The SEO industry is fast-paced, and what is working today, not necessarily work the same after a month or two from now. Google makes numerous changes in its ranking algorithms every year. Every digital marketer must keep their knowledge updated to develop strategies that will make their sites rank higher on the most used search engines. If your site is not performing well in search engines, it’s time to do an SEO audit. So, before discussing how to perform an SEO audit, let first have a brief understanding of it.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a process that evaluates whether your website is SEO-friendly or not. The audit aims to optimize your website so that it can achieve a higher rank in SERPs. With a thorough SEO audit, you can easily check where your marketing efforts are going so that immediate action can be taken if your SEO strategy is not moving in the right direction.
You can do your SEO audit yourself or hire the best SEO services to perform the audit process for you. With a precise audit, you will know the factors hindering your website performance on different search engines to be fixed to boost your site’s rankings.
How to Perform an SEO Audit?
In the digital marketing world, it is necessary to perform an SEO audit. It allows you to analyze your ongoing SEO efforts and emphasize the areas that need more attention. To help you begin with the audit process, we are listing down the steps you must follow to ensure that every audit area is covered.
- Review your site: The process starts by reviewing the entire site to identify the website’s issues. Every month, the step can be performed to ensure that the site is free from every on-page error like duplicate content, broken links or dead links, page titles, and meta-data. If you find any major errors, you can contact the best SEO agency in your area to get the error fixed. While reviewing your site, you need to keep a keen eye on its URLs, content, meta descriptions, links, images, and website structure to ensure that they are best practices. A thorough check will analyze the user-friendliness of the page and how it relates to other pages.
- Page speed: No digital marketer can miss out on page speed while doing an SEO audit. A faster loading site will provide a better user experience, whereas a slow website will increase bounce rate in the age of high competition and fewer patient people. You can use Google’s page speed insights to check your site’s loading speed on both desktops and mobile. Apart from Google’s, you use other tools to check your site’s page speed and determine the elements hindering its loading speed from an SEO perspective. After knowing the elements, you can optimize your site’s performance.
- Site Architecture: A robust site’s structure facilitates its SEO. The structure will boost your site’s user experience in terms of more website visitors and bots that review it to determine its search ranking. Therefore, it is important to have an organized and logical structure backed with precise URLs, content, sitemap, images & alt tags, and backlinks.
- Content check: Your site’s content acts as a major factor influencing your site’s effectiveness on search engines. If your content is original, relevant, and unique, then it can boost your SEO strategy in the best way.
- Check the tags: Make sure that the title tags are concise, descriptive, and convey the web page’s exact purpose. The tags should not be lengthy and must include relevant keywords. The meta tag will describe your webpage’s content and bring your target audience to your site. The alt tags are essential for bots when they crawl a website and significantly impact your SEO.
- Backlinks audit: Search engines determine the quality of your website based on the quality of websites it is linked to. Therefore, it is important to verify that your links are coming from different domains instead of the same website, not negatively impact your SEO.
Don’t miss out on any of the points mentioned above to ensure that your website is user-friendly and will rank higher on SERPs.
