SEO Audit: A Complete Guide

The SEO audit is often the first stage in the process of a thousand optimizations.

After taking on a new client or joining an organization internally, the first step for the majority of SEO experts is to conduct a thorough SEO audit.

To go where you want to be, you must first understand where you are.

The SEO audit is useful in this situation.

Wherever people are looking for you—your goods, your services, or the subjects you are an expert in—that is where you want to be.

As a result, increasing your exposure in Google and other search engine rankings is crucial.

Your road map to getting there eventually is an SEO audit.

Any website’s SEO issues will be revealed by an audit, allowing you to address them and start ranking effectively through SEO auditing.

What is an SEO audit?

Numerous aspects of your website’s ability to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) are evaluated in-depth during an SEO auditing service. These elements include the on-page and off-page SEO of your website as well as its technical SEO performance.

This article will describe the various components of an SEO audit, describe how to conduct an SEO audit, and identify some useful tools to get you started.

Why is SEO Auditing Important?

There are numerous advantages to conducting regular SEO audits:

1. Find SEO weaknesses

This benefit may be evident, but it should not be undervalued. It is possible to examine certain elements (particularly on-page elements) to determine if they are effectively optimized. For instance, if you know that meta descriptions should be between 150 and 169 characters and yours are too long or too short, you will realize that they need to be modified.

However, SEO has become significantly more complex since the days of simply placing keywords in the correct locations on web pages. Now, Google evaluates the efficacy of your website on multiple levels, including technical performance and content quality.

It is essential to remember that Google frequently modifies its algorithms. Experts who are immersed in the industry, such as those who develop SEO auditing tools, are best equipped to discover and react to these changes.

2. Measurability

Whether you are a client using an SEO service or a consultant/in-house marketer performing your own SEO, you must assess the effectiveness of the work performed on your website. An initial SEO audit will establish the baseline against which all subsequent metrics and progress will be measured. If you do not know the previous state of affairs, it will be difficult to determine how your website has improved.

3. Prioritize marketing

It is likely that a website audit will reveal several enhancement opportunities. While it may be tempting to rush through all of these suggestions, it is advisable to divide individual duties into mini-projects and prioritize them.

Customized 404 pages, favicons, and the implementation of structured data markup are duties that will unquestionably enhance the user experience. However, I would suggest focusing initially on technical SEO issues, such as crawling and indexing issues, that may be impeding your website. A website crawl can assist in identifying any issues in this area. If you don’t optimize your technical SEO first, you may discover that other optimizations have less of an impact on your website’s overall performance.

Similarly, if your exit rate is high and you’re unable to engage visitors beyond the first page, you may need to prioritize optimizing your landing pages for conversions.

4. Track the progress of keyword rank

Monitoring the movement of your keywords is one of the best methods to determine how well your website is performing. As you optimize your website, you should observe a rise in keyword rankings. Similarly, negative movements can signal significant problems or even penalties!

5. Assess the competition

Site audits are not limited to only your own websites. You can audit the websites of your competitors to determine their strengths and deficiencies. Important facts to learn about your competitors include:

What keywords they use: Use a tool to determine if it is possible to rank for those keywords. It may not be worthwhile if your competitors rank highly and have high domain and page authority. Instead, target keywords that your competitors are not targeting. Do not feel remorse for squandered opportunities.
Backlinks: Carefully examine their backlinks to determine who is linking to them. Target these websites to see if you can obtain a backlink or, better yet, wholly replace your competitor’s link with a link to your site.
Strategy: By analyzing your competitor’s website, you can get a sense of their strategy. If their excellent content is attracting backlinks and being shared, a similar content strategy may be advantageous for your site. Similarly, if they are adept at generating engagement across social media platforms, you should investigate their social media strategy in greater detail and extract lessons from it.
Mobile site: Perhaps your competitors have a superior mobile site to yours. In this circumstance, use this information to inform your strategy.

How to do an SEO audit?

On-page SEO Audit

Your on-page SEO audit consists of site elements you can control and optimize, and a significant portion of that is the content. In other words, an on-page SEO audit concentrates on optimizing website elements that influence the site’s position in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Keyword research

What better way to improve your content’s ranking than with keywords? Before creating content with keywords, you must understand what content is presently ranking and what people searching for a keyword actually mean.

Examine the websites of your top-ranking competitors on Google to determine what they emphasize in their content. Are they ranked for anything that you are not? Ensure that your content also matches the user’s search intent.

Keyword usage

Therefore, you comprehend why consumers type a particular keyword. If you are not already using it in your content, you must do so immediately.

Use keywords in your headers, body copy, title tag, and meta description. I will provide a breakdown. You should begin by incorporating keywords into your headers where they make sense. Suppose you wish to convince individuals to utilize your reasonably priced home improvement services. You may want to begin this section of your website with a header that explains “why you should use our affordable home improvement services.” Then, you’ll want to use “affordable home improvement services” and variations of this keyword throughout the body of your content.

Avoid keyword stuffing, as this can actually harm your SEO. Ensure that it makes sense when read aloud. You can use related keywords in your content to provide search engines with a better understanding of your page’s context.

During your SEO audit, you should also search for keywords in the title tag and meta description. These appear in search engine results and can provide users and search engine algorithms with context regarding your page’s content. These can be optimized with keywords to increase their visibility in the SERPs.

Internal linking

Important to your SEO is making it easier for search engines to discover pages on your website. An important component of this is internal linking, which means that when you create new content, you should include links to other pages on your site.

Internal links make it much simpler for search engine crawlers (and users) to locate pages on your site, thereby boosting your SEO. If you are writing a blog post about financial services and have a page on your website that lists your services, you should absolutely link to that page. You are improving your SEO and driving visitors to another page on your website.

Useful Links: Top 5 On-Page SEO Tips to Improve Your Website Ranking

Off-page SEO Audit

Off-page SEO is comprised of SEO factors that you do not directly control but can influence.

Once you have a sitemap in XML format, you can submit it to Google Search Console so that it can be crawled.

Backlinks

Backlinks, or referrals to your website from other websites, are a crucial component of off-page SEO. When a reputable website incorporates a link to your site on one of its pages, it transfers some of the value of its site to yours. You increase the value of your pages and increase the likelihood that visitors will select the link on the other page and visit your website.

As part of the SEO audit, you should also be familiar with your backlink profile and the backlink profiles of your competitors. Anyone who links to your competitors could also link to you. There are many tools to analyze your backlinks.

Technical SEO Audit

There are many factors to consider when auditing your technical SEO, and the process can become quite complex.

Page speed

How rapidly does your website load? Are your website’s pages loading swiftly to ensure a positive user experience? Searchers are accustomed to websites loading within a few seconds, as this is the norm. About half of searchers will abandon your site if it takes longer than three seconds to display.

People will leave your site in favor of a speedier one, which will increase your bounce rate and harm your search engine rankings. During your SEO audit, you can check your page speed with Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool, which will inform you how quickly your page loads on mobile and desktop devices and provide suggestions for addressing any problems.

Mobile-friendliness

People are spending significantly more time on their mobile devices. Mobile users spend an average of over three hours per day on their devices, compared to just over two hours per day on a desktop. Google now prioritizes mobile-first when crawling and indexing new sites because the majority of users view sites and content on mobile devices. If a mobile user views the desktop version of your website, portions will be cut off and the content may be unreadable. This is a truly terrible situation. This valuable web traffic will be lost to other sites that either have a mobile version or adapt to the user’s screen size.

Site Security

Site security is a ranking factor for SEO. Site security often achieved through SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certification. SSL ensures a secure connection between the user’s browser and your website’s server, encrypting data transmission. You can identify a secure site by the “secure” message next to the URL in your browser. When your website lacks SSL and is labeled as “not secure,” users entering information are at risk of having it stolen.

Canonical URLs

A canonical URL is the URL that search engines like Google use to identify the “main” version of a duplicated page. Google does not want to waste resources or show users the same search results repeatedly. As a result, when Google discovers duplicate (or nearly identical) pages on a website, it chooses one canonical URL to represent all of them. This page is then given priority during indexing and ranking.

Index/Noindex

Checking the “index” or “noindex” status of pages in an SEO audit is crucial for controlling how search engines treat your content. “Index” tells search engines to include the page in search results, while “noindex” excludes it. This helps you manage what appears in search results, avoid duplicate content issues, and ensure search engines focus on indexing your most important pages. During the audit, review and adjust these settings to maximize your site’s visibility and SEO performance.

Broken Links

Broken links in a technical SEO audit refer to hyperlinks on your site that lead to non-existent or moved pages, resulting in a poor user experience. Identifying and fixing these links is crucial to prevent increased bounce rates and maintain positive search engine rankings, ensuring users find the content they seek.

Sitemaps

Important to on-page SEO is having sitemaps that enable search engine algorithms to locate your website’s pages.

HTML and XML sitemaps are two sitemaps you should have. HTML sitemaps contain connections to every page on your website and can assist users and crawlers in locating pages that may lack internal links.

If your website is powered by WordPress, you can generate a sitemap using a plugin.

If you lack extensive experience with XML sitemaps, it may be best to work with an SEO professional. Now that we’ve discussed the on-page SEO portion of the SEO audit, let’s examine the requirements for the off-page SEO audit.

Local SEO Audit

A Local SEO audit is a comprehensive examination of a website’s online presence with a specific focus on optimizing it for local search results. It’s a crucial process for businesses that operate in specific geographical areas and rely on local customers. Here’s a breakdown of the key components and steps involved in a Local SEO audit:

Google My Business (GMB) Optimization

GMB Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of your Google My Business listing in local search results. Begin by claiming and authenticating your listing to ensure that its information is accurate. Upload appealing images and solicit customer feedback. Use “Posts” to share updates and highlight distinctive attributes. Optimizing GMB increases the visibility of your business in local search results, making it simpler for prospective customers to locate and engage with you.

Local Citation Audit

A Local Citation Audit ensures that the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of a business are consistent and accurate across all online platforms. Verify NAP data uniformity, identify listing sources, and resolve inconsistencies. If duplicate listings are discovered, monitor and remove them. Examine specialized directories pertinent to your business. Ensure that your citations are accurate to improve your local SEO and credibility.

Online Reviews and Reputation Management

Online Review and Reputation Management involves monitoring consumer reviews and responding to them professionally. Check review platforms such as Google, Yelp, and industry-specific sites frequently. Respond to both positive and negative reviews with courtesy. Encourage reviews without offering incentives. Respond to negative comments by acknowledging problems and providing solutions. Mark offensive content. Build a positive online reputation that affects search engine rankings and attracts more consumers over time. Integral to your local SEO strategy is reputation management.

Read the article about How To Do A Complete Local SEO Audit to learn more.

Top 10 SEO Audit Tools

Here are 10 of the top SEO audit tools you can use to analyze your website’s current state.

1. Moz Pro

Moz provides the tools and resources necessary to identify SEO problems on your website, monitor growth, optimize, and generate reports. The Crawl Test tool will analyze up to 3,000 links and send you an email containing page-specific data.

Moz describes each problem, its potential impact on your SEO, and how to resolve it. In addition, you can flag issues you wish to disregard, mark issues as resolved, and recrawl to monitor your progress.

2. SEMrush

SEMrush is an all-inclusive SEO tool with an in-depth dashboard that displays the performance of your website or individual pages. Multiple toolkits for SEO, advertising, social media, content marketing, and competitive research are included.

SEMrush provides a complimentary 100-page website audit. When you conduct a site audit via the platform, you receive a thorough technical SEO audit that helps you identify and resolve on-site issues, thereby increasing your Google rankings.

3. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free, beginner-friendly SEO auditing utility. It provides an abundance of information regarding page load performance, indexed pages, broken links, HTML markups, and more.

You can obtain an overview of your site’s performance, including visits, impressions, average click-through rate, and average SERP position, using Google Search Console. It also provides information regarding areas of your website that are generating errors or not performing as expected.

4. Ahrefs

The Site Audit tool from Ahrefs can notify you of more than 110 technical issues, spanning from critical errors to “you might want to fix this.” It identifies everything that could potentially harm your rankings, including bad CSS or JavaScript files, redirects, and broken links.

Site Audit by Ahrefs is entirely cloud-based. This means there is no installation required, and you can access your data at any time, from anywhere. Additionally, you can schedule inspections to occur daily, weekly, or monthly.

5. Screaming Frog

The SEO Spider from Screaming Frog is designed for SEO-minded users. The tool will examine any websites you specify, analyzing URLs for common SEO problems. It simplifies and accelerates the process, even for larger websites.

The application is fairly intuitive and navigable. In addition, you can export your data to Excel or a.csv file if you need to conduct a more in-depth analysis.

6. HubSpot’s Website Grader

The Website Grader by HubSpot is a web-based utility that provides an overview of your site’s health. It evaluates the efficacy, mobile optimization, SEO, and security of your website.

Website Grader is somewhat complicated because, while it does provide you with a grade and suggestions to help you improve your grade, it is entirely up to you to solve the issues. However, it does pose the question, “What should I do next?” list.

7. Woorank

Woorank offers an in-depth site analysis to help you discover optimization and improvement opportunities. The analysis considers social media performance, usability, and existing SEO initiatives, among other factors.

Reports from Woorank include a marketing checklist, SEO, mobile, usability, technologies, social, local, and visitors.

8. Seomator

Seomator is an online SEO auditing application that crawls your website and provides a detailed report. You can export or download the white-label PDF that contains on-page and off-page SEO scores, problems, and solutions.

Seomator has SEO monitoring alerts that can crawl your website on a schedule so that you can trace changes.

In addition, with the Seomator Domain Comparison utility, you can compare your site to that of a competitor.

9. MySiteAuditor

MySiteAuditor is optimal for larger SEO firms. You can embed a free SEO audit tool on your website to generate more leads and purchases with this plugin.

You can generate an unlimited number of SEO audit reports from the dashboard or from embedded audit forms on your site. The reports are generated in approximately 15 seconds and report on 50+ SEO signals.

10. Serpstat

The site auditing utility from Serpstat allows you to evaluate and enhance technical SEO. It’s a fantastic aid for those with SEO experience, but those without SEO experience will also benefit greatly.

It detects problems with server parameters, loading performance, links, redirects, meta tags, headings, indexation, and HTTP. The report can be exported as a spreadsheet or PDF.

Serpstat displays the SEO issues on your website, where they are located, and suggestions for how to repair them to improve your search engine rankings.

Guide to SEO Audit – In a Nutshell

An SEO audit is the compass that steers your digital strategy which identifies areas for improvement and ensures that your website will appear in search engine results. Businesses may maintain their competitiveness and prosper in the changing online environment by embracing the insights generated by this process and committing to constant optimization.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should an SEO audit take?

Depending on the scale of the website, an SEO audit can last between two and six weeks. During this time, an SEO specialist is analyzing your website and identifying SEO opportunities. However, biweekly or weekly progress reports keep you and your team abreast of the project’s status.

Is an SEO audit worth it?

SEO audits can help you identify opportunities to improve your website’s performance, receive insight into the marketing strategies of your competitors, and ultimately generate more revenue for your business. Even if you believe that your website is in perfect health, you may be startled by the results of an audit.

How much does an SEO audit cost?

The cost of an SEO audit depends on the size and purpose of the website. However, companies typically charge anywhere from $650 to $14,000 for an SEO audit. The majority of companies adhere to this range when delivering a comprehensive SEO audit report.

Can I get a quality SEO audit for free?

Yes, you can get a quality SEO audit for free. Free SEO audit tools or services are widely available from trustworthy SEO tools and companies, and they can give you insightful information on the functionality and optimization of your website.

Free SEO audits can provide you a solid place to start, but it’s crucial to keep in mind that more thorough and detailed SEO audits can need professional assistance or expensive technologies. These frequently provide in-depth analysis and recommendations based on the objectives of your particular website and organization. However, the free choices described above can be useful in analyzing your website’s existing SEO performance for fundamental insights and preliminary optimization efforts.

What is the difference between SEO audit and website audit?

An SEO audit focuses on evaluating a website’s search engine optimization performance, addressing issues that impact search engine rankings, and improving elements like keywords, meta tags, and backlinks. On the other hand, a website audit is a broader assessment that evaluates overall website health, user experience, technical issues, and compliance with web standards. While both audits are crucial for a well-rounded website strategy, they have different scopes and objectives.

How do I know my website need an SEO audit?

You should consider an SEO audit for your website if you notice a decline in search engine rankings, decreased organic traffic, or if you’ve made significant website changes. Additionally, if you haven’t conducted an SEO audit in a while or want to improve your site’s visibility in search results, it’s a good time to consider one.