SEO Audit for Website: Your Step-by-Step Guide

One of the main reasons why your website isn’t ranking well may be due to SEO issues. Search engine optimization is a fantastic marketing strategy that allows businesses to drive leads and sales by ranking websites on the first page of search results. However, to rank on the first page is no easy feat. It requires continuous efforts to maintain your ranking, so if you notice a decline in your ranking consider it as a sign to conduct an SEO audit for website.

SEO auditing allows you to maintain your brand’s position in the digital world. A decline in ranking means fewer people will see your website. And the less eye on your website the fewer customers you will have. Therefore, to avoid SEO issues affecting your website, you need to conduct regular SEO audit for website. Auditing can help you find and fix issues before they can have a real impact on your website. Additionally, it can also help you find opportunities to grow your presence.

Excited to improve your site's online presence with web page SEO analysis? Then make sure to stay with us till the end of this blog.

What is an SEO audit for the website?

An SEO audit in simple terms is nothing but evaluating how well your website is optimized for the search engine. By auditing your website you can understand if it is in a position to achieve your goals if not SEO audit for website can provide you a sense of how to improve your site to reach these goals. While auditing we review and analyze the online assets of the website to ensure it is performing the best it can. This could include:

• Looking for strengths and success to harness or scale
• Finding mistakes and errors to fix
• Check what’s not working for you and what you should do less of.

Aside from this SEO auditing can also help you with other aspects of your website. Overall, the goal of SEO is to maintain and improve your SEO website’s SEO ranking. If you want to understand the real value of SEO audit for websites then make sure to read the next section.

Importance of SEO analysis for website

SEO audit for website is the first step to improving your search engine ranking. Therefore if you do not want your business to get lost in the vast sea of competitors, you must conduct regular site audits. By conditioning web page SEO analysis you’ll be able to refine your strategy to produce even better results.

Here is a list of all the benefits you will experience from an SEO audit for website:

Increased organic search traffic

As we mentioned before auditing helps you improve your ranking, and increasing ranking means more traffic. Therefore, by auditing your website and resolving SEO issues you will be able to reach more potential customers.

Improved conversion rates

SEO not only affects your ranking it also affects your site’s user experience. If you can’t keep customers on your websites what’s the use of having a high-ranking website? With an SEO audit for website, you’ll be able to refine your user experience, and credibility, thus leading to higher conversion rates.

Enhanced brand visibility

The higher your ranking the more eyes are on your brand. So if your page makes it to the first page of the SERP you’ll be able to increase your brand awareness significantly.

Resolve technical issues

Search engines like Google regularly update their algorithms to enhance user experience. If a website fails to keep up with these changes, the consequences can be severe, ranging from a drop in rankings and poor user experience to technical issues and even penalties. SEO audit for website helps ensure your site stays up-to-date and free from technical issues.

Looking at these benefits you may have made up your mind about site audits. But before you take any action do you know what is included in an SEO audit? The next section might give you some idea so keep reading.

What is included in an SEO audit?

SEO audit for website is not an easy process. Therefore to simplify this process for you we have divided website performance audit into different categories:

SEO content audit

Content as you might already know is a crucial part of SEO. Therefore every SEO audit for website should include a thorough evaluation of your site’s content to identify opportunities to improve the accuracy, recency, and quality of your content. This will significantly improve your site’s ranking and engagement.

On-page SEO audit

On-page SEO audit refers to making sure that the backend elements of your page are optimized for the search engine. For this auditing strategy, the on-page SEO analyzer would check meta description, meta titles, image alt text, compression, and more.

Off-page SEO audit

An off-page SEO audit for a website involves checking other pages and domains that link the pages you are looking to improve. Here the SEO auditor will focus on evaluating the quantity, quality, distribution, and recency of the backlinks.

Technical SEO audit for website

Technical SEO checkers focus on analyzing and improving performance metrics like site speed, security, etc. Although it requires a bit of expertise, however, if you can optimize the technical elements of your website you’ll see a significant improvement in your website’s performance.

Local SEO audit

Local SEO is different from SEO in the sense that it focuses more on ensuring your website’s visibility on the local SERP. Therefore the main aim of a Local SEO audit for website is to help your business rank in the local search. Now a local SEO audit might be smaller in scale but it involves elements from each of the above audits.

The thing about an SEO audit for website is that it has so many aspects and facets that they can become quite complicated. Therefore the next section will provide you with a simple guide on how to conduct SEO audit for website. So keep reading.

How to conduct SEO audit for website?

Every website is different therefore everyone’s SEO audit for website differs. However, if you are not sure how to approach SEO audit strategy for your website, here is a simple process that might come in handy:

Run your website URL on a reliable site audit tool

There are plenty of tools available that can help you audit your website. If you are on a tight budget there are even SEO audit tools that can help you check SEO of website free. The first step of an SEO audit for website is to analyze your website’s performance. When you use tools to conduct an SEO audit, they can provide you with specific recommendations to improve your SEO strategy.

Locate technical errors

Technical errors like performance issues, SEO problems, and security errors can negatively impact your customer’s experience and your website. Here is a comprehensive SEO technical audit checklist that can help you with this:

• Deduct crawlability and indexing issues: Pay attention to robots.txt, XML, sitemap, and HTTP response codes
• Check the site architecture: While conducting an SEO audit for website ensure your URLs are user-friendly, navigation is smooth and effortless, and fix the redirects.
• Audit for internal linking issues: Spot and fix broken links, find pages with excessive outgoing links, and deal with any orphan pages.
• Examine on-page tags: Make sure to check all the on-page elements during SEO audit for website.
• Address duplicate content issues: Duplicate content can ruin your position and reputation therefore is better to swiftly deal with it.
• Test the load speed and the page experience: Audit your core web vitals to improve page speed and page experience.
• Check for mobile friendliness: Make sure your website has a responsive design.
• Spot coding errors: Focus on the main aspects of your code like the W3C standards, Hreflang issues, JavaScript issues, and Structured data.

Identify SEO problems

After checking the technical aspects of your site the focus of your SEO audit for website should shift to identifying SEO-related issues. Find SEO issues and optimize them to boost your site’s performance.

Analyse design and UX

Check how your website’s design is working for your customers. Some software has heatmaps that could show which part of your site draws the most attention. This type of analysis will help you improve the overall experience of your website.

Assess your site’s content

An SEO audit for website is never complete without checking the site content. Thoroughly check your content to ensure it is optimized with SEO best practices for higher traffic and more conversions.

Create an audit report

Creating an audit report that clearly states the site issues found is very important. Having a comprehensive report in your hand enables you to make improvements to your SEO strategy.

By making a few tweaks you can create your own SEO audit for website from this strategy. Following these processes will ensure you are not missing out on any important SEO aspect of your website. Do you know what could help you ensure the effectiveness of your SEO audit strategy? A checklist therefore the next section will provide you with a comprehensive checklist to further improve your site’s SEO.

A complete checklist for SEO site audit

An SEO site audit can be complicated, especially if you are working with a large website. Therefore to avoid getting overwhelmed by the processes of SEO audit for the website, here a simple checklists you can follow:

Check your organic traffic

Check your organic traffic to see which page performs the page and which needs help. This will help you prioritize your work after an SEO audit for website.

Run a full site crawl

Running a website crawl can provide you with valuable data about every page of your website. Performing a site crawl is a quick and easy method to get insights into the:

• Crwaliabilty
• Loading speed
• Structured data
• On page SEO
• Internal links

Once you are able to locate the issues you can start resolving them to improve your site’s performance.

Focus on on-page SEO

A general site issue is good but there is no harm in taking a closer look at specific pages. An on-page SEO analyzer can help you with this. You don’t need to check all the pages instead focus on the ones that bring the most conversion and target the most important keyword for your business.

Check for indexing issues

Pages that aren’t indexed will not appear on the search. Therefore during SEO audit for website check your site for indexing issues. Ensure all your pages are available on the search engine.

Remove any duplicate content

It is crucial that Google indexes only one version of your site. Duplicate content can cause issues with crawling, indexing, and ranking. Therefore it is very important to deal with duplicate content after SEO audit for website.

Maximize your internal links

Internal linking is one of the most underrated SEO strategies, therefore it's important you optimize your strategies and link high-priority pages as much as possible. Including this in your SEO audit for website will help you avoid orphaned pages and make it easier for the engine to find your content.

Optimize for featured snippets

If you want more visibility and organic traffic for your site, you should optimize your content to appear in feature snippets of the search engine.

Check for mobile friendliness

Google no longer indexes sites that don’t work for mobile devices. Therefore when you conduct an SEO audit for website make sure your website is mobile-friendly with Google user experience.

Optimize your site speed

The speed of your website is a crucial ranking factor therefore it’s important you optimize any element that is causing your site speed to slow down.

Focus on your core web vitals

The core web vitals of your website can significantly affect your ranking. Therefore it’s important that you focus on these three metrics during the SEO audit for website:

• Largest contentful paint
• Interaction to next paint
• Cumulative layout shift

Find the keyword you are missing out on

A website performance audit is a great opportunity for you to look at the keywords of your competitors and discover what you are missing out on. By targeting these keywords you can further increase your brand reach.

Find missed backlinks opportunities

Backlinks are very important for SEO because they help Google determine the authority and credibility of your website. Therefore it's important that you utilize backlink gap tools to find missed backlink opportunities and take advantage of them.

Update declining content

Check if the content that was performing well in the past is declining in its performance. Use this SEO audit for website to look for outdated content and update it. By improving the quality of your existing content you can further boost your ranking.

Moving on the next section will explore how a professional SEO agency can audit your website to improve its performance.

Continue improving your SEO with Gigde

Gigde is a leading agency with years of experience in implementing successful SEO strategies. We have a team of top SEOs who are well-versed in the latest SEO services, tools, and trends. Therefore by choosing our SEO audit services, you’ll be able to maintain a strong online presence on the internet. Here is how our SEO audit for website will benefit your website:

• Comprehensive site analysis
• Tailored solutions
• Actionable insights
• Competitor benchmarking
• Up-to-date SEO trends
• Regular reports
• Ongoing support.

Conclusion

SEO can either make or break your website. To ensure you experience only the benefits, conducting regular SEO audit for website is essential. A comprehensive audit can significantly improve your site's performance and provide valuable insights into your strategy. Need help optimizing your website for SEO? Let Gigde assist you!

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