Complete Guide To Conduct The Best SEO Audit
Website audit is most important part of SEO through which the website health status is checked. Via SEO audit, businesses or online marketers can identify the website’s weakness and rectifies it with ease.
To put it technically, SEO audit is the complete process of evaluating the website with the SEO audit checklist and correcting it for the betterment.
When Is SEO Audit Performed?
You have launched the great website. You might be proud of the features that website hold, however the website is lacking to resolve its purpose. That is, it fails to bring more website visitors. Then it is correct time to perform the search engine optimization audit with the checklist & details given here.
By following these procedures, you can find the problems that hinder your website to bring traffic, leads and profits.
By The End Of Doing SEO Audit, You Will Come To Know The Below Given Details:
- Where you stand in industrial competition. Whether you are on right path or lacks far behind.
- You can clearly identify what changes must be done on website to make it competitive.
- SEO scores for the website.
- Uncover the website’s strength and weakness. Rectify them as early as possible.
- Make some technical changes by predicting the future SEO.
Now let’s go in detail about the SEO audit procedures and how to perform it easily.
The techniques given here are niche and evergreen and so, SEO experts can use it at any time.
The sole purpose of doing SEO audit is to improve the website search ranking.
For this, before getting into off-page optimization factors, one must check the on-page of the website. Only when this is perfect, off-page techniques will work well.
Use Reliable SEO Audit Tools:
So, utilize the reliable SEO audit tools like SEO Checker and figure out the changes that must be done. There are many SEO audit tools available online. However relying all of it will topple the audit results. Only few tools will be reliable and accurate. The best example for this is SEO Checker.
In this tool, you can type the website URL and also the industrial competitors’ website URL to find out the differences. The tool will perform SEO audit and give the results within minutes.
Through this, you can easily compare your website performance with the competitors. Find out where your website lacks.
For example, your website may be missing with alt tags which are one of important SEO ranking factor. However your competitors might have given alt tags for the images in their website. And this is the right time to give appropriate keywords as alt tags for the images present in website pages.
The alt tags must be relevant to the web pages. You can also check how competitors have given it.
Check for Penguin & Panda Google Algorithm Updates:
We all knew that Panda update is to check the content. Hence do the quick Panda check for all the website pages content. Furthermore, Penguin update is for checking the natural backlinks that are made for the website. Majestic SEO is the best tool for checking the Penguin update. If you find any irrelevant backlinks or low quality backlinks linking to your website then it is advisable to delete it.
To delete the irrelevant backlinks: Go to the webmaster search console, from dashboard, select Search Traffic > Links to Your Site. And from Who Links the Most > More. Select Download More Sample Links. All the backlinks formed for your website will be downloaded in excel sheet. You can delete the unwanted links in that excel sheet.
Later, go to Disavow Links Tool Page, select the website URL and then click on Disavow links. Now upload the edited excel sheet. And thus the unwanted backlinks will be removed from search engine.
Improve Meta Tags & Check Canonical URL:
You can also compare the website page titles of yours with the competitors via audit tools. Check if any website pages are missing with page title & description. If so, then create page title and description for it. While creating it, remember that the web page titles must hold branded phrase like company’s name or a tag line related to the web page.
Secondly, the Meta description’s length must be according to Google’s latest algorithm. The Meta description must be the answer for that page’s title. Create unique content as the search engine loves it.
The SEO audit contains canonical check too. Ensure that every website pages have canonical URL. Ensure that the canonical URL must match the regular URL.
Crawl Throughout the Website & Identify the Problems:
Sometimes, the website issues might be hidden and it requires an eagle’s eye to detect it. For example, sometimes my mistake you might have included some web pages under “No Index and No Follow”. Due to this, those website pages might have missed its chance to get crawled by search engines.
Sometimes, the website might lack in 404 page, hence create it and upload the 404 page.
So take this opportunity to perform the great website crawl to identify these sorts of technical issues.
Improve the User Experience:
There are many ways to improve the user experience since it is most important for any business.
Website Color: This plays a critical role for creating the brand identity. The color of the website must match the brand logo to make a strong presence in users mind. Heading must be catchy too.
Use Good Images & Videos: These visually presence creates a good impact among users. A product/service must be represented in rich way that offers user experience.
Share the Most Important Information on Above the Fold: Usually the banner slides present in home page of the website must not be too lengthy that occupies the total screen length. However it must be minimal and niche information must be shared above the fold.
Keyword Research is Basic Factor:
Usually search terms chance from time to time. Hence make a detailed keyword research of how users type and search for your business online. For example, “Website Designing Company” is used long back and people stopped searching via this search term. Instead “Web Design Company” is the latest search trend these days.
y using those old search trends, it is highly impossible to get good search results. By using it in the website content will make the website outdated. Hence implement the researched keywords in website content to make the betterment.
Check Whether The Website Is Mobile Friendly:
These days, website owners are rushing up to make their website pages mobile responsive. And this trend will constantly grow without diminishing. By 2021, it is expected that nearly 52.3 million users use the mobile devices to search the data on the internet.
The statistical data says that in 2015, 32.1% of users used the mobile devices to search the data, in 2016 the percentage was raised to 36.6%, in 2017 it was 40.7 and this year it is estimated to be 44.5%
Hence
Why one must miss this wide opportunity of getting mobile customers? Therefore check whether all the website pages are mobile responsive.
Check the Website Loading Time:
When the website has longer loading time then the visitors will get frustrated and move to other website. Nearly 25% of the visitors are estimated to get irritated because of longer loading time. And they never come back to that website.
To reduce the bounce rate and to catch hold of the customers, SEO experts must check the website loading time during SEO audit. The website must load as quickly as possible. To check the page speed – Pingdom Website Speed checking Tool can be used.
Here is the list of things which will slow down the website speed. Though there are several other factors, these parameters are considered to be the most specific ones.
- Too much of website pages coding will reduce the website speed. Hence check whether the code-to-text ratio is good. If there are unwanted codes present then consult with website developer and delete it.
- No caching Elements: Usually cache is implemented in website so that when users enter the website for first time, the website elements get cached in user’s browser. Later when they enter other time, through the caching the website is loaded quickly.
- Page size is longer than 1.5MB: then website loading is longer.
Key Takeaways:
Follow the given SEO audit checklist while checking the website pages. Use reliable SEO audit tools to identify the hidden mistakes within the website pages. Resolve those issues to make the website to stand among competitors and also in search rankings.
Check whether the web pages hold canonical URLs and whether it contains Meta tags – Meta title and Meta description. Improve the user visual experience via rich videos and images. Implement the best search terms as keywords within the website content.
Finally, crawl through website pages to find out the mistakes to be rectified and do it as early as possible.