An SEO Audit is performed on a website to check the overall performance on the SERPs and devise a plan accordingly in order to counter the lags. This is a must especially if you are relying on website traffic to drive business growth. An audit is usually done by an SEO auditor in regular periods of time and is very crucial. There are a few SEO audit tools that you must be aware of as an online business.
Define Website Objectives
The most basic step to do an SEO Audit is to identify the objectives of your business website. Why was the website put up in the first place?
A. To create brand awareness
B. To market products
C. To get more traffic and hence more business queries
These are a few very broadly defined objectives that can be achieved by employing different strategies like creating original content for the blog, video marketing, and website SEO. All these are collectively done by SEO companies.
Keyword Analysis and Content Analysis
Content is the most critical aspect of a website. But, prior to that is the content analysis. There’s a term called thin content that is heavily penalized by Google. Thin content refers to the content that has no value to the user. A 2017 update of the Google algorithm penalizes thin, ad-affiliated or ad-centric content. All the content should be of high-quality and impart value to the reader.
What do the readers want to know about? This can be found out by doing keyword analysis. Keyword analysis is to identify unique and targeted keywords that the users are looking up daily on search engines. There are plenty of keyword research tools like SEMRush. Creating content around long tail keywords can help your website rank better. Keywords are not only measurable and effective but are indeed a gateway to reach the intended audience.
Keyword positioning is also important. Once you have set your eyes on the right keywords, make sure they are placed in the right place to enhance on-page SEO ranking. The most ideal place for inserting keyword is in the H1 and H2 tags, Meta Title, and Meta description.
Moving further to content, there are many online tools like Copyscape Premium to detect any plagiarized material.
Technical SEO and On-Page SEO
The website framework is very important. The Google crawlers must be able to navigate through the pages without meeting a dead end. If your website has flash content, it must be redirected to HTML. This helps in getting the crawler to navigate through the data and get it indexed accordingly. Building an HTML website is very important to rank better. Also, make sure that your website is using HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). An HTTPS adds extra encryption to the data to secure it from being seen or stolen from the network during a transfer. This SEO Audit tool not only guarantees better ranking but also secures visitors’ and business’ data from cyber-attacks.
You must also keep in mind to use a keyword-focused search engine URL. The optimization of a permalink structure is available in WordPress. If not, to have a friendly URL structure, you must keep it short and use a dash instead of underscores.
Auditing internal link structures, broken links, and redirected links also help in boosting SEO. Apart from that, you need to audit the website loading speed.
A website that loads faster means that there is less bounce rate. The website speed can be audited using Google’s Page Speed Insights.
On-page SEO Audit can be done by image optimization. It is advisable to use high-resolution images with an appropriate ALT Tag using a title and a caption for the image and decluttering them by resizing. You can audit your website for image optimization.
The website should be mobile optimized and compatible with all devices.
Check if there are any 404 errors
Alternatively, you can conduct a user analysis by setting up a call to action or measuring the time spent by visitors on your website.
Web Hosting
An audit of a website is equally important. There are a number of ways to check the performance of your existing web hosting service. The performance of the server and the loading speed offered by the host are crucial contributing factors to the SEO performance of a website. You can also check the age of your domain using any domain registrar.
Optimize Social Share
Your website needs to have social share buttons if it is more content-centric. If the content is more likely to be shared, it will have a better chance at ranking in SERPs.
These are a few essential SEO Audit steps, but these keep changing with every new search engine algorithmic update. The SEO audit and optimization must be given to professional digital marketing companies.
