What is an SEO Audit and How to Perform One on Your Website?

 An SEO audit is a review of your website from an SEO perspective to identify opportunities for improvement. An effective audit will reveal what works (and doesn’t work) from an SEO standpoint, uncovering any weak spots, as well as areas that are not being optimized. An audit will help you identify opportunities for keyword optimization and visibility, technical best practices, link diversity, or site structure and user experience. You can use this information to improve the search visibility of your website and drive more traffic from search engines.

 

What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a review of your website from an SEO perspective to identify opportunities for improvement. Stay on top of the search engine results with the best SEO Company in Chennai leading in the field with many successful clients. An effective audit will reveal what works (and doesn’t work) from an SEO standpoint, uncovering any weak spots, as well as areas that are not being optimized. An audit will help you identify opportunities for keyword optimization and visibility, technical best practices, link diversity, or site structure and user experience. You can use this information to improve the search visibility of your website and drive more traffic from search engines.

How to Perform an SEO Audit?

There are many ways to perform an SEO audit. You can do an audit manually by identifying your biggest SEO goals and then going through the website page by page to see how well they are being accomplished. Or you can use an automated tool to do the heavy lifting for you and present you with an in-depth report. If you choose to do the audit manually, here are some questions to consider: - What are the main goals of your website? What do you want your visitors to do? - What keywords are your visitors currently using to find you? - What content do you currently have on each page that’s relevant to those keywords? - What other pages on your website could be using this content to improve their visibility? - What is the user experience like for each page? Are there elements that could be improved? - What links does each page have and what could be done to diversify them? - What are the technical aspects of each page? Are they optimized for search engines?

 

What to Look for During an SEO Audit?

In a general sense, you want to look for opportunities to improve the SEO of your website. To do this, you need to know what your website is doing well and where it can be improved. For example, let’s say you have an ecommerce site that sells hiking gear. Your website currently ranks on page one for the term “hiking boots”. However, you also sell hiking socks, but they are not being targeted with keywords because no one is searching for them. You also notice that there are no links to your hiking socks page from other pages on your website; they are all linked to your hiking boots page. These are all areas where you can improve your SEO. You can start by adding the relevant keyword or keyword phrase “hiking socks” to your hiking socks page. You can also add this to the title and meta description. Next, you can add a link to your hiking socks page from your hiking boots and every other relevant page on your website. Finally, you can optimize your hiking boots page for “hiking socks”.

 

HTML and CSS Styling Audits:

When auditing your HTML and CSS styling, look for any styling elements on your pages that might be negatively impacting your SEO. For example, if you have an H2 tag above your clickable product title that is not a title attribute, Google will assume that H2 is the title of the page. This will significantly drop your page’s rank. Another example would be if you have an un-linkable image above your text. You can also check to see if your titles and descriptions are being used in the way they were meant to be. If they are not, you can edit them to be more effective. If you have images on your page, you can check to see if they are optimized for SEO.

 

SEO Audit of Your Website’s Content:

When looking at the SEO of your website’s content, you want to ensure that it is optimized for search engines and that it’s also written in a way that’s easy for humans to understand. You can do this by using keywords in your content naturally and thoughtfully, while also staying away from over-optimization. For example, let’s say you own an ecommerce website that sells hiking gear. You have a page that talks about the best hiking boots for specific types of terrains. The first paragraph of your article might be something like this: “When hiking through mud, sand, or any terrain where your boots will get dirty and covered in grime, it’s important to have a pair of hiking boots that can stand up to the challenge and keep your feet protected and dry.” While this is a great paragraph that is structured well, it doesn’t really use any keywords. To improve the SEO of this paragraph, you could re-write it like this: “The best hiking boots for after muddy and sandy conditions are those that are sturdy, protect the feet from rocks and debris, and keep the feet dry.” This new version uses keywords naturally and thoughtfully and it still has the same meaning. To do a full content audit, you can look at each page on your website and see if the content is optimized for search engines. You can also look at the links that are being used to link to different pages on your website.

 

Google Analytics Audit:

To do a Google Analytics audit, go to your Google Analytics account and click on the “Behavior” tab. Here you can see which pages are getting the most traffic and what your bounce rate is. You can also click “Goals” in the left-hand menu to see which pages are being “completed” by users. This will tell you what people are clicking on and if there are any pages that are being ignored. This information will give you a good idea of what pages on your website need improvement. For example, if there are certain pages that are not being visited often, you might want to re-write them or add more content to make them more appealing to your visitors. You can also see which pages are getting the most “completions” or “conversions”. This will tell you what pages are truly effective at driving traffic.

 

Check Your Website’s Technical SEO Strategies:

Technical SEO strategies can make or break your website’s visibility in search engines. To check if your website’s technical SEO strategies are sound, look at your website’s URL structure, title tags, meta descriptions, robots.txt file, indexability, speed, and more. First, you can check if your URL structure is correct. For example, if you have an ecommerce site selling hiking boots, your URL structure might look like this: www.examplehikes.com/hiking-boots If you want to improve your SEO, you could change the URL to this: www.examplehikes.com/hiking-boots/types-of-hiking-boots This will help you optimize your URLs for keywords and make them easier to read. Next, you can check the title tags for each page on your website. These are what show up in the search engine results above the URL. They should be around 55-60 characters long and include the keywords you want to rank for.

 

Final Words:

An SEO audit is an important part of understanding how your website is doing from an SEO perspective and where it can be improved. There are many ways to perform an SEO audit, and you can start with the basics outlined in this guide. To effectively perform an SEO audit, you need to understand what SEO is and how it can help your website. If you follow these steps, you’ll gain a better understanding of your website’s SEO, allowing you to make informed decisions to improve the search visibility of your website.