A noticeable online presence is one of the essential needs of businesses today. As a result, people and marketers often talk about the need for website optimisation. But, how to identify if their websites or online businesses need optimisation? The answer is search engine optimisation (SEO) Audit! and for that, you must consider the complete SEO audit checklist.
SEO audit is the process to assess the health of your website, find out the faults, prevent wrong implementations and recommend reliable solutions for optimum performance.
There are many SEO audit tools available for website evaluation that give more power to SEO audits. SEO professionals use them for the purpose whenever the need arises. Auditing is not so technical and does not take much time. You will need only a few hours to audit your rankings, content, backlink profile, bad links, whether your website is crawled/indexed or not or anything that could hinder your search performance.
In this blog, we have tried to cover maximum guidelines for a smooth SEO audit process. Go through every process to find flaws that could be blocking your website’s performance. The guidelines below will help you boost your rankings.
Why is SEO Audit Important?
Following an SEO audit, you can take relevant actions to fix those issues and build a solid marketing strategy.
Why you should perform an SEO audit:
- You need to incubate a growth strategy for your new SEO client.
- You want to figure out a plan of action to improve organic search performance for your new domain.
- You observed a drop in the organic traffic of your website and need to know why
- Auditing is one of the parts of your ongoing SEO plan that helps you find out and fix problems.
Necessary Tools for SEO Audit
Few tools to make the process of SEO audit smooth and easy:
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- SERP Simulator
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
- Copyscape
- Screaming Frog
SEO Audit Checklist
Identify Your SEO Needs
Unless you know what SEO can do for your business, it is not possible to evaluate your website performance. To make things easier for yourself, you can reach out to your target audience to understand their expectations when they are looking for better options.
One simple and proven way to grab attention is to create an integration page for every new partner that you get. It helps in improving your rankings because partners are motivated to link to their integration page. In addition, it will give you an insight into building your SEO strategies to increase your organic search and further gain online goals.
Crawl Your Website
Google for sure will use a crawler to evaluate your website structure and its SEO settings at the time of inquiring about several site elements that will impact the rankings of your website. Therefore, it is prudent to crawl your website before Google does. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is one of the most sought-after tools to configure your crawler to act like Google or any search engine you are looking to index your website on.
Evaluate Technical Issues
Technical SEO issues continue to be a significant problem even today, and an SEO audit is the only way to find them out. You can use Screaming Frog to identify duplicate content, irrelevant pages, broken links, no index tags, short and long meta tags, and other technical issues.
Remove Useless Content
Content is essential, but low-quality or useless content cannot help improve your website’s performance. Just putting some content is of no use if it does not serve any business purpose or help you grab traffic. It is better to remove all the useless and low-quality content and instead use quality and informative content with more credibility to attract significant traffic to your website. You can rewrite and make your content more educative and valuable for your potential customers. Remove all that looks useless and poor in taste. To know if your content is good to go, there is no better place than Google to find out. If Google has not indexed your pages, and the numbers look disturbing, then start pruning your content.
Check Page Load Speed
Page load time is a significant factor that impacts your website performance in a big way. You can quickly identify this issue. Your page should not take more than 3 seconds to load. After the introduction of RankBrain, bounce rates also affect your website rankings. Pingdom’s Website Speed Test is a tool that you can use to check the loading speed of your website. Simply enter a URL, select the location, and find out.
Mobile-Friendliness Issues
Mobile-friendliness of your website is another crucial factor that impacts your website rankings. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, enter your URL and run the test to determine if your website is mobile-friendly.
Fix Structured Data Errors
There are many web pages on your domain that are useful from an SEO aspect. These could be your product pages, testimonials, upcoming event announcements, brand descriptions, and many more.
Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool can be helpful to find out your website’s structured data errors. You will just need to type in the URL, hit on the run test, and get a list of mistakes for the typed domain.
Assessment of Keywords and Organic Traffic
Analyse the keywords that are bringing traffic to your website. If your Google Analytics is connected to Search Console, you will get your result there only. You just have to open the breakdown of acquisition and review your organic search.
You will have access to a summary of your website’s key pages for organic searches. Additionally, you can cross-reference these outcomes within the breakdown of queries inside the Google Search Console.
Upgrade Your Backlink Strategy
Backlinks are one of the key ranking factors in SEO. However, you will need to find only quality content links for this. This is because Google only considers if your links deliver quality and valuable information to the audience. Ensure you are using the proper link building tools to guarantee your efforts are actually improving your website’s authority.
Hire SEO Experts to Perform SEO Audit Successfully
SEO though may look very simple and easy to you, but you must think of hiring a professional SEO company in Dubai for assured online success. An SEO expert knows all things about the SEO audit checklist and can help recognise issues and guide you to fix those with the necessary tools and tactics.
