SEO Audit
An SEO audit is like checking up on your website to see if it’s doing well on search engines like Google. It’s a bit like getting an oil change for your car, where you make sure everything is working smoothly.
During an SEO audit, you look at different parts of your website, such as how Google Adwords and Analytics are set up, the words on your site, any issues with your content, how people engage with you on social media, and how other websites link to yours.
Doing these audits regularly is important. It helps your website perform better in search results. The audit looks at the technical stuff, how other websites link to yours, and what’s on your pages to make sure everything works well, attracts visitors, and is easy to use.
How to do an SEO Audit ?
1. Crawl your website
If you’ve made a bunch of updates to your website, ask search engines to “crawl” it. Crawling means they take a full snapshot of everything on your site, so when people search, they get directed to your latest content. If your site has changed a lot but search engines haven’t taken a new snapshot, people might not see your recent updates.
You can use SEO audit tools to crawl your site for you. It’s like a shortcut that saves time. Just enter your website’s URL, and the tool will go through your site, checking it like search engines do. After it’s done, the tool gives you a report showing different parts of your site.
This helps you find problems like repeated content, missing links, not enough words in your content, or too many redirects. These things can affect how well your site does on search engines. Once you know what’s wrong, you can make changes to fix it.
2. Check Search Engines for Indexing Problems
Besides using an SEO tool, you can also look for your website by typing in your main keywords. Count how many of your web pages show up in the search results and see if they’re near the top. This gives you an idea of how well your website is doing and if it’s showing up correctly.
When you search for your main website address, you can see how many pages are listed on search engines. If you can’t find a specific page, try searching for its exact web address.
If it doesn’t show up, there might be an issue with your site’s meta robots tag. This tag tells search engines how to handle your page for listing. If it’s broken or not used correctly, search engines might not list your page.
3. Check If Your Website Shows Up First
When you’re working on your SEO plan, remember that you’re not the only one making changes.
Your competitors are doing things too. Search engine rankings compare how well websites are doing in a specific industry. You can’t be sure your site will rank high for all your keywords, but following best practices helps.
Use your main words to search for your website and see where it shows up. Your goal is to get on the first page of the search results. If your site is on later pages, fewer people are likely to click on it.
Being on the first page means more people see your website, bringing in new visitors and customers.
4. Check Your Website's Stuff
Doing an on-page SEO check helps you see if your website is set up and working well. This means looking at all your website’s content and the behind-the-scenes code. When your site is optimized, it provides the info search engines need to understand and list your site correctly.
Your content should also be what users want to see, making them interested and helping search engines see your page as an authoritative one. This involves smartly using important keywords in your high-quality content on pages and posts.
Even though keywords aren’t as important as before, they still matter in SEO. What’s more crucial now is how relevant your content is to what users are searching for. So, not only should you place keywords smartly, but the stuff around those keywords should also be interesting, easy to read, and helpful for readers.
Checking your on-page SEO also ensures your website runs smoothly. This means providing a great user experience. Make sure your site is easy to navigate and loads fast. If you have ads on your site, make sure they don’t mess with how your site works, or you might lose more than you gain from the ads. Also, test your site on phones and other mobile devices. If it’s not as easy to use on a mobile device as it is on a computer, you need to make some big changes.
5. Watch Out for Same Stuff on Your Website
Having the same content in more than one place can hurt your SEO. If search engines see that your site has content similar to another site, they might penalize you.
It’s crucial to make sure your content is original for it to be trustworthy and relevant. Sometimes, companies don’t realize they have duplicate content, so it’s essential to check your whole website. If you find any duplicates, either get rid of them or change them up.
Duplication doesn’t just mean copying from other websites. If search engines find the same content on different pages of your own site, it looks like you’re trying to fill up your site without offering real information.
Avoid just copying or repeating stuff to fill space. Instead, spend time creating original and interesting content across your website. This way, search engines will notice your efforts and rank your site higher in search results.
How often do you conduct an SEO Audit?
How often you should do an SEO audit depends on the size of your website and how much it changes. If your website is big and you make a lot of updates, it’s good to do an audit more often, like every month or every three months. For a smaller website, once every six months or even once a year might be enough.
If you’ve made major changes to your site, like adding an SSL certification, it’s smart to do an SEO audit to check that everything is working as it should.
But if your website is brand new, doing an audit might not be very useful. You could check to make sure the technical stuff is set up right, but you probably won’t have enough data for a full SEO audit at that point.