the significant thing, which is how to do an effective and appropriate SEO audit for your business. This way, you can ensure you know what things are failing on your website and work on them to improve your web positioning.
Knowing how to do an SEO audit will give you the tools to ensure your site ranks correctly. If you want to know the steps you must take into account, keep reading. Then fashionable no time, you can apply these guidelines to your web page. The first results of Google are very close! rpose.
1. Check that your relevant pages can be crawled and indexed
Make sure that the essential URLs of your website can be crawled and indexed, so they appear among Google results. It is a detail that can escape us on many occasions, but that will mark whether your pages are visible or not.
You can find out if your web pages are well indexed from tools like Google Search Console. If your position has fewer than 500 pages, you can Google “site:[yoursite]” to see which pages of your website are indexed.
Remember that the Google bot has a limited crawling budget, so you should tell it which pages you’re interested in crawling.
You can see the current directions by checking ” www.yoursite.com/robots.txt”. The pages you do not want to be tracked should appear under the “Disallow” code. On the other hand, if you have detected a page that appears indexed in Google and you are interested in removing it (for example, a “Thank you” landing page), what you should do is include the “noindex” tag in its HTML code.
2. Check the loading speed and adaptation of the content for mobile devices
More than 50% of searches are done from mobile devices. This means that if your site is not optimized for these devices, it is likely that Google will not show it among its first results.
On the other hand, if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, the user may leave before seeing your content. Take a look at PageSpeed Insights to find out what you can improve about your website.
3. Study the Architecture of your Website – How to Perform an SEO Audit in 7 Steps
A well-designed architecture will contribute to better crawling and indexing of your site. This is achieved by considering both the user experience and internal linking. A transparent organization will improve the navigability of your site and allow the user to find what he needs.
Decrease the level of depth of your site, measured by the number of clicks from your main page. Through a redefinition of your internal link structure. Check that your main page is connected with links to the most relevant pages of your site. And check that these pages are also connected to other pages of importance to your business.
Finally, you must check the status codes of your URLs (you can use tools like Ahrefs, Screaming Frog or Botify, among others).
A status code is a standard response provided by a server to a request from any client. The idea is to receive the code 200 since the request has been processed correctly and can be answered without problems.
However, a page no longer will return a 404 code. Depending on the subject, a permanent (301) or temporary (302) redirect is generated in these cases. Learning about HTML status codes will improve the user experience and your SEO.
4. Evaluate your Content and its Organic Visibility
Search engines will always prefer those sites that offer a good user experience. Therefore, you must evaluate the content you submit. Is it optimized with the needs of your audience in mind? Does it answer your questions? Is the information fresh and relevant? Make sure to update statistics, data and links, so your pages do not become obsolete.
Keep in mind that the content of your website is somehow like its soul. Without texts photographs videos or infographics. We are left with just a digital void. Therefore, the content on your web pages must add value to users regardless of whether it is on a product page, on the main page or on your blog.
An essential alternative aspect to consider is the structure of your content. Initially, search engines placed great importance on keywords in deciding the ranking of pages in the SERP.
Today, although keywords are still significant. Changes in the way the user searches and, consequently. In the algorithm of search engines have made it crucial to perform keyword research around topic clusters or theme sets.
For example, if you have a psychology website, you can define agoraphobia as a topic and work on subtopics such as treatments, symptoms, causes or ways to overcome it. Evaluating your content from this perspective will allow you to organize your site better, boost your SEO and find new content opportunities.
To find out if the keywords you have chosen for your theme sets are working, you can rely on tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs or SEOquake.
5. Evaluate if you are Attracting the Right Audience
If you notice that you have many visits to your site But then the number of actions within the website. Itself is relatively low (for example, nobody visits your price page or asks for a demo). It is possible that you are not attracting the right audience or that you are not guiding them appropriately to take the actions that interest you.
6. Analyze your Competition
You recognize the saying, keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. And this, taken to the field of digital marketing, means that you must carry out an analysis of your competition. This way, you will be bright enough to know it thoroughly and what you are facing.
Even so, I remind you that real competition is not the same as competition in SEO. That company with which you compete within your same neighbourhood does not have to be the one you compete against to reach the first results of Google. Here are a series of factors that you should take into account to study your SEO competition :
Please look at the keywords they are ranking for and the different themes they are working on to find out how to get ahead of them. You can use the Ahrefs “Content gap” tool to detect keywords your website does not rank for yet.
You should also check what type of link-building strategy your competition is running and this will help you understand. What kind of links you should get to improve your ranking. We recommend that you use Ahrefs Site Explorer to see. How many referring domains they have and how they have grown over time. Other handy tools are Majestic SEO and SEMrush.
Another factor to consider is the featured snippets (or featured snippets) that your competitors have achieved. These are pages that Google has chosen to appear just above the rest of the organic results. Since their content perfectly matches the search intent. Due to its strategic position (they call it “position zero” for a reason). The featured snippet becomes many clicks, so you must study how to achieve it.
7. Do an off-page SEO Analysis – Perform an SEO Audit
SEO off-page refers to all the external factors influencing your position in the SERP. A crucial part of this analysis will be looking at your site’s backlinks and spotting opportunities for new links. If you don’t have much knowledge in this aspect, don’t worry. We share with you 11 strategies to get quality backlinks.
How do I know if I Require an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit should not be an exceptional action, but something carried out consistently to keep your website optimized. You can sell a fantastic product and have the best customer service. But your marketing strategy cannot be based primarily on word of mouth. Being visible on Google or any other search engine is currently essential.
Conclusion and Final Recommendations when Carrying out an SEO audit
In conclusion in this post I have insisted on how important it is to know how to do an SEO audit for your web business and the steps. That must be followed to carry it out. Though I also want to remind you that an SEO audit is only the first step of a good SEO strategy.