An audit helps to get a clear understanding of what needs to be done to achieve objectives. When it comes to digital marketing, SEO audit lays the foundation. You can’t forget SEO. SEO means putting efforts continually before and after achieving success. It plays a huge role in building brand image as compared to other companies which are running the race. SEO auditing helps to analyze the website so that the performance of off-page and on-page can be assessed. An SEO audit helps to analyze backlinks, identify website-related problems, scan keyword density, analyze social media engagement and find out the duplicity in the content. If a company wants to attain long-term success, then it has to identify its weakness, strengths. And all this can be done can be effectively done by auditing the website.
Types of SEO Audits
1. SEO Technical Audit:
All the technical issues that are refraining the search engines to crawl the website links can be identified through this type of SEO audit. All the technical problems are summarized in the SEO technical report and the solutions are also given. In this way you make way for the necessary actions, most of the proficient digital marketing companies execute the best practices.
2. Competitive Website Audit:
In this fierce time of competition, following the competitors is significant. With the help of a competitive website audit, you can come to know what your rivals are doing. You can get a picture of how they are doing well and what should you do to outshine them. You can disclose the best successful marketing tactics that you can execute to get more customer reach and clients.
3. Content Audit and SEO Link:
According to the recent Google updates, its crawler wants to read updated content and rank websites accordingly. Otherwise, the search engine will affect the rankings negatively. Apart from content, auditing the links is equally important. SEO link auditing helps to find out broken and bad links so that you get improved performance.
4. Local SEO Audit:
Actionable and accurate data can be received to optimize for local areas. With local SEO audit, local citations, local listings, on-site and off-site activities, review, and local search rankings. All the issues can be found out in detail and the solutions can be thought of and hence, chances of improved local ranking increase.
Also Read: Create A Winning SEO Strategy For Higher Ranking
Audit your organic search efforts with the following 8 steps-
1. Analyze indexation and crawlability issues:
First thing first, your website should be properly set up so that crawlers can get through your pages and index them. If the crawlers fail to understand your website, then you can’t rank on the search engine because it will not know where to place your content.
Use the SEMRush audit tool to effectively check these kinds of issues. The tool will analyze all the website’s pages and inform you of the problematic areas in the particular pages. Also, with the help of the tool, you can come to know the overall performance of the website, the number of redirects. Checking the XML sitemap helps to understand how one page is related to other.
2. Checking Architectural Issues:
A technical SEO audit is needed to analyze if the construction and architecture of your website are correct. Otherwise, it will have a negative impact on your rankings. The audit will ensure the accuracy of your URL structure, site structure, and hierarchy. As a result, when all these issues will be removed from the website, they will become easy to navigate. A good site is that one where a visitor can reach any page from the homepage in less than 3 clicks.
In this step, check the grouping of the pages, analyze if the menus are logical. Moreover, check if all the URLs of the website have the same structure. URL structure should reflect the journey of the user from the homepage to any other page they are visiting now.
For example, Home> Services> Digital Marketing> SEO, then the URL should be like Domain.com/home/services/digitalmarketing/seo
Try to flatten the hierarchy. It will help you to build a more responsive website. When you are fixing the hierarchy, make sure that no page is too deeply connected with your website. Otherwise, Google will consider it irrelevant.
3. Fixing Canonical Tags
Sometimes a website has pages with similar or matching content, then it becomes difficult for the search engine to catch the difference, canonical tags come into the picture then. These are pieces of code that differentiate the ‘master page’ which you want to get indexed from Google. The tags must follow the best practices when you are conducting a technical SEO audit.
Note- one tag per page is used on the correct domain protocol such as HTTP or HTTPS. Also, you should specify whether you want the www version to be indexed. These are all the best practices that are to be followed.
4. Correcting Internal Links
Internal links can boost user experience and search engine optimization by linking high domain authority pages with weak ones. All the issues with the contextual and navigational links can be found out.
The main problem in the internal links is the presence of orphaned pages- no links leading to them. They will not be indexed by Google and hence, very hard for the visitors to find them. But orphaned pages are on the sitemap, so creating links to such pages can boost performance.
Tip- make sure you use relevant anchor text and the text should target significant keywords with clearly understandable language. This tip will help you make the best use of SEO services in USA and elevate your business to the next level.
5. Website Security
These days, protecting a website from any intruders is like shielding your business from hardships. If in case your website invites spy eyes, then a technical SEO audit is a must. The audit will let you know how secured your website is. The problems in the security certificate, like registered to the wrong domain name and the need for a password for the non-secure pages are known after the technical SEO audit. Hence, working on an SEO audit is important to make sure the search engines don’t block any pages.
6. Site Speed
Having a good loading speed of a website determine the user experience. How fast a page load decides a lot of things and is an important ranking factor. Entire website speed increases when worked on this factor. PageSpeed Insights analyzer is one of the Google tools that helps to check the current website speed. It uses various metrics to check a website’s performance and gives you a score out of 100 with the highest number indicating more speed.
What if your website has lesser speed, then:
- Compress the pages wherever possible
- Fix all the loops and redirects
- All JavaScript and CSS files are cached
- Trim down HTML pages
- Optimize images and make sure they are sized according to the size of the display
7. Fix Redirect Errors
When there are wrong redirects in the website, it increases loading speed and gives a bad experience to the visitors. So, all the redirect issues that are spotted with an audit should be tackled to get the best results.
Also, check the status codes. If they start with 3 then this means search engines and users are redirected to a new page. The three different codes are-
- 307: The change of the protocol from source to destination and there is a temporary redirect. This should be avoided to optimize the search engine.
- 302: Indicates a temporary redirect
- 301: if this code appears on the screen that means the redirect is permanent. It passes the value of SEO to a new page.
Also, the status code can start with figure 4. When the requested page is not accessed then the coding starting with 4 shows up on the screen.
- 429: Multiple requests on the server
- 410: resource is gone permanently
- 404: Code 404 indicates the page doesn’t exist
- 403: Forbidden access means the user needs to login
8. Checking On-Page SEO
All the concentration is on the content where it is optimized so that the search engine discovers the page.
- Check the length of the title tags as they should not be too long.
- Check for the duplicate or missing header tags
- No thin content should be there
Also Read: The Latest On-Page SEO Checklist That Will Increase Your Rankings
The Bottom Line
The beauty of SEO audits is huge. Timely SEO audits can change the fate of your business. The issues that are acting as obstacles in the betterment of your website can be identified and corrected with the help of the detailed report of the technical SEO audit. Other forms of audits as discussed in the article above can fix all the problems. It is important to continuously look for SEO improvements because Google comes with various updates. So, in order to sustain the changing guidelines and functioning of the crawler, a company has to create an effective action plan.
Also Read: Most Commonly Asked SEO Questions
