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 includes the SEO factors that you do not have direct control over but can manipulate.

Backlinks

For instance, backlinks — or links to your website from other websites — are a fundamental part of off-page SEO. When a well-reputed site online has a link to your website on one of their pages, they transfer some of the value of their website to yours. Your pages become more valuable, and you open the door for individuals to click the link on the other page and end up on your site.  Backlinks can make you rank higher for keywords that are most important to your company. The better you rank in the SERPs for keyword-relevant terms, the more valuable traffic you can receive to your site.

Getting traffic to your website for specific keywords can lead to qualified leads, and subsequently, sales, for your enterprise.  Familiarity with your backlink profile and your competitors’ backlink profile is also necessary as part of the SEO audit. Whoever is linking to your competitors can potentially link to you. Ahrefs has a free backlink checker and Moz has their Link Explorer tool, which they give you for free to be able to view where you and your competition are gaining links from—if at all. 

We’re nearly there! Time to move on to the third component of your SEO audit: technical SEO.

SEO Audit Part Three: Technical SEO

There is a great deal to keep in mind when auditing your technical SEO, and it can become quite complex. 

It’s simpler to begin with the basics.  Technical SEO audit takes a closer look at the nitty-gritty of how your site works.  You can audit many, MANY other technical SEO facets beyond the aspects I will discuss, but working on these items will get you underway.

Page Speed

Is your site fast to load? Are your site’s pages loading quickly to provide a good user experience? Most websites nowadays load within seconds, and searchers have come to expect that. Roughly half of searchers will not even wait for your site to load if it takes over three seconds.

If your website is slow, individuals are going to visit one of those quicker websites, raising your bounce rate and damaging your search result rankings.  You can analyze your page speed as part of your SEO audit using Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool, which will report on how well your page is loading on mobile and desktop, and provide you with recommendations on how to fix any problems.

Mobile-Friendliness

Is your website, and every page of your website, mobile-friendly? How good is your website transitioning from a desktop to a mobile screen?  Over the last five years, mobile usage has exploded, and more than half of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices. People are also spending an awful lot more time on their mobile devices. Mobile users as of last year average more than three hours a day on their phone compared to slightly more than two hours on the desktop.  Google now prioritizes mobile-first when it crawls and indexes new websites because that is where most people are looking at sites and their content. If someone on a phone sees the desktop version of your website, parts are going to be cut off, the text might be unreadable…

it’s really not a good situation.  You’re going to lose that valuable web traffic to other sites that either have a mobile version or change with a user’s screen size.

Site Security

Is your website secure? Believe it or not, website security is an SEO ranking signal. And it’s been verified by Google as well.  You may have noticed that on top of a browser, to the left of the URL, there’s a pop-up message that reads either secure or not secure.  If your site isn’t secure, anyone who enters their data onto the site puts it in jeopardy of being stolen. A secure site encrypts and safeguards this site information.

It helps your site rank and sends a message to the user that they can trust your site. Think about it, if two businesses sold the same thing online, and one site was secure and the other was not, wouldn’t you feel safer putting your credit card information into the secure site? If you don’t have much experience diving into the backend of your site, you may think about hiring a web specialist to lock down your site.

Well, that’s all for my response to your question: What is an SEO audit?

Don’t forget to contact Bloom Agency to do your own SEO audit! Try it today to not only audit your site, but also research keywords, monitor your organic traffic, analyze competing sites and more!