7 Steps to Complete an SEO Audit
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to any successful digital marketing strategy. However, it’s more than a set-and-forget kind of job. To keep your SEO strategy effective and your website ranking high in search engine results, you must regularly perform an SEO audit.
An SEO audit is a health check for your website. It allows you to evaluate how well your website is optimized for search engines and identify areas for improvement. Here’s a step-by-step guide to performing your own SEO audit:
1. Start with a Crawl
The first step in an SEO audit is to crawl your website using an SEO crawler tool. This will help you get an overview of your website from an SEO perspective, and identify issues like broken links, duplicate content, missing tags, and errors in website structure.
Tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush, or Ahrefs can help you with this process. They will crawl your website in the same way a search engine would allowing you to see your website as Google does.
2. Evaluate Your Website’s Structure and Design
Next, assess your website’s structure and design. A well-structured website is user-friendly and makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl and index your website.
Consider whether your website’s design is responsive and mobile-friendly, whether your pages load quickly, and if your website is easy to navigate. User experience (UX) is a critical ranking factor, and poor UX can lead to higher bounce rates and lower rankings.
3. Analyze Your On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the optimization of individual pages on your website. It includes elements like title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and content.
Ensure that your title tags and meta descriptions are unique, include your target keywords, and are of the correct length. Your headers should be properly structured (H1 for main headers, H2 for subheaders, etc.) and also include your target keywords where appropriate.
The content on your pages should be high-quality, unique, and relevant to your audience. It should also be well-optimized for keywords without being overly stuffed.
4. Assess Your Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO relates to factors outside your website that influence your rankings, primarily backlinks. In the eyes of search engines, backlinks from other websites to yours serve as endorsements of your content and can significantly boost your SEO if they are from high-quality, reputable sites.
Use a tool like Ahrefs or Moz’s Link Explorer to analyze your backlinks. Look at the total number of backlinks, the number of unique referring domains, and the overall quality of these links.
5. Review Your Website’s Content
Quality content is an important aspect of effective SEO. Review your content to ensure it’s valuable, relevant, and original. Duplicate or thin content (with little to no value) can hurt your SEO efforts.
Also, evaluate your content in terms of keyword optimization. Are you targeting the right keywords? Are these keywords integrated naturally within the content?
6. Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
Technical SEO refers to the technical aspects that affect your website’s visibility to search engines. This includes elements like site speed, mobile-friendliness, XML sitemaps, and schema markup.
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to assess your website’s loading speed. For mobile-friendliness, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool can be beneficial. Your website should have a well-structured XML sitemap that you’ve submitted to Google Search Console, helping search engines understand your site structure.
7. Evaluate Your Local SEO (if applicable)
Assessing your local SEO is crucial if your business has a local component. This includes your Google My Business listing, online reviews, and local citations, which are sites that mention your business name, address, and phone number.
Your Google My Business listing should be complete, accurate, and optimized with relevant categories and a thorough business description. You should also manage and respond to your online reviews and ensure that your business’s information is consistent across all online platforms.
While performing an SEO audit can seem like a difficult task, it’s essential for keeping your SEO strategy on track. With the right tools approach, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current strategy, make necessary adjustments, and keep your website well-optimized for search engines. SEO takes time, and regular audits can help you stay in the lead.
Don’t have time to do your own audit? Contact Virtual Surge, Baltimore SEO’s top team, today. We have a team of experts with extensive experience!