Are you a website owner and wondering why your engagement and traffic are falling? Then don’t be scared. An SEO audit is your answer!
Today, I am going to share “How to do an SEO Audit”, which can help you increase your engagement and organic traffic.
Before diving into the guide, let’s first understand what an SEO audit is.
SEO Audit
An SEO audit is a process of evaluating your website’s performance in Search Engines and helps identify areas where improvements can be made to attract more organic traffic.
This process analyzes the problems related to on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
Let’s get started
1. Crawl Your Website
Start by crawling the website to gather useful data related to the number of monthly visitors, backlinks, organic traffic, and other relevant metrics.
Tools you can use for website crawling:
- SemRush: SemRush is a paid tool, but its free account allows you to audit 100 URLs. Also, SemRush allows a 14-day free trial on a Pro subscription. This tool is a full SEO audit tool that detects more than 140 issues in a website.
- Screaming Frog: It is a paid tool, but it allows you to run an audit of 500 URLs for free. It gives insights on meta titles, headings, descriptions, image alt text, helps to identify broken links, and much more.
- Ubersuggest: This SEO tool offers a free version with limited features and also a free trial for premium features. The SEO audit shows the number of visitors monthly, the number of backlinks, critical errors, warnings, and recommendations.
- Ahrefs: Ahrefs is also a paid tool like others, but with its webmaster tool, one can do the site audit for free. Once you create the free account, import the projects from Google Search Console, and then Ahrefs will automatically run the crawl of your website.
Crawling helps to detect:
- Site speed
- On-page elements
- Internal linking
- Technical errors
- Crawlability
2. Review Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors coming to your website through (SERP) Search Engine Result Pages and not paid ads. Organic traffic indicates the popularity of your website.
To check your organic traffic, go to Google Analytics.
Go to “Reports” > “Generate Leads” > “Traffic Acquisition”.
Now, you will see the organic traffic in the primary channel group.
Additionally, to determine which page is performing well in search engines and receiving more clicks, you can refer to Google Search Console‘s “Performance Tab”.
After analyzing organic traffic, you will understand which pages need a changed SEO strategy to perform well in search engine result pages.
3. Review Meta Titles and Descriptions
We all know that On-Page SEO is crucial for your website to improve its ranking and user experience.
Review title tags and meta descriptions. Optimizing title tags and meta descriptions acts like inviting searchers to your website. Using tools like Screaming Frog and Ubersuggest will help you identify missing or duplicate titles, descriptions, and missing image alt text or heading tags.
Missing titles or meta descriptions means missing a chance of attracting users to your website.
4. Check Indexing Issues
Using a tool like Ubersuggest during your site audits, you can find common indexing issues on your website.
These indexing issues include 404 Not Found errors, thin or low-quality content, duplicate content, Redirection errors, server errors (5XX), slow loading speed, and lack of mobile friendliness.
Due to these errors, Google might not index pages on your site. But for a detailed report on these errors, you can use the Google Search Console tool.
5. Fix Broken Links
Broken links are hyperlinks that are dead and do not lead to the intended webpage. Broken links are a common issue you will find during site audits. This occurs when the intended page is moved or deleted without proper redirection.
Broken links are not good for user experience and can negatively impact SEO.
You can find broken links by using a tool like Screaming Frog or SemRush, and fix them by deleting or redirecting any links.
6. Review Core Web Vitals
Google says Core Web Vitals are essential metrics that measure your website’s user experience and are considered as a ranking factor.
You can check the problems associated with Core Web Vitals using Page Speed Insights.
The three Core Web Vitals metrics are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how fast your site loads.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how layout shifts when your page is loading.
- Interaction to Next Paint: Measures how responsive your website is to user interactions.
Optimizing these metrics will help you enhance the user experience.
7. Review Mobile Friendliness
Over 50% of traffic on the website comes from mobile devices. A mobile-friendly website is considered a vital component in enhancing SEO and user experience.
Google uses a mobile-first indexing process to crawl and index the content of a website that will be accessible to users when they are accessing the website on their mobile phones.
You can use Page Speed Insight to test your website’s mobile friendliness. Just add the URL and click the analyze tab.
And then you will get the full report telling you how responsive your website is and what fixes you need to make for a mobile-friendly website.
8. Review Your Sitemap
Analyze your sitemap during the SEO site audit. A sitemap ensures that Google and any other search engine can easily understand the structure of your website and crawl and index your website efficiently.
Now, to review your sitemap, you can use Google Search Console:
Go to Google Search Console > Indexing > Sitemap
Here you can review your sitemap to ensure that Google has successfully indexed your sitemap. Make sure Google is indexing a significant number of URLs that are submitted.
To check this, you must know how many URLs you have submitted in a sitemap and how many are “Discovered by Google”. Also, if you are making any changes or fixing the issues during your site audit, then update and resubmit the sitemap.
9. Review Your Competitors
Analyzing your competitors will help you identify the opportunities to rank higher than them on Search Engines. Reviewing them also helps in analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. This will give you an idea of how to do better in that area.
Now, check for your competitors’ best keywords and keywords they lost, and look where they are ranking, and grab a chance to rank on those keywords.
Secondly, check which type of content is working best for them and identify the opportunities where you can rank too, using the content ideas.
You can check this using tools like SemRush, UberSuggest, and many other tools.
These tools allow you to check the keywords your competitors are ranking for, content ideas, the number of backlinks, and the quality of backlinks.
10. Identify Opportunities to Create Content
Identifying the content gaps and filling them will help you improve your website’s visibility in the Search Engines. Content gap tells you the topic your website is not covering, and your users are searching for it.
You can analyze content gaps by using tools like Ubersuggest to speed up the process.
Here is how you can identify a Content Gap:
a) Content audit: You can analyze your content by checking the performance of your current content, which pages are underperforming and declining rankings, and which topics are missing from the website.
b) Competitor Analysis: Review your competitors’ content strategy and especially their top-performing pages and keywords they are ranking for.
Conclusion
An SEO audit helps to fix important issues and provides important information that will enhance your website’s performance, increase rankings, and search engine visibility.
Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and Screaming Frog can help you optimize your website.