It may be a long time back when you last audited your website. It may also be that you are not gaining the desired SEO results. Have you ever thought that these two can be interrelated? Well, it is and it is for this reason you should always conduct a thorough SEO audit on a regular basis. This will help you to build an SEO strategy that is:
- More effective
- More data-driven and
- More productive.
It is the desire of every online business to have an SEO strategy that actually works. This will bring them a lot of revenue. However, without auditing and tracking the performance of your website, this is hard to come by.
Ideally, auditing your website is the first step in building a productive and highly functional SEO strategy. Auditing is actually similar to the diagnosis by a doctor before that plan your treatment.
Your SEO audit should entail:
- Keyword and SERP analysis
- Technical and sitewide assessment
- Competitor research and analysis
- User experience assessment
- Link analysis and
- Page and content analysis.
This comprehensive check-up of your website will help you to know several different important things such as:
- The current state of your website
- Problems and challenges
- Better ranking keywords
- Position of the competitor and
- The content gaps.
Therefore, you should not skip this vital step, or else you will have to bid adieu to your dream of offered by healthcare practitioners before they move onto providing a treatment plan. If you have skipped this crucial step, you can say goodbye to your dream of making a more dominant online presence and gaining more organic traffic and not buy automatic Instagram likes.
Check technical SEO first
There are different stages in conducting SEO audit and there are lots of things to check during the process. If you have the right tools in your hand then the process will seem to be less overwhelming.
Look at the technical aspects of it first. This will ensure that your strategy and website is in accordance with the recent algorithm updates made by Google. This will ensure that your website is of high-quality and find the top place in the SERP. For this you will need to:
- Focus on the content and find out whether or not it is meaningful and useful for the readers
- Look at the relevance, logic, and naturality of the links
- Find out whether or not there are loads of banners on your website
- Determine whether sale and promotion are taking the entire screen and covering the content
- Check for the balance of text and graphics
- Check the backlinks to find out whether there are any questionable websites linking back to your site
- Check the page titles and modify them up a bit
- Find out missing pages, titles or duplicates
- Ensure that there is a high-quality, short and accurate meta description and
- Check the canonical URLs.
This will complete the technical aspect of SEO audit and take you to the next stage.
Crawl of your website
The next important aspect to focus on is the website crawl. This is the process where an SEO crawler spiders the website just as the way Google does. This will give you a lot of useful info regarding the structure and setup of your current SEO. You can use different useful tools for this such as:
- Screaming Frog
- Beam Us Up and
- Ahrefs.
It is also recommended that along with the crawl you also check the HTTP status of the external links. You may do that by turning on the Execute JavaScript option under Crawl settings. This will check all the external links.
You will also find your SEO audit process to be much easier when you check Google to find out whether or not there are any indexation issues. This is important because in the absence of it there will be no ranking.
- If you use Google Search Console for it, go to Google Index and hit on Index Status.
- If you are not used to using Google Search Console, do not fret. You can use the Google search operator itself for that matter.
Though this may not produce as accurate results as Google Search Console, Google search operator will help you to know the number of pages in your domain that Google has indexed.
Check the page speed
Next, you should check the page speed. This plays a huge role in SEO ranking and therefore should not be skipped while doing an SEO audit. The load time of a website not only ensures a positive user experience but will also reduce bounce rates, given the short time window to grab the attention of the viewers. A slow website is far from ideal if you are looking for higher conversion.
In order to analyze the page speed, you can use tools like GooglePageSpeed Insights. This tool will provide you with the data and suggestions that you can implement quickly. The changes needed to make may include and not limited to:
- Formatting of the page and
- Compressing the images used in it.
Every part of the site and every page of it should be checked individually to find out the right size for the best load times. Your audit will enable you to know the specific elements that are hindering the loading speed. You can remove or tweak those from an SEO perspective in order to optimize the performance of your site.
The Benefits of an SEO audit
If you are wondering why you should spend so much time and effort in such an audit then you must know that there are a few top benefits of it from an SEO and marketing perspective. These are:
- Optimization of website performance
- Optimization of conversion rate and
- Search engine optimization.
It will improve the technical aspects of the site, its structure, its robustness, friendliness to the search engines, and more. This will ensure that there are no missed SEO opportunities. You can easily find and implement the necessary remedies to please your users first and the search engine second.
