Do an SEO Audit and Search engine results pages (SERPS) – Any attempt to reach the top level SERPs start with fool-proof Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO audits are carried out on sites to determine areas of improvement, including on-page and off-page SEO, content strategies and link building, among many other factors.
Want to do an SEO audit as a health check-up for your website. If not checked over for some time, something could go wrong.
Auditing tools closely and comprehensively examine a website and come up with a prognosis. A good audit points out all pre-existing mishaps and proposes solutions that could help fix these underlying issues.
This helps improve a website’s organic search results performance. Before any SEO audit of a website is done, here are some critical factors to consider.
7 Factors to Consider before you do an SEO Audit
1. Research of Competitors
If you’re looking to beat and improve on the competition, then it is essential to know what they are doing right and more importantly what they are doing wrong.
A thorough competitive analysis provides a clear roadmap on how to outdo your competition.
You have to stay ahead of the competition by outdoing them on their weaknesses and exceeding their strengths.
It starts with examining the performance of certain keywords critical to your niche. Here, you can see how your website is performing against other sites. Tools such as CreatorSEO will allow you to view the keywords and phrases used by your competition, traffic trends etc. This will help you establish a content strategy that can outdo the competition.
Once you’ve settled on several top competitors, a closer look at what they are doing with their pages can do wonders. Pay attention to their homepage, service pages, FAQs, and blogs. Perhaps, they are incorporating their main keywords in such areas with high reader contact better than you.
2. Crawling and Indexing
Any SEO analysis is not complete without checking for crawling and indexing problems.
- Crawling refers to how search engines skim through and understand the content on your web pages.
- Indexing is the storing and organizing of this information by search engines. When a page shows up on a search engine, it means it has been indexed.
Website crawling allows search engines to connect to millions of search results at once. Crawling does not necessarily lead to indexing, as a page can be indexed without it.
Understanding how crawling and indexing works could help optimize your site for better results. Also, if you’re not familiar with these technicalities, ensure you engage someone who does.
You can use Google Search Console to ensure that your website has been indexed, is crawled by this, and other search engines.
3. Website Accessibility
Every SEO audit checklist should guarantee that a website isn’t disadvantaged by issues of accessibility. Website visitors may run into several challenges when trying to access a website.
They can range from slow page load speed to experiencing 404 errors.
For a basic insight into your website’s accessibility, you can use Google Search Console for this, click on coverage, and then make a note of all recent drops on valid pages. Also, take notes of the errors page.
Ease of use of your site also falls into the category of accessibility. The structure of your website should be easy to use for site visitors including a handy navigation tab along with a well-designed link structure.
If your technical SEO audit or Google site speed insights indicate problem areas, it’s important to employ professionals to fix these issues.
4. Keyword Analysis
Keyword analysis is the process of looking for keywords or search phrases that can attract organic visitors to your website.
Keyword analysis helps identify gaps in your content, shows what the competitor is doing, potential traffic results etc.
Keyword analysis should be a key focus of your auditing process.
Google tools can help users get an oversight of your website’s keyword quality. Google AdWords has tools to help analyse keyword capabilities, their popularity, and total visits. It also ranks keyword groups and separates them from the highly significant ones to improve quality.
To get the most from your keyword analysis it’s better to use tools designed specifically for this purpose. For example, CreatorSEO provides keyword research services while their in-house Creature’s products allow you to research the completion and analyse your website.
5. On-Page SEO Review
An on-page SEO review refers to aligning on-site, page-specific elements such as heading, content, meta and title tags to target keywords.
On-page SEO refers to everything that happens on your site. This can include adding alt-attribute to images, creating an internal link structure, designing a responsive page for mobile and desktop etc.
All of these send signals to both search engines and your users that your site is functional, serves a purpose and is up to date.
It is critical to have all these areas in line, so your site has the highest chance of standing out in a crowded market.
6. Website Link Analysis
Understanding how your website connects with other authority sites is essential because this affects your optimization efforts immensely.
Google and other leading search engines rely a lot on links when ranking your site on their SERP. Hence, it should matter to you how your linking with other sites is done or affects your SEO.
An in-depth link analysis should not only focus on your internal links but also the external ones.
- Internal links direct the reader to a different page within your website.
- An external link leads a user to a page on your site from another site, which is also known as a backlink.
Backlinks carry a lot of weight, so they need to be adding value, not doing the opposite. If you find any poor backlinks, use Google’s disavow feature to block them, but as a last resort.
7. Content Evaluation
This is the process of examining a website’s content for factors that can either boost or deter its organic performance. You need to evaluate your content from the perspective of a search engine and site user.
Content evaluation helps detect duplicate content that has been used in some parts of the content, such as introductions, titles, or keywords. This is important in creating a useful strategy for your SEO content.
Long-form, well written and informative content works best for search engine results. Your content evaluation can also be based on images, video and audio content. It’s important to know how all of this is viewed both by search engines and site users.
Conclusion
Regular SEO auditing plays an essential role in understating your website and how it factors against the competition.
Algorithm changes, poor backlines, competitor changes etc all affect how your site is viewed and ranked by search engines.
An SEO audit provides an opportunity to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a website’s potential for long-term success.
It is important in helping one design a smooth path for continuous improvements and ensures that content is at its best for users and search engines alike.
Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit can be time-consuming and ineffective if carried out incorrectly. If you are dedicated to improving your site performance, understanding how your site is working and what your competition is doing, it is best to employ the services of professionals to undertake an SEO audit for your business.
CreatorSEO auditing service’s produce in-depth reports on your site performance, your competition and of ranking opportunities to improve your site.