SEO Audit Guide: Comprehensive Guide to Conducting SEO Audits
You’ve launched your website, it looks promising initially, but then you notice a decline in traffic. It’s time for an SEO audit guide. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
According to Ahrefs, a staggering 96.55% of content receives no organic traffic from Google. Feeling concerned? Don’t be. An SEO site audit can pinpoint common issues affecting your online performance.
The good news is that acting on insights from an SEO audit can enhance your rankings, visitor numbers, and conversions. If you’re unsure where to start, this guide will walk you through the process step-by-step.
Understanding SEO Audits
What is an SEO Audit? An SEO audit is an exhaustive evaluation of a website and its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Furthermore, it identifies areas for improvement to boost visibility and increase organic traffic. An audit can uncover issues like:
- Technical SEO problems, such as site speed issues or coding errors
- Content gaps that need addressing
- Areas where competitors are outperforming you
- Opportunities to improve user experience (UX) by enhancing load times and mobile accessibility
- Target keyword usage, including titles and meta descriptions
- Your website’s ranking for chosen keywords
- Quality of backlinks
SEO audits cover numerous aspects of your website, ensuring no stone is left unturned. But is an SEO audit really worth the effort? Let’s consider some proof.
Case Study: Verint
A detailed SEO audit conducted by NP Digital for the CX automation platform Verint yielded significant results, including:
- A 210% increase in non-branded organic search clicks year-over-year, 30 days post-migration
- A 33% increase in the total number of keywords ranked in positions 1-10 year-over-year
To optimise your website’s performance, regular audits are essential – typically a couple of times a year or quarterly. An audit is also crucial if:
- Your website’s organic traffic and conversions are declining
- Your site has a high bounce rate
- Your keyword rankings are dropping without an apparent reason
Additionally, an SEO audit guide is recommended after building a new website or following a website migration to identify early SEO challenges.
Essential Tools for SEO Audits
Additionally, SEO audits can range from a few hours to six weeks, depending on your website’s scale and the audit’s depth. However, the right tools can make the process more manageable.
Top SEO Tools:
- SEO Analyser: Assesses critical SEO factors like duplicate or missing metadata, H1 tags, site speed issues, and, moreover, provides competitive analysis.
- Ubersuggest: Offers backlink audits, keyword research, content performance analysis, competitive analysis, content ideas, and domain overviews.
- Copyscape: Detects plagiarised and duplicate content that can harm your SEO.
- Lumar (formerly Deepcrawl): Crawls your website to check technical performance, including site speed and accessibility issues, providing reports on up to 250 technical issues.
- Schema Markup Validator: Ensures proper implementation of structured data on a website. Enter your URL to run tests, identify errors, and receive recommendations.
- Small SEO Tools Keyword Density Checker: Analyses keyword density on your website; consequently, it aims for around 1-2% keyword density.
How to Conduct an SEO Audit
With over 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm, identifying issues can be daunting. Similarly, a comprehensive SEO audit can uncover problems and help you formulate a plan to address them.
Step-by-Step SEO Audit Process
- Run a Website Crawl
Use an SEO analyser tool, enter your URL, and click “Analyse website.” The crawl will provide details on monthly visitor numbers, backlinks, social shares, and more; additionally, it includes a list of critical errors, warnings, and recommendations.
- Analyse Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to visitors who find your website through unpaid search results, which an SEO audit guide can help optimise. It’s a crucial metric for gauging your site’s popularity and the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. In fact, falling organic traffic or keyword rankings may signal the need for strategy adjustments.
Tools for measuring organic traffic include Website Traffic Checker, Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, or your web host’s internal analytics.
- Review and Optimise Meta Titles and Descriptions
Meta titles impact search result rankings and should include relevant keywords. Moreover, Meta descriptions invite users to your site and should be enticing yet detailed. For example, use tools like ScreamingFrog to find missing, duplicated, or unoptimised meta titles and descriptions, allowing for necessary revisions.
- Check for Keyword Cannibalisation
Keyword cannibalisation occurs when multiple pages target the same keyword, competing with each other and lowering rankings. Furthermore, use tools like Ubersuggest to identify cannibalisation issues. In addition, consolidate content from competing pages or redirect weaker pages to improve traffic.
- Fix Indexing Issues
Additionally, common indexing issues include 404 errors, server errors, broken redirects, duplicate content, thin content, and incorrect use of canonicals. Use Google Search Console to identify and resolve these issues, ensuring Google indexes your pages properly.
- Check for Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can harm user experience and cause cannibalisation. Use tools like Copyscape or the SEO Content Checker Chrome extension to find and address duplicate content. All in all, consider consolidating content, using 301 redirects, or adding canonical tags to preferred URLs.
- Check Page Speed
Slow loading times can increase bounce rates and lower conversions; in fact, consult an SEO audit guide to address these issues. For example, test your site’s speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. Improve loading times by optimising images, using a Content Delivery Network, reducing plugins and scripts, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, and enabling GZIP compression.
- Check Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are metrics that Google uses to measure your website’s user experience, including:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures page load times.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures time to interactivity.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures layout stability during loading.
Use Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights to analyse and improve these metrics.
- Analyse Mobile Friendliness
With over half of web traffic coming from mobile devices, ensuring mobile friendliness is critical. Therefore, use Bing’s free mobile-friendliness tool to analyse and improve your site’s mobile accessibility.
- Fix Broken Links
Broken links can frustrate users and harm your rankings. Moreover, use tools like Screaming Frog’s broken link checker to find and fix broken links, ensuring a smooth user experience and maintaining Google’s PageRank.
- Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Understanding your competitors helps you identify opportunities to outperform them. In fact, tools like Ubersuggest can provide insights into competitors’ keywords, backlinks, social media engagement, website speed, and mobile responsiveness.
- Analyse Your Sitemap
Your sitemap ensures search engines can crawl and index your website. Moreover, use Google Search Console to check your sitemap’s status, identify indexing issues, and make necessary adjustments.
- Identify Content Gaps
Content gaps refer to topics your site doesn’t cover that users are searching for. Moreover, identify these gaps using keyword research, competitive analysis, and tools like Ubersuggest to enhance your content strategy.
Conclusion
In summary, no matter how visually appealing your website is, it needs to function optimally; an SEO audit guide can help attract visitors, leads, and conversions. Regular SEO audits allow you to identify and fix potential issues, boosting performance, rankings, and visibility.
SEO might seem complex, but it significantly impacts your traffic. Tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog can help you keep your website in top shape. Conduct audits regularly (at least twice a year) and especially if you notice a decline in organic traffic.
A thorough SEO audit is your roadmap to a more effective and successful online presence.
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