A Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting an SEO Audit

It doesn’t matter if you love every ounce of search engine optimization or hate it with every fiber of your being; nothing changes the fact that it’s essential to perform an SEO audit of your website.

Maybe you are among the 95% of marketers who use search engine optimization to enhance loyalty among current customers.

And maybe you agree that SEO has a significant impact on lead generation.

Conversely, you could be part of a group that doesn’t put a lot of stock in the effectiveness of SEO.

You get the point: everybody has a different take on SEO and its impact.

What’s an SEO Audit?

Before diving into the deep end of performing an SEO audit, it’s essential to understand what an audit is (and isn’t) and what you should expect when it’s done.

Websites that display positive marks in these audit categories increase confidence in web crawlers, promote trust, and consequently rank better in search engine indexes.

While there are automatic site auditing tools, there is something to be said by manually looking under the hood of a website and business to see what’s happening.

Essential SEO Audit Tools

Here are the tools I use to perform audits and crawl websites.

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• SEMRush
• Screaming Frog
• Copyscape

SEO Audit Preparation

Crawl First…

To ensure greater success in the future now is the time to crawl your entire website. This will give you a clear view of where you stand regarding:

• On-site optimization
• Meta descriptions
• Off-site optimization
• Keyword selection

And that is just the start.

Tools For Crawling Web Pages

I can’t write custom crawling and analysis code for my audits, but I rely on the fantastic work of SEO tools like Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider to perform the site crawl. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is free. However, you can purchase a license for £149.00/year to crawl over 500 URLs and access advanced features.

Helpful Videos:

• A demo of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool (6.0)

SEO Audit Analysis
It’s one thing to say you are interested in conducting an audit, but another thing entirely to move through each step in a timely and efficient manner.

You can spend as much or as little time on your SEO audit. If you end up with valuable data that leads to actionable steps, you will find yourself in a much better place.

Here are five critical steps when auditing your website:

1. Accessibility
2. Indexability
3. On-Page Ranking Factors
4. Off-Page Ranking Factors
5. Competitive Analysis

1. Accessibility

It may not be the most exciting step of an SEO audit, but it’s one of the most important.

If search engines (and users) are unable to access your website, you aren’t going to make much progress.

Robots Meta Tag

When analyzing your site’s accessibility, you want to locate pages accidentally blocking web crawlers. Below is an example of a robots meta tag that keeps snails from indexing a page and following its links:

Start by addressing questions such as:

• Is your robots.txt file restricting search engines from crawling some or all of your website?
• Are there any robot meta tags on your website that are mistakenly blocking search engine crawlers?
• Are there any URL errors, such as 404 errors?
• Have you created an XML sitemap?

Helpful Videos:

• How to Submit a Sitemap to Google
• How to Submit a Sitemap to Bing

Along with answering the above questions, another detail belongs in this section: site performance.

A slow website will chase visitors away. It is also one that can harm your search engine rankings.

Use a tool, such as Google Page Speed, to better understand how your website is performing regarding speed.

2. Indexability

You can do everything right regarding on-site and off-site optimization, but this will only get you far.

After you go through the four steps above, you want to see how your website appears from the outside. Answer this question: what are search engines doing with the information provided?

Get started by taking these basic steps:

• Search for your domain to see how it appears on Google
• Make sure it has not been penalized.
• See how many pages are indexed, ensuring that Google recognizes most or all.
• Search the keywords most closely related to your business.
• Choose several pages of your website and search for duplicate content.

Nothing else will make sense if you run into any issues during this part of the audit.

Traffic Overview

This is all about the people who visit your website. During this step, it’s essential to answer questions such as:

• How much traffic is your website receiving, on average, every day, week, and month?
• Is your traffic increasing or decreasing month over month?
• What are the primary sources of your traffic?
• Which keywords are generating the most traffic?
• How does your website’s traffic stack up against the competition?

There are several ways to answer these questions, starting with a review of your analytics account. If you are using Google Analytics, all of these questions are simple to answer. It will only take a few minutes to dig through your data and make informed conclusions.

Helpful Resources:

• How to Register Your Site with Google Webmaster Tools
• How to Register Your Site with Bing Webmaster Tools

3. On-Site Optimization

Spending plenty of time on this step during your SEO audit makes sense. After all, it’s the pages of your website that attract visitors and search engines.

URL Structure

Let’s start by learning how to analyze the URL of each page:

• Is the URL user-friendly and to the point?
• Does the URL include keywords related to the content of the page?
• Have you avoided the use of excessive parameters?
• Does the URL use hyphens to separate words, as opposed to underscores?

Content Analysis

To go along with URL structure, you should review each page of content on your website. When doing so, address questions such as:

• Is the content 100 percent unique when compared to other pages on your website and other websites in general?
• Is the content valuable in terms of the user experience?
• Does the content include keywords without stuffing?
• Is the content of the highest quality with grammar and spelling?
• Is the content easy to read?

Search Engine Land does a great job breaking down the correlation between content and search engine success.

4. Off-Site Optimization

Like on-site optimization, the things you do off your website are essential to your search engine rankings.

While there are many aspects of off-site optimization, three deserve your most attention. Let’s examine each one:

a. Backlink Profile

The quality of your website is mainly based on the quality of the sites that link to it. When it comes to backlinks, quality is more important than quantity. While you can control this to a certain degree, you want as many high-quality websites linking to your property as possible.

Here are a few questions to address:

• How many unique domains are linking to your website?
• How many backlinks are no-follow?
• Are the backlinks from sites that are related to yours in regard to the subject matter?
• How much authority do the domains have that are linking to your website?

b. Authority

A website’s authority is more important than ever before. Your job is to build a strong brand, as this proves to the search engines that your content should be ranked at or near the top.

There are several ways that authority is judged, including the quality of backlinks, the number of backlinks, the sites that link to yours, and the overall level of trust.

To learn more about your site’s authority, use the domain authority and page authority tools Moz provides. This will show you how each page stacks up and your domain as a whole.

c. Social Engagement

With social media use on the rise, this plays a large part in search engine rankings.

Focus your time and efforts on the social platforms with the most extensive reach, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and Instagram.

When analyzing your social engagement from an SEO perspective, pay close attention to the meeting. For example, how many retweets are your posts receiving? How many likes?

Taking this one step further, evaluate the authority of the brands and individuals sharing your content. Like backlinks, engaging with the top influencers in your space would be in your best interest.

5. Competitive Analysis

SEMrush is one of the top competitor analysis tools for digital marketers. Even the free version allows you to capture valuable data.

Although this is an SEO audit of your website, it’s good to know what the competition is up to. This shows you where you stand regarding competitors while also providing insight you can use to your advantage.

Additional SEO Audit Resources

Are you interested in learning more about SEO audits? Check out these reputable online marketing and SEO websites.

• How to Perform the World’s Greatest SEO Audit
• How To Do Your Own 5-Minute SEO Audit
• How to Perform Your First SEO Audit
• SEO Audit Your Website In 15 Minutes [Tutorial]
• How To Perform an SEO Audit – FREE $5000 Template

Conclusion

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to SEO auditing, as the best approach will vary depending on your website’s specific needs and goals. However, there are some general steps that can be followed to ensure that your audit is comprehensive and effective.