A lot of the technique is available to SEO audit. It may be hard to know where to start and how thorough your research should be and what SEO audit tools would allow you to gather the most useful data, whether you are a small company trying to optimize your site for organic search or an agency doing it for a client.
We closed 20 key elements for a good SEO audit to eliminate some noise. In this article, we will be discussing how to do an SEO audit.
What Is An SEO Audit: Brief Overview
An SEO audit is a method to assess the friendliness of a website’s search engine in various fields. An SEO audit mainly aims to help you refine a website to gain higher rankings in the results of the search engine.
To boost the efficiency of search engines, the SEO Auditor reviews the website manually and presents suggestions as to how it should be fixed (because it is wrong) and how it should adapt.
Importance Of SEO Audit
In the SEO industry things change very rapidly and what works today can not work in six months. Google is reported to upgrade its ranking algorithm annually to thousands and an SEO audit will help keep you in tune.
Daily SEO audits (at least 2 times a year) must be carried out to ensure the new changes in your website are up to date.
SEO Audit Checklist
Now that you’re sure that an SEO audit is necessary for each website, let’s see how you can conduct the SEO site check.
After reading nearly every article about how to audit SEO’s websites and testing a variety of auditing tools, I have come up with several measures that cover everything you need to review to assess your website’s SEO availability.
Our SEO audit list is full and contains everything you need to know about performing a manual SEO audit.
1. Understand Your Competitors By Benchmarking Your Rankings
You need to consider the competition before you dive deep into a technical site audit or on page SEO. The more you know what other players are doing in the same room, the greater the likelihood of success if you are working on a new site for the first time or are auditing as part of your ongoing plan.
You must measure the rankings of your site and profile your results against the competition.
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How To Benchmark Your Site’s Rankings?
You must set location tracking for your site if you have not already done so. Go to the monitoring tool for positions and build a new project of SEO audit online.
Now you have a choice of location, device, search engine, and language, and complete your whole company name. You must also create your campaign.
Then, in your keywords, it’s time to track them.
You can either manually add keywords from campaigns, from SEMrush, or Google Analytics in many ways for SEO page audit.
You will see when you begin monitoring how the keywords you enter are located around.
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How To Understand Your Competitors?
Run the domain through the domain survey tool, and the competition map will clearly show you who you are against, and you can go away and get deeper information about the output of their sites. You can also use the domain overview tool.
2. Check The Identical Versions For SEO Site Checker
Maybe this is your most simple check, but Google must index only one version of your website. Disturbed?
Your site may be sitting on:
- http://www.domain.com
- http://domain.com
- https://www.domain.com
- https://domain.com
There’s no difference here for a customer (with the exception that they may see a warning for a non-secure site in their browser).
There are various versions of the website for a search engine and you can check them using the website auditing checklist. The web should only be indexed with a single version and duplicates should be verified. You can do this very easily.
Go to google and search for the website:domain.com.
This returns the URLs for domains that are indexed. You have a potential problem to solve if you see a combination of versions of the website.
The alternative is to type in your browser each URL version. You should assume that the version you are using should be forwarded to one single version. If not, all versions of 301 can be redirected to one edition.
That said, it’s important to do a website search. You will also be able to easily get insight into any subdomains used and it is not unusual to see double versions of the website on subdomains set up for affiliates or the like.
3. Check The Indexed URLs For SEO Website Audit
It is also a check that you can run in line with the above move, but it guarantees that it is a part of your own.
If you’ve run a ‘search engine,’ check the number of indicative URLs on Google.
Often, when you see the number of pages Google has indexed, you will be surprised.
How many products have you mentioned while running an eCommerce store? How many pages and articles have you published in your CMS if you have a simple lead generation site?
Everything we do here is a fast review — are you going to expect the number of indexed results? If not, you might have a problem that needs to be solved with duplicate or thin content pages (we will look at this further into the audit).
For example, it is not unusual to see hundreds of thousands of indexed URLs in an e-company with 5,000 items — this is generally the cause of faceted, indexable browsing. On the other hand, you will find that your site is not crawled down or indexed to the extent that it is anticipated. This will be further explored below.
4. Enhance Your Manual Actions For Site Audit
If your website is considered to contravene Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines, it can (and sometimes) take manual action. This was known as a manual punishment. It means that the rankings of your site are dropping and that you will not be able to rank as high as before until you have revoked the action.
The worst-case scenario is that your whole platform will be de-indexed. In the Search Console, you can check whether manual action was taken to your website. The ‘Security & Manual Actions’ tab in the left-hand menu and a link for manual actions. Click it, and you’ll be led to a page that shows the status clearly.
Hopefully, a green tick can be shown which means no problems are found.
See this guide on how to resolve a problem and how to revoke the manual action when you see a list of problems.
5. Analyzing The Site Speed With SEO Audit Tool
For a long time, site velocity was significant. Indeed, Google launched a special page speed update back in 2018, which introduced mobile classification speed. Google has just revealed that a page experience update will be implemented in 2021.
This is now in progress. This is confirmation of what many believed for a while; UX is more integral than ever to SEO performance. And we can’t negate the importance of tempo.
In effect, Google has published data on user habits to demonstrate that a user’s risk of bouncing increases loads of a page dramatically.
Your platform, to check website SEO and UX point of view, is more critical than ever.
You can see slow pages highlighted in the list of faults, including load times numbers, in the site Audit report and inside the Problems tab.
Also, you can access your site audit dashboard’s performance summary.
This highlights any problems and you can then go through Google PageSpeed to get advice on practical steps to change the situation.
6. Use HTTPS For Website Audit Report
It should be if your site does not use HTTPS. It’s just that straightforward. This can be verified on your browser by going to different domains. Ignore this stage and move on if your site remains on an HTTPS protocol. You have to fix this if you are redirected to an HTTP version.
HTTPS is a sign of ranking since 2014, and you need to enforce an SSL certificate if your site still runs on HTTP. There are many websites like Let’s Encrypt where you can do this for free.
7. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
We live in the first-world mobile and if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you are likely to not put the experience of your user first. Since 2015, mobile convenience is a key factor. In reality, the majority of websites are now mobile-optimized versions or responding to them, but this does not mean that problems do not exist.
More significantly, mobile friendliness has now been verified in the 2021 update to the Page Experience. In the Mobile Usability section of the Search Console tab, you can check for any problems related to SEO site checkup.
These are highlighted here if there are problems. Otherwise, there are no problems you can check out.
8. Analyze & Resolve The Issues Related Indexation For Website Audit
Stay in the Google Search Console and go to the Index tab on the cover page. Here you can learn about all coverage errors and excluded pages as well as seeing true or warning pages.
If you see mistakes here, it means some problems can prevent your site from being properly scratched and indexed — you have to fix these ASAP problems. Common mistakes are:
- Pages with a no-index attribute and shown in a sitemap.
- Pages not crawled into the robots.txt file but included with a map. Pages are not included.
- A sitemap containing 404 pages.
- You must purify those if you see errors and have established the cause.
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Exclude URLs For Better On Page SEO
You may also view a list of excluded URLs in this article. The following pages are currently not in the index of Google and could include:
- No no-index pages excluded pages
- Direction of pages
- Anomalies of crawl
- Problems of canonization
- Pages that have not been indexed but crawled
- Errors not detected (404)
- Your robots.txt file interrupted pages.
Such exclusions can occur for various reasons and need not be cleaned up often. You may have moved to a new site recently, for example, and redirects are anticipated due to migration. There may also be no-index tags to block faceted navigation. You could check out the tools of SEO for analyzing and resolving the issues related to indexation.
9. Analyzing Your Page Experience For SEO Site Checkup
About the site pace and the ease of use, we’ve already touched upon Google’s Page Experience update in 2021 above.
And now the good news is that in the Search Console you can find a report to help you check it.
You can see a report on both the smartphone and the desktop and open one such report provides detailed insight on the problems with bad URLs and the ones that need to be improved.
10. Audit Your On-Page SEO
SEO on the page concerns topics such as:
- Title tags, meta descriptions, and H tags are optimized
- Picture of old tags
- Optimized content creation
- Internal link
To ensure that you do not miss the opportunities to further optimize your website, you need to ensure the online SEO checkup on your entire website. You can set up the on-page tool from your project page, and a list of optimization ideas will be sent to you:
This is an excellent way to easily find ways to boost the SEO on your platform as part of your audit.
11. Fix The Broken Internal Links For SEO Site Checkup
With interrupted links, a poor user experience is created. If a user clicks a connection on the web, he or she expects that a 404 error will be taken to that page. Nevertheless, it gives the search engines negative quality signals.
In the site audit report, you will find broken internal ties underlined in the Problem tab.
Either the internal connection to the correct URL is updated or the link removed to repair them; it is so easy to check SEO.
12. Correct Sitemap For Site Audit
The XML sitemap of your site can be used to define the primary pages that you should index to Google on your web. The problems of incorrect URLs in your site audit report are presented as errors.
This will be triggered if your sitemap file contains URLs that either lead to the web pages with the same content or forward non-200 status codes to a different web page. Prioritize the removal from your site map of any incorrect pages as a fast fix.
13. Re-checking The Redirects For Website Audit
It is not unusual to encounter problems with redirects, but it is always a fairly easy fix to find and fix those. Again, you can note a variety of different problems with the redirects in the site audit report.
Redirecting Loops
If redirects are improperly implemented, they can cause crawl problems, with common examples of inappropriate use of redirect chains and loops. In the error tab, you will see these marked.
Temporary Redirects
You can use 301 redirects rather than 302s in almost every case. Check for temporary redirects in the Site Audit report and change them to 301 instead of 302 if the redirects are to be permanent.
14. Find Toxic & Unwanted Links For Website Audit
You don’t help with all ties. If Google finds a connection to influence the rankings of your search, it breaches its Webmaster guidelines. As part of any SEO audit, you must search for toxic ties, particularly if you first work at a site.
To quickly recognize the toxic links, you can use the Backlink Audit tool to clean them up to avoid an adverse impact on your site results.
15. Fix The Duplicate Content Issue For Better On Page SEO
Multiplying your content will lead to problems preventing you from taking the highest possible rankings. The search engines may receive confusing signals. After all, what should be the page if there are two duplicates?
Duplicate material can in some cases also be viewed as an effort to manipulate rankings. This is less of an issue, however, than it was once thought of. In the errors section of the Site Audit report, you will find duplicate material problems. Awesome website checkers can fix content issues.
16. Identifying The Shallow & Incomplete Content Pages
Similar to duplicate content, thin content can cause problems. Thin content is usually of little to no benefit for consumers and search engines, but it thinly extends the website authority.
You can define thin pages and provide a solution to these issues, either by creating big, unique content or by adding a no-index attribute, you can normally improve these pages.
You will again see these problems flagged in the errors tab of your website audit; these are reported as short-word pages.
17. Fix The Pages With No Link (Orphan Pages)
Essentially, if a page is not connected to, the current authority passed by an internal connection does not apply and can seldom be seen as a gateway page. Pages that are present in your XML sitemap but not connected from any other page in the Site Audit will be found. The fastest way to resolve this is to add key pages or at least a connection from within your site’s navigation.
18. Analyze The Intent By Comparing With Top Pages
One of the main issues SEOs have addressed is the searcher’s purpose in the last few years. We know that Google is well aware of the purpose of the search engine query and pages that usually deal with this.
This might sound evident, but it will take time to analyze the top-class pages for the search words. You may need to consider reworking the contents you have in mind if you find that your content is very different from those pages which rank at the top of the Google website.
Maybe you haven’t gone into a subject deep enough? Perhaps users expect to read a guide when attempting to classify them as eCommerce.
19. Consider Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
A new approach to build web pages is to accelerate mobile pages (AMPs). It’s a format that Google creates and supports (and other companies). Load AMP pages faster than standard HTML pages, but the features you can use are limited.
The SEO industry has a long debate over whether to adopt AMP on your website. SEO industry.
20. Make Use Of Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are an interesting way to skyrocket your organic traffic. Doesn’t this sound interesting? But optimizing featured snippets in the most optimized manner is a difficult task. So, you need to plan out how to get featured and curb the oldest methodologies of digital marketing.
Try to keep a lot of headers and sub-headers, answer the question very shortly, keep your content mobile-friendly, and use HTTPS for protection.
What After A Perfect SEO Audit?
It’s time to immediately remedy your SEO audit once you have completed your SEO audit and found problems that could hold up your site. The importance of prioritizing projects, based both on the seriousness of the problem and on the resources and efforts needed to address it, is an important point to consider.
In certain cases, you have to collaborate with a developer to execute at least some of the steps you need to take and we suggest looking at this fantastic presentation, which will help you articulate efficiently the value of the tasks you need to accomplish.
Free online SEO audit is a very essential part of pushing your webpages on top results. So, you can also take the help of a professional SEO audit company for SEO site audit and make your hands free for accomplishing other tasks.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you do an SEO audit?
- Begin your audit with a crawl
- Make sure only one version of your site is browseable
- Conduct on-page SEO checks
- Manage your internal and external links
Why SEO audit is important?
SEO audit will help you identify the technical problems with your website that are restricting search engines to crawl through your site or understand the content.
How do I know if my website is SEO-friendly?
Check if your webpage URLs are SEO-friendly. For links to be SEO-friendly, they should contain keywords relevant to the page’s topic and contain no spaces, underscores, or other characters. You should avoid the use of parameters when possible, as they make URLs less inviting for users to click or share.