A Guide to an SEO Audit

Do you have a report on the performance of your website? These days top brands and SEO experts understand the relevance of SEO practices.

In this article, you’ll discover top tips on performing an SEO audit like a pro, including the latest tools and practices. 

What is an SEO Audit?

Simply put, an SEO audit helps you check the overall health of your website. This improves your site’s prevention against spam and provides ideas on how to optimize them. Keeping in mind that Google changes its algorithm regularly, an SEO audit keeps you on track with the latest trend and search patterns.

Whether a business owner or a digital marketer, performing frequent SEO audits is an integral part of your business. Luckily, you don’t have to break the bank for an efficient SEO audit for your brand.

How often should you do an SEO audit?

We recommend you have an SEO audit every six months or one year. However, check ranking metrics and performance every time (maybe weekly or monthly).

How to do an SEO Audit?

1.      Check Your Performance and Rankings

When performing an SEO audit, you first want to check average ranking positions for your unique keywords. For an accurate metric, you can use either SEMRush or Ahrefs. For instance, in SEMRush, you can check for relevant SEO metrics for your targeted keywords.

For instance, you could check about 40 to 50 keywords to see if you’ve great rankings for these. Remember, the goal of everyone is to be on page 1 of SERPs. So, aim for the top!

2.      Check Your Competitors

There are two ways to do this.:

Option 1 – use an SEO tool

You can use an SEO tool like SEMRush to understand what your competitors are doing deeply. Whether performing an audit for an old or new site, the Semrush tool will auto-populate a report about your top 100 competitors. And it shows you where each one is sitting in the SERP.

Option 2 – manually via Google

Google helps you see where you and each of your competitors rank with a specific keyword. With this, you can understand how search engines like Google choose relevant information and authority of each site.

3.      Check Your Indexability

Apart from using an SEO tool, you can perform a manual search by inputting your unique keywords into a search engine. So, you can see the pages on your website that rank well and anyone that isn’t doing so great. Also, you can determine if your site is indexed effectively.

Again, you want to watch out for your website’s meta robots tag, which tells SERPs what your pages’ content is. If you notice a page that is not indexing, this may be a problem related to this meta robots tag. So, you already know what to fix.

4.      Check Your Website for Duplicate Content

Having duplicate content on your pages can badly hurt your SEO practices. Search engines can penalize your site if you’ve got any duplicate content. This is why it’s important always to craft original SEO content. Some businesses even invest many bucks into hiring professional writers because their brand is valuable.

Sometimes, search engines can find two pages on your website with similar content. This, of course, is regarded as duplicate content. Keep in mind that duplicate content isn’t always the same as lifting content from other websites.

5.      Meta Tags

It’s important to have short, descriptive meta tags that easily tell the reader about the page. Generally, keep your meta description between 150 to 160 words. Search engines and irrelevant will cut off anything more than this. So, ensure to insert your keywords where possible.

When optimised, meta tags encourage a reader to click through a page on a SERP to your site or ignore it. They might jump to your competitor – and you don’t want that happening.

Include tags for all images on a particular page, as this is important for bots to crawl that page.

6.      Check Your Backlinks

The saying “is not what you know but who you know” is true. Search engines like Google consider the quality of backlinks you get from other top-ranking websites. In other words, if a top-ranking website links to your site, search engines automatically assume and recognise your site as a solution solver.

However, ensure to verify that your links are coming from valuable websites. Otherwise, getting backlinks from questionable sites could cause more harm than good.

Outbound Links

As a rule of thumb, no page on your website should have up to 100 outbound links. If this happens, the page will look ‘spammy’ and be classified as a link farm, which is an old way of exchanging reciprocal links. Performing an SEO audit, however, helps you see the number of outgoing links on each page of your site.

Internal Links

Unlike outbound links, internal links are safe practices. An SEO audit helps you identify broken links so you can fix them.

A Guide to an SEO Audit: Tools

Fortunately, you can grab hold of a few tools online to help you perform an accurate SEO audit. Below are our top picks for you:

Google Analytics

As expected, Google Analytics makes a list. Google Analytics can be used together with Screaming Frog so you can thorough site performance details, including page views and bounce rates.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is also another great one for an efficient SEO audit. Google aims to help everyone perform routine checks on the health of their website. This tool lets you view reports exactly the way Google sees your site.

MO’s Crawl Test Tool

MOZ’s Crawl Test Tool pro version helps you work like a pro. With about £84.94/$99 a month to £513.94/$599, depending on your team size, you can boost your page ranking using dedicated keywords.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider

Crawl up to 500 websites for free or choose the paid version at $209/£149 annually. Enter your domain (or any other website you want to crawl), and you’re done!

Concluding Thoughts

There you have it! A guide to an SEO audit at your fingertip.

With so much content online, connecting with your main audience can be quite intimidating. But reaching out to an amazing team can get you back on track!

If you need any professional help in setting up your report or audit, kindly get in touch with the team today.