Websites have become the primary way to search for and communicate with businesses. However, it’s not just enough to have a website for people to be able to find you. It would be best to invest a lot of effort into SEO so you would even rank among the top results. Unfortunately, sometimes all of your work won’t give the results you expect, and you might not even know why. Here is how to conduct an SEO audit on your website and determine the issues causing your SEO to drop.
The importance of SEO and what are audits
SEO refers to Search Engine Optimization and includes a set of principles and techniques which you can apply to your website. Once you have performed specific actions that boost your SEO, you should get better search results and rank highly for your chosen keywords. Audits identify problems that can cause you to rank poorly. Audits can point out issues that interfere with your website’s indexing, making it harder for search engines to find you. It also allows you to identify and remove toxic links that can bring your website negative SEO and bad karma.
Before you learn how to conduct an SEO audit on your website, you first need to understand the primary goal of website audits. By pinpointing weaknesses and correcting them, you can ensure that your SEO brings in the results you are working for. After rolling out improvements based on information from the audit, you will notice an increase in user engagement, lead generation, and an overall boost of sales.
Key traits of a good audit
Success doesn’t come overnight, and thorough audits take some time to complete. After you have completed the audit, you will get a mountain of information. If you don’t know your way around this data, it will take you a long time to implement actions and changes to make your website work more efficiently. However, that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case. Reach out to professionals for help in order to make your audit time efficient. The results you gain from the audit need to be concise and understandable. You don’t need to sift through hundreds of pages of audit results; focus on key improvements which will have the most impact.
The tools you’ll need for an audit
Thankfully, there is an abundance of online software available to conduct an SEO audit on your website. Most SEO software will have site crawl tools, and there are many affordable options for you to choose from. In addition, Google offers a suite of free tools, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google PageSpeed Insights. We understand that all of this can be a bit too technical for the average user. Your best course of action is to find a company that offers SEO services and audits to do the job for you.
Here is how to conduct an SEO audit on your website:
Check your current ranking
Firstly it’s good to know where you stand when compared to the competition. Search for relevant keywords and look for areas where you need to improve. After all, the main goal of SEO is to improve your rankings when users search for keyphrases.
Link building matters
Both internal and external links contribute to your overall ranking. Internal links can help strengthen your indexing by building a complex interlinked network which ties your important pages together. On the other hand, external links need to be approached a little bit differently. External links should point to sites with authority, and quality backlinks can help here. Accept backlinks only from trusted sources. When it comes to links that lead to your website, you can see where you have already been mentioned and check their domain authority.
Inspect your content
As we have just mentioned, internal links will lead to your own pages. You need to make sure that the content they lead to isn’t thin. The easiest way to load your website with content is to create a blog and post content-rich articles there. Avoid pages that offer nothing but links. Search engines will recognize you are building a weak network of links and punish you for it. Instead, you should provide your users with valuable content that they will genuinely be interested in engaging with.
Remove duplicates
Google’s index may hold duplicate versions of your site, which you should remove. While you are at it, you can check your site versions on various domain types and ensure they all lead to the same landing page. You can easily accomplish this by running a site search and checking for duplicates and subdomains.
You also need to be mindful of duplicate content on your website. Don’t create multiple cookie-cutter pages with no original content. Unintentional duplicate content is less problematic, like if your CMS (Content Management System) generates new similar pages. This can often be the case with WordPress sites and archiving copies of pages.
User Experience issues
User Experience (or UX for short) is an umbrella term that encompasses a set of practices aimed at improving the experience of your website visitors. These can range from simple quality of life improvements all the way to full design reworks meant to include cutting-edge technology. The most critical UX issues you should be on the lookout for with your audit are:
- Mobile friendly optimization – developers are stepping away from developing for desktop browsers, and search engines will punish your ranking if your page isn’t optimized for mobile.
- Site speed – do any individual pages stick out? The most common causes are broken links and unoptimized media.
- Site architecture – how easy and intuitive is it for users to find pages? Clean up your sitemap to avoid any 404 problems.
The bottom line
We’ve gone through the most important steps on how to conduct an SEO audit on your website. Now it’s up to you to decide if this is something you think you can do yourself or if it’s best left to trusted professionals. Either way, you need to perform audits regularly to ensure your website is ranking well.
