eWay Corp You may have a beautifully designed website to represent your business. It’s supposed to engage a good number of visitors and get you leads but, unfortunately, that’s not the case. You are not alone in this situation; many businesses are facing the same problem as you. The answer to this problem is running an SEO audit.
An SEO audit would allow you to improve your website’s performance. Plus, you would get enough visitors that would increase the ranking and even improve conversions.
If you are reading this post right now, that means you have questions related to SEO audit service and you want to learn more about it. Not to worry!
In this post, we will cover some major topics associated with this audit. However, before we delve deep into SEO audits, let’s look at what an SEO audit is and its importance.
SEO Audit: What is It?
In today’s competitive world, your business needs to have a good rank in the SERPs. Only then you will be able to reach out to your target audience and outrank your competitors. This can happen if your site is having a good SEO performance and smooth user experience.
But if your site’s performance is poor along with a negative user experience, then periodic website audit services could be the savior. In order to ensure the success of your site, proper site performance is essential. This is when you should focus on performing SEO audits.
Before opting for an SEO audit service, it’s essential to have a clear idea of this audit. Well, an SEO audit evaluates your entire site and gives you a detailed report regarding the site’s current condition. It mentions how it ranks on search engines as well. Basically, it can identify the strengths, weaknesses, and threats of your website.
So, with the audit report, you will know which sections of your site need improvement for better performance and ranking.
By performing an SEO audit, you can easily identify the improvement areas, and even gain recommendations for improving the site’s search ranking.
At the same time, SEO audits can uncover improvement opportunities, regarding:
- The Site Speed
- Technical SEO Issues
- Content Gaps
- Ways To Improve UX
- Areas Where Competitors Are Outranking You
Once you work on these areas, your site would automatically rank high across the SERPs and get you more traffic.
What Does an SEO Audit Analyze?
Needless to say, an SEO audit offers a comprehensive analysis of a website and its ranking. In other words, it determines the on-page and off-page performance, problems related to the site structure, examines duplicate content, scans keyword density, and social media engagement.
In simple words, this audit would analyze your site and find out the pertaining issues that are preventing the site from getting indexed and crawled by Google. Often, these issues are the main factors for poor traffic and low organic search ranking. Once the issues are fixed, no one can stop you and your website from earning the top rank in the SERPs.
Before you perform an SEO audit for your website, make sure you are aware of its types.
Different Types of SEO Audit
Here you will get a complete list of the types of SEO audit services. They are:
Local SEO Audit
The local SEO audit can give you accurate information on core areas of local optimization, which includes local listings, on-site and off-site local activities, local citations, local search rankings, and reviews. With this audit, you get a detailed report on these areas and their issues that needs fixing for improved local ranking.
Competitive Website Audit
This audit gives you a complete picture of what keeps your competitors ahead of you or what your competitors are doing to get a high ranking. Basically, it pinpoints their SEO strategies.
Hence, you will be able to identify the marketing strategies that can work for your site as well. In other words, this audit can help you to implement strategies that can be the building blocks for your business success.
SEO Link and Content Audit
You must know website links as well as the website content must be audited to ensure that the search ranking is not getting affected. Link audit summarizes issues related to inbound links, broken links, or bad links on the site. On the other hand, an SEO content audit evaluates the website copy for applicability and its status.
SEO Technical Audit
This audit can identify the technical problems with your site that restrict search engines from crawling your site or understanding the content. With SEO Technical Audit, you will get a summarized report on all technical problems and their solutions.
With this audit, you can make your site more efficient for indexing and crawling. This includes factors such as XML Sitemap, Duplicate Content, Mobile SEO Analysis, Redirects, Status Codes, URL Structure, Page Speed, Robots.txt, Crawlability, Canonical Tags, and Domain Issues, etc. that are responsible for improving the site’s health.
Now, let’s see why the SEO audit is gaining so much importance.
Why SEO Audit is Important?
By this time, you know that an SEO audit crawls your website and identifies issues that need fixing.
Technically speaking, with this audit, you get a clear picture of where your website stands in terms of SEO. Also, it would identify opportunities that your site has missed and activities that would boost the site’s ranking.
It won’t be wrong to say that an SEO audit service would give a complete overview of your site’s health and performance.
Still not convinced?
Read on to know why SEO audits could be good for your business.
Stay Up-to-Date with Changing Algorithms
Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. update their algorithms from time to time. Why? For better search results. And if you are not aware of these changes, your site might lose valuable traffic.
On top of that, SEO practices that your site might have followed do not work anymore. Hence, with the help of an SEO audit, you can learn about the changes that have taken place and how they are going to affect your site. Accordingly, you can take steps to deal with it.
You can Identify Areas on Your Site That Need Improvement
Many tools are available online that might guide you on making your web pages SEO-friendly. Somewhat it’s a great way to keep the pages optimized for search engines. However, with an SEO audit service, it’s easy to identify problems on your site in a precise manner. For instance, the URL of the site can be used to check issues about speed, quality, and factors that might affect the E-A-T of a website.
Help Your Website Rank High on any SERPs
The main goal of SEO audits is to help a site rank well on Google for its targeted keywords. Eventually, it would help the site get more traffic. So, from the audit, you will get to know the issues that are preventing the search spiders from ranking the pages. Once you fix the issues, you can expect a steady ranking and traffic.
It can Help You Refine Your SEO Strategy
Once you know how to improve your site’s SEO performance, you can simply implement the changes and fix the issues. The SEO audit presents ways to resolve the problem which you can do yourself. Also, an updated SEO strategy in place would make it easy for the spiders to crawl and index your pages/site for organic search. Hence, it can maximize your site’s performance.
Sounds interesting? Are you planning to carry out a complete SEO audit for your site? You can do it yourself; however, taking the guidance of a professional SEO audit company is recommended.
Still not convinced? Let’s walk you through the reasons why it’s so vital for your website.
Why is an SEO Audit Beneficial for Your Website?
You must keep in mind that an SEO audit is an essential tool for your business, and it must be used regularly. In case you are wondering what an SEO audit can do for your business, read the rest of this post.
Find Out the Weaknesses
Capturing the attention of search engines isn’t so easy. You must review your website to see if it has got the right backlinks, keywords, meta titles, meta descriptions, etc. Also, you might be using some old SEO strategies which are just doing the opposite of getting your site ranked higher. SEO audits would point out the flaws that need to be fixed.
Improve Site Performance
Google wants end users to have the best browsing experience for all devices. This calls for delivering high-quality, relevant content from reputed sources. But just having the necessary information isn’t enough. You need to convince Google that your site is healthy and compatible with various devices.
Customers won’t go back to a site that takes too much time to load. So, by running an SEO audit, issues that might impact the user experience get flagged. Issues could be mobile compatibility, broken links, page load time, and more. These issues can be addressed in advance to ensure a good user experience and site performance.
Measure the Improvement Impact
You have successfully implemented the changes to your site and optimized it for better performance. But your job is not done yet. You will need to carry out another audit and compare the results with the last one. This can pinpoint the accomplishments and effectiveness of your site since the first site audit.
Understand Your Keywords
Keywords are crucial for SEO. Therefore, with an SEO audit, you will get to review the keyword research data. Make sure to use keywords that have low competition and a high search volume. The keyword research information can give some idea regarding the keywords that are getting the most hits, or the keywords that would appeal to your target audience.
Tools like Google Ads can help you to analyze keyword capabilities, their popularity, and the website’s keyword quality.
Track Your Keyword Ranking in SERPs
The number of keywords for which your site is indexed and how you are ranking are good indicators of your site’s performance. The audit can help you to understand where your keywords are standing.
Improve Your Site’s Structure Links
When Google scans your site, it looks for internal links on your site. The internal links could be present in various pieces of content that showcase your knowledge and authority. During the audit, you can get an idea on how external links from other authoritative and reputed sites can help your pages to get ranked. Once you follow those strategies, Google can easily index your page.
Audit Your Competition
By auditing your competitor’s website, you can get a detailed overview of their SEO strategies and their performance. Based on the input you can tailor your SEO strategy for your website.
Similarly, assessing the backlink structure of your competitors can give you some information that you can use for your website’s benefit. For instance, you learn from where they are getting the majority of external links. You can also target similar websites like your competitor and get an edge in the game.
Create a Plan
An SEO audit service will make sure that you are not just implementing the latest Google updates or just following blindly your competitors. Rather, it can help you to come up with a customized strategy that would bring success to your business.
For instance, you can redesign your backlinking strategy, or you can improve your local SEO strategies for attracting targeted customers or using keywords to suit a certain kind of client.
Only an in-depth audit will help your business outshine others and thrive online. To succeed, regular SEO audits for your website are important.
Factors to Consider Before Carrying Out SEO Audit
Before you go ahead and hire any SEO company for boosting your site’s ranking and traffic, you must carry out an SEO audit. But before the audit is carried out, some factors must be considered.
Research Your Competitors
If you want to beat the competition, you must find what your competitors are doing. You need to know their strengths and weaknesses.
A proper competitive analysis will give you some idea on how to outrun your competitors. You can work on areas that would outdo their pain points or simply work to exceed their strengths.
Understand Crawling & Indexing Relation
An SEO analysis remains incomplete without keeping a tab on crawling and indexing issues. Website crawling doesn’t necessarily lead to indexing. That’s because a page can be indexed without it. Rather, web crawling allows search engines to connect with millions of search results.
Having a proper understanding of how crawling and indexing work can help to optimize any site for improved results. In case you are not aware of such technicalities, you better hire a professional SEO audit company.
Check for Organic Traffic
Before you kick-start the SEO audit process, you must check the organic traffic for your website. You can use Google Analytics for this job as it allows you to customize the time frame. A detailed analysis of the organic traffic acquisition can help to locate peaks or drops in traffic.
Internal Link Structure Review
Internal links connect your website pages. This makes it easy for search engines to understand the site structure and offer relevant results to the users. The first step in an SEO audit is reviewing and improving the internal link structure for an improved user experience of a website. Linking to internal pages, if done properly, can improve the site’s SEO.
Review the Competitor’s Backlinks
Search engines greatly rely on links when ranking a site on their SERPs. Hence, an in-depth analysis of the external links is important. After all, an external link, also known as a backlink, leads visitors to any particular page of your site from another site.
Google can penalize poor-quality backlinks. Hence, having a strong link profile is mandatory. With an SEO Link Audit, you can study your competitor’s strongest links and even assess the ones which you can use or replicate. A tool like Ahrefs can help you to carry out the link-building audit.
Look for Low-Quality Links
Make sure you are not paying for low-quality links. Businesses rely on their rankings; hence, if links to a website come from a shady site, they will affect the page rank. They might also affect the brand image. So, you should get rid of poor links before starting the audit process.
Evaluate Your Content
Before you perform the SEO audit, make sure to check for duplicate content. In case Google finds that your site’s content, like text, images, or videos are exactly like other sites, they can penalize you. Duplicate content affects the organic performance of a website. So, make sure your site doesn’t get slapped with a penalty ticket from Google.
Review Title Tags of Target Pages
The title tag appears in the search results. This means it’s an important factor for a page to rank. Make sure the title tag describes accurately what a visitor might find when they click on a link that defines their needs.
Make sure to review every title of your web pages. This would help you to locate confusing titles and change them before starting the audit.
How to do an SEO Audit?
Wondering how to start the SEO audit process? Well, it’s very easy. You can do it manually or using website audit tools.
But do remember that depending on the size of the site, the audit time willvary.
Now, let’s investigate the steps involved.
Firstly, you must head to the Site Audit tool.
Secondly, you should click on the ‘Set Up’ option next to the ‘Existing Project’. Or one can simply click ‘Add New Project’ on the top right corner of the screen.
Thirdly, the site audit settings must be filled out, including ‘Limit of Checked Pages’ and ‘Crawl Source’.
Fourthly, any other settings shouldn’t be edited. However, you might need to remove the URL parameters or allow/disallow certain restrictions.
Once done, you can click on the ‘Start Site Audit’ icon and allow the crawler to run. Once the site crawling stops, you will get to see a dashboard that displays the findings.
However, when you or any SEO audit company is doing the audit, certain factors must be checked. They are:
- Benchmark Your Ranking & Understand Your Competitors
- Check If Your Site Is Having Any Duplicate Versions
- Check For Indexed URLs
- Lookout for Manual Actions
- Check For the Site’s Speed
- Understand Mobile-Friendliness Issues
- Check If Site Uses HTTPS
- Analyze and Resolve Indexation Issues
- Check Your Site’s User Experience
- Audit On-Page SEO
Tools to Perform an SEO Audit
An SEO audit is carried out with five main tools. They are:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- SEMrush Site Audit Tool
- Google Page Speed Insights
- Google Schema Markup Testing Tool
Professional Help
You can carry out the SEO audit process on your own. However, it’s better to take professional help for performing the SEO audit.
Concluding Thoughts
Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit is an art. If it is not carried out effectively, your site’s performance or ranking won’t improve. If your site’s ranking and performance remain poor, it won’t get you any leads and conversions. Hence, it might affect your ROI and business goals.
If you want to improve your site’s performance, first understand the pain points of your site and then compare them with your competitors. Based on the report, you should devise a strategy that takes your business to the next level. To ensure a steady improvement of your site’s health and performance, it’s better to hire an SEO audit company.
Do remember, these are just a few suggestions regarding an SEO audit that you can carry out. With the help of eWay Corp’s SEO audit services, you will be able to improve the performance of your website and enhance its brand value.
