SEO Audit in 10 Steps to Improve Google Ranking

SEO Audit

Introduction

Do you want to engage visitors to your website? Or the traffic to your website is falling? Even though it looks good and all set, you cannot figure out where you have been lacking. In this scenario, you need to run a website SEO audit. 

A website audit increases the ranking of your website by bringing visitors and conversions. When businesses approach digital marketers, they get to hear about optimizing their websites most of the time. 

Now, what does that mean? If you are selling SEO or have just started selling it, you must establish your website before a potential client approaches you.

Every strategy depends on the data available. Be it the links or the keywords. All this begins with an audit.

This guide has listed ten steps to improve your rankings and SEO efforts. First, let’s discuss what an SEO Audit is.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a technique that identifies and analyses the website’s flaws and helps in its improvement. It is also a helpful technique that improves the website’s ranking (SERPs).

This technique identifies the areas which need improvement and assesses on-site optimization. It also gains recommendations to improve the website’s search position.

An audit also improves:

  • Speed of the website
  • Technical SEO issues leading to reduced traffic
  • UX improving ways
  • Gaps in the content
  • Outranking positions by the competitors

What’s the Purpose of Doing an SEO Audit?

It is essential for anyone who wants to improve the performance of their website to learn how they can do an audit. You get to know about the elements that are essential for its optimization.

An audit of your website provides you with the following:

  • Comparison data of your current and previous website performance
  • Analysis of your current SEO efforts by looking into insights
  • Looking at the competitors
  • Action points to put in place in your SEO strategy

SEO Audit in 10 Steps 

This section will take a quick look at the ten steps of an SEO audit. These include:

1. Use Google Analytics to track your metrics

2. Improve SEO practices by optimizing the existing content

3. Use keyword research for new content

4. Get featured snippets by structuring your content

5. Optimize the images

6. Make your site mobile-friendly

7. On-page SEO factors need optimization

8. Decrease load time

9. Improve local search engine optimization (SEO)

10. Make your strategies perfect by your results

Best SEO Audit Tools

SEO Audit tools

Some SEO tools are available online, which aid in performing an audit. But you don’t need many of them. The details of your SEO strategy depend on the critical data.

And thus, for the critical data, you’ll need the best tools. Enlisted below are some of the top tools for performing an audit:

1. Ahrefs

This tool analyses the website and provides an SEO score. It has three main features: Site explorer, Keyword explorer, and Content explorer. It is best to use it for the following: 

  • Competitor Analysis and
  • Off-page and on-page audits

2. SEMRush 

This tool provides extensive information about your website’s performance.

3. MySiteAuditor 

This tool mainly serves agencies. Its primary use is in auditing websites and lead generation. This provides you with a customized audit report.

You can quickly get a quick audit report by entering the URL and target keywords of the competitor’s website. It is best to use for general audits. 

4. Schema Markup Testing

This tool helps in testing and ensuring that you make an error-free schema. It makes sure that you create the correct code without any errors.

5. Google Analytics

This tool provides the grades, scores, and data about your website’s performance in their search engine.

6. Google PageSpeed Insights

It measures the page’s performance for your website on both desktop and mobile modes.

7. Google Search Console

It enables you to look at the indexing of your website and analyze it according to its appearance in the SERP.

When to Start SEO Audit?

SEO Audit Start

You must perform an audit when creating or migrating a new website. Running an audit quarterly after starting your website is best to ensure better performance. 

However, some situations alarm that your website needs an audit soon. It’s always to keep a check on your website. But, sometimes, you get strict indications when your website goes down. The following can be reasons for this regard: 

  1. If your website’s conversions and traffic start dropping
  2. If there is a high bounce rate on your website
  3. If you are getting low customers satisfaction
  4. If you are unaware of the decline in your keyword rankings

Check Keyword Cannibalization

Cannibalization occurs when you have multiple pages on your website with similar or identical keywords. These pages appear to compete with each other to gain traffic.

Thus, this results in low rankings for your website by damaging its visibility. 

However, the traffic gets improved by 3x upon fixing this issue. Ahrefs tool is used to check keyword cannibalization. As it performs the following functions:

  1. Performs website audit
  2. It helps in viewing historical rankings
  3. Completes website searching and looks for identical URLs

Fix Broken Links

You have to make sure that you check all the external and internal links on your website. Fixing broken links is essential as they lead to the correct content. Broken links get frustrating for website users. 

It makes your page look unprofessional. An example of a broken link is an error, such as 404. If anything on your website fails to provide an engaging and accessible experience, traffic gets away quickly.

You can find and fix the broken links in two easy steps:

Step 1- Find broken pages on your website that Google can’t index.

Step 2- Find broken external and internal links using a tool. Thus, the SEMRush or broken link checker tool is suitable for this primarily.

Conclusion

You are wrapping things up on a note that an SEO audit is essential to assess the ranking of your website. Plus, it helps identify the needs you lack for building up your website. 

In this digital marketing era, you must keep track of your competitors and SEO strategy. If you apply these strategies wisely, your website will never experience a downfall.

More Resources:

On-Page SEO Factors You Should Know

Technical SEO: A Complete Guide And Checklist