What is an SEO Audit? (And a Beginner’s Guide on How to Do SEO Audits)
What is an SEO Audit? (And a Beginner’s Guide on How to Do SEO Audits) You don’t have to wait for your car to break down before going to a mechanic. Routine check-ups allow you to identify and fix problems before they become serious, and they maintain your car in top working condition. Just like your car needs routine check-ups, your search engine optimization strategy needs constant maintenance in order to continue producing the best outcomes.That upkeep is an SEO audit. Interested in learning more about what an SEO audit is and why it keeps your site on top of search lists? Just stick around! What is an SEO Audit? SEO audits go deep into your site to evaluate a number of factors that influence your ability to rank on search engine result pages or SERPs. Among these factors are your on- and off-page SEO, as well as technical SEO performance. In this video, I will break down the various components of an SEO audit, show you how to perform an SEO audit, and point out some useful tools to assist you in getting started. Before I start, don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive result-driving digital marketing content from our experts. How to Perform an SEO audit Ok! Now that you understand what an SEO audit is and have reviewed your SEO, let’s get started. There are three components of an SEO audit I discussed previously that I’m going to address: On-page SEO Off-page SEO Technical SEO Let’s start with the on-page SEO section of your SEO audit. SEO Audit Part One: On-page SEO Your on-page SEO audit includes site factors you have control over and can optimize, and much of that is the content. That is, an on-page SEO audit is concerned with optimizing factors within your website that affect your site’s SERP rankings. Keyword Research What more to get your content ranking than keywords? There is more you need to learn before you begin creating content based on keywords: what content already ranks and what people actually want when they type in a keyword. Review the websites of your competitors that are well-ranking in Google and note what they’re targeting with their content. Are there any places that they rank for and you don’t? Ensure that your content is also fulfilling the users’ search intent. Check your keyword in Google and look at what you find. What are other top sites doing that is causing people to click? A keyword might begin with “what is,” but the person searching is actually seeking a “how to.” You will learn these small but significant subtleties with some research that will get you ranked! Keyword Usage So, you know why the users are typing a specific keyword. Now you need to implement it in your content if you are not doing so already. You need to be implementing keywords in your: headers, body content, title tag, and meta description. I’ll make it clear. You should begin by implementing keywords in your headers where it naturally applies. So let’s say you need to inform people why they ought to use your cheap home improvement services. You may want to begin that part of your site with a strong heading that informs them “why you should use our cheap home improvement services.” Next, you’ll need to include “affordable home improvement services” and other variations of this keyword where it applies in the body of your content. Don’t overstuff your keyword everywhere… That will actually damage your SEO. Make sure it sounds good if you were to read it aloud. You’re welcome to use similar keywords in your content to assist in providing search engines with the context of your page. Tools like KeywordsFX, LSI graph, or even Google autosuggest and related searches are perfect to help you come up with similar keywords. You also need to search for keywords in the title tag and meta description during your SEO audit, as well. These show up in the search engine results and can give context to users and crawlers about what your page is about. Internal Linking Having it simpler for the search engines to identify the pages on your website is a big deal to your SEO. A good chunk of that is internal linking, so when you’re producing new content, you should be linking to other pages on your website within that new content. Internal links are such a big help for a search engine crawler (and humans!) to locate pages on your website, enhancing your SEO. If you’re writing a blog entry on financial services, and you have a page on your site that lists your services, you ought to be linking to it. You’re aiding your SEO and directing traffic to another page on your website. Sitemaps Another crucial component of on-page SEO is maintaining sitemaps that provide search engine crawlers methods for locating the pages in your site. You should maintain two sitemaps: HTML and XML sitemaps. HTML sitemaps include links to all of the pages on your site and can assist people and crawlers in discovering pages that do not have internal links pointing towards them. XML sitemaps exist solely for search engines. These are actually wonderful for getting search engines to discover new pages to crawl. If your website is built on WordPress, you can have a plugin create your sitemap. If you can’t utilize a plugin, you can make an XML sitemap online. Once you have an XML sitemap, you can send it to Google Search Console to be crawled. It can get somewhat technical, so it may be better to collaborate with an SEO expert if you don’t have a lot of experience working with XML sitemaps. Now that we have touched on the on-page SEO aspect of the SEO audit, let’s examine what you need for an off-page SEO audit. SEO Audit Part Two: Off-page SEO Off-page SEO