How to Do an SEO Audit in 10 Steps (A Complete Guide)
An SEO audit evaluates your website’s health by checking its technical, on-page, off-page, user experience, and local SEO performance. It can help you assess elements or areas that need improvement to make your campaign more effective.Hence, it’s essential to perform an SEO audit to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities so that your SEO strategies are more aligned with your business goals.
Furthermore, this article will give you a complete guide to conducting your SEO audit that covers all essential areas!
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a comprehensive analysis of your website’s health from a search engine perspective. It identifies areas for improvement that can help your website rank higher in search results for relevant keywords. This can lead to increased organic traffic, which is website traffic that comes from search engines without any paid advertising.
A well-rounded SEO audit will delve into several crucial aspects of your website, including: Technical, On-page, and Off-page SEO. An SEO audit can improve your website’s search visibility.
1. Understanding SEO Audits
As mentioned, SEO audits target all SEO areas to maximize the performance of your website. Before you start the actual process of SEO audits, you must learn the different types of SEOs and their relation to the auditing procedure to learn how you can strategize for your comprehensive evaluation. Here are they:
- Technical SEO Audit: This type of audit focuses on a website’s backend aspects, including site structure, crawling, indexing, and performance.
- On-Page SEO Audit: Examines content, meta tags, keyword usage, and other elements on individual web pages.
- Off-Page SEO Audit: Evaluates external factors like backlinks, social signals, and brand mentions that influence a website’s ranking.
- User Experience (UX) Audit: Assess site navigation, design, and engagement metrics to ensure a positive user experience.
- Local SEO Audit: Analyzes a website’s performance in local search results, focusing on local citations, Google My Business, and reviews.
These areas need constant monitoring to know what you need to improve for better SEO performance. SEO specialists must conduct yearly comprehensive SEO audits because of possible changes in Google’s algorithm. You can also do monthly or quarterly edits to focus on smaller audits.
2. How to prepare a SEO Audit?
You can start by having the tools to make your SEO audit process more efficient. Here are they:
- Google Analytics – This tool can help provide data about website traffic and user behavior. You can gain insights about your target audience and demographics, allowing you to strategize for your SEO audit to focus on your potential business clients.
- Google Search Console – This tool monitors your website’s performance in Google search. It can also help your SEO audit by providing performance reports about crawl errors and security issues.
- SEO audit tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and SEMrush – They can give in-depth information about on-page SEO performance, backlinks, and competitor analysis. Therefore, you can realign your SEO audit strategies to improve critical areas in your website’s SEO elements.
Utilizing these tools allows you to focus on critical areas to make your SEO audit successful. Continue reading the article to learn more!
3. Technical SEO Audit
👉 Website Crawling and Indexing
Of course, you must start by ensuring that your web pages are crawled so search engines can see them. So, as you begin a technical SEO audit, you need to check for crawl errors and ensure that all necessary pages are indexed.
- Checking for crawl errors: Use tools like Google Search Console to identify crawl errors that prevent search engines from accessing your website’s content. You can also work with a technical SEO specialist to address this issue so you can fix the crawl errors.
- Ensuring all important pages are indexed: Verify that search engines index all crucial pages. Use the “site:https://yourwebsite.com” operator in Google to check which pages are indexed. Once the important pages are indexed, you can rest assured that your target audience or online users will see the pages that will help with lead generation and sales.
👉 Site Speed and Performance
Now, after ensuring your web pages are crawled, it’s also essential that you check their site speed and performance because it affects online user retention. You can analyze page load speed and identify and fix performance issues.
- Analyzing page load speed: Evaluate your website’s load speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. Identify and fix issues that slow down your site. There are many ways to fix page load speed, so make sure you work with a specialist so the professional can analyze what strategies you can use to improve page speed.
- Identifying and fixing performance issues: There are many ways to improve loading speed. To enhance site speed, you can address performance issues such as large image sizes, unnecessary scripts, and server response times. This can speed up loading and improve user retention.
👉 Mobile-Friendliness
According to Statista, there are projected to be 7.49 billion mobile users in 2025, meaning more people are now using their mobile phones to access the Internet or social media. In relation to SEO, you should also prioritize mobile-friendliness to improve your site’s performance.
- Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly: Ensure your website is responsive and offers a seamless experience on mobile devices. You can adapt responsive web design to adapt to different platforms, including mobile phones.
- Using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool: Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check your site’s mobile compatibility. You can get feedback and valuable information that can help you improve your mobile friendliness. This will increase the number of online users visiting your website not only through computers but also mobile phones.
👉 URL Structure
URL structure should also be part of your technical SEO audit because it helps with the navigational experience of online users. You must review URL structure and follow best practices for SEO-friendly URLs to do so.
- Reviewing URL structure: Examine your URL structure for clarity and simplicity. Ensure URLs are descriptive, short, and include relevant keywords. Long and irrelevant URLs will make your website look suspicious, so keep them short to make it look professional.
- Best practices for SEO-friendly URLs: Follow best practices for SEO-friendly URLs, such as using hyphens to separate words, avoiding special characters, and ensuring URLs are easy to read. Also, remember to include at least one keyword in your URL so online users can get an idea of what the webpage is about.
👉 HTTPS Status
Security is important for your website because it protects you from cyber crimes that can affect your business. For this reason, you need to consider your HTTPS status, which can establish encrypted communication between a client and a web server.
- Ensuring your site uses HTTPS: Verify that your website uses HTTPS for secure connections. Update any HTTP links to HTTPS to avoid mixed content issues. It’s better to consult a technical SEO specialist so that the professional can help you address the security issues regarding the HTTPS status.
- Fixing mixed content issues: Identify and fix mixed content issues, where secure pages load non-secure content, which can compromise security and SEO performance. Remember, protecting your website’s security is paramount to protecting your business in the digital landscape.
4. On-Page SEO Audit
After fixing your technical SEO, you must complete your on-page SEO audit. On-page SEO focuses on your website content and structure, making your site more visible in the digital landscape. When doing your on-page SEO, you need a plan and proper guidelines to make your auditing process more efficient.
With these top on-page SEO checklist, including doing keyword research, fixing URL structure, optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags, improving content, image optimization, internal linking, external linking, page speed optimization, mobile optimization, User Experience (UX), Schema Markup, social sharing integration, and analysis and monitoring.
With this guide, you’ll be able to do your on-page SEO with more efficiency, which can help your digital performance improve.
5. Off-Page SEO Audit
Of course, off-page SEO is also essential for your comprehensive SEO audit process. Backlinks are still one of Google’s most important ranking factors, so make sure you include link building in your auditing strategy.
👉 Backlink Profile
Backlinks are considered a “vote of confidence” in the digital landscape. So, you must ensure that your backlink profile is highly optimized to improve your SEO performance. Make sure you have high-quality links through guest posting, social media integration, infographics, and other backlink strategies.
- Analyzing your backlink profile: It can also help if you analyze your backlink profile by using SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahref, or Moz to identify high-quality backlinks that can boost your website’s credibility and domain authority score. Analyzing your backlink profile can also help you strategize for your link building acquisition to make your SEO campaign more successful.
- Identifying toxic backlinks: Identifying toxic backlinks is also beneficial for your website because you disavow toxic links that can affect your website’s reputation and SEO performance. The Google March Core update heavily emphasizes quality over quantity when it comes to your link profile.
👉 Social Signals
Social media is one of the most valuable platforms for amplifying your SEO performance. In the digital landscape, you can use social media to expand your online presence and encourage more engagement with your followers and potential clients. For this reason, you need to include social signals for your off-page SEO audit.
- Checking social media presence and engagement: Assess your social media presence and engagement levels. Active and engaged social media profiles can enhance your website’s credibility and SEO. To do so, you must create high-quality content encouraging people to share your blogs, videos, or images to improve branding.
- Importance of social signals for SEO: Social signals like shares and comments can indirectly impact your SEO by driving traffic and increasing brand visibility. To get more likes, you can learn about effective marketing strategies to make your social media postings viral, trendy, or appropriate for your target audience.
👉 Brand Mentions
On a personal level, referrals are a good sign that you can trust a brand. If you relate this to the digital platform, the brand mentions act as a referral and signal to the search engine that your brand is trustworthy and credible. So, it’s essential to collaborate with other industry experts as part of your off-page SEO audit.
- Monitoring brand mentions across the web: Use tools like Google Alerts and Mention to track brand mentions. Engaging with these mentions can boost your online presence and SEO. You can do email outreach to work with other industry -experts and expand your network to improve your online credibility.
- Leveraging brand mentions for SEO: Convert unlinked brand mentions into backlinks to improve your site’s authority and search rankings. This will also make your link profile more diverse, signaling to search engines that your link acquisition is natural and legitimate.
6. User Experience (UX) Audit
User Experience (UX) can complement SEO because it helps improve online user retention, lower bounce rates, and increase user engagement. With this in mind, you can increase sales and improve your brand-client relationship!
👉 Site Navigation
Ensure your site navigation is intuitive and user-friendly. Clear navigation improves user experience and reduces bounce rates. Hence, you must incorporate UX writing and UX web design to improve your website’s navigational qualities and make it easier for your online visitors.
👉 Engagement Metrics
As you conduct your User Experience audit, you should analyze the bounce rate, time on site, and other engagement metrics. This will help you identify web pages that need improvement to reduce bounce rates and increase user engagement.
7. Local SEO Audit
Local SEO applies to local businesses that target a certain community or neighborhood. So, if you’re a small local business owner, doing a local SEO audit can increase your sales and improve brand visibility! Here’s how you can do it:
👉 Google My Business
The first step to improving your local SEO is to optimize your Google My Business (GMB) so people can see your business when they search for you online. Make sure to include accurate and up-to-date business information, photos, reviews, and contact information.
👉 Local Keywords
You can identify and optimize local keywords to increase brand visibility when making content like blog articles. You can use SEO tools to identify effective keywords to improve our local organic search traffic.
👉 Reviews and Ratings
Part of your local SEO is managing and responding to reviews, which are crucial for local SEO rankings. Encourage your satisfied customers to leave positive reviews on your social media accounts, GMB, and other platforms to let other people know about your exceptional service.
Conversely, address negative reviews professionally and use them as a source to improve your services and products.
8. Competitor Analysis
To have a more comprehensive SEO audit, you can also include competitor analysis in your list. This will allow you to re-strategize your SEO campaign to work effectively in your field. The first step is identifying your top competitors using SEO tools and social media platforms.
After this, you can analyze their strategies and leverage on some ideas that would also work for your brand. With their strategies and your SEO plan, you can develop a useful campaign to help your brand achieve its goals.
9. Creating an Action Plan
After your SEO audit, you can create an action plan for your future SEO strategies. You can do this in three ways: prioritizing issues, creating a step-by-step action plan, setting timelines, and assigning responsibilities.
- Prioritizing issues identified during the audit: Rank the issues identified during your SEO audit based on their impact on your website’s performance. Address critical problems first because it can improve your SEO performance and yield positive results.
- Creating a step-by-step action plan: Develop a detailed action plan to address each issue. Include specific tasks, timelines, and responsible team members. With this, you can have a guide on what you need to do for your SEO audits in the future.
- Setting timelines and assigning responsibilities: Set realistic timelines for completing each task and assign responsibilities to ensure accountability and timely completion. Assign tasks to the team members, including content writers, graphic designers, web developers, tech team, and SEO specialists.
10. Monitoring and Reporting
Finally, monitoring your SEO performance and reporting it to the team is essential to determine whether your SEO audit is effective and whether you’ve implemented your SEO strategies correctly. You can track progress and measure the results of your SEO audit to determine which areas need improvement.
Nonetheless, strive for continuous improvement to keep your business on the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Doing Your Comprehensive SEO Audit
SEO is about continuous improvement, so as a professional, you need to monitor and track your progress occasionally. Fortunately, you can use this guide to do your comprehensive SEO audit that covers all essential areas!
Now, you can begin your SEO audit process with a positive mindset that you can achieve your goals.
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