Beyond creating your website, getting it to rank for a targeted keyword is particularly essential. It’s one of the crucial aspects of digital marketing. People typically use search engines to look up information. And would visit the pages displayed on SERPs for the information.
For Google to display and rank your website above others, your web pages must be properly optimized for visibility and traffic. So, how will you be able to tell if your web pages are strategically optimized? That’s where an SEO audit comes in.
This article explores advanced SEO audit and its importance for your website. Let’s dive in!
What Is an SEO Audit?
An SEO Audit analyzes your website to spot the factors and metrics that might impact its SEO performance in SERPs. You can say it involves how your website works with SEO best practices, and you’d be absolutely correct.
An SEO audit aims to discover all the nominal and technical issues affecting your website’s visibility during organic searches. Some of the elements of an advanced SEO audit include:
● Onpage SEO audit issues.
● Website structure issues.
● User experience issues.
● Content gaps and opportunities.
● Competitive marketplace insights.
● Potential off-page issues.
● Technical SEO issues, and many others.
As search engines are constantly changing the way web pages are ranked in SERPs, your website needs to be audited regularly for the best performance. Think of it like a regular checkup where illnesses can be quickly spotted and rectified before it causes serious damage to your system.
What are the Benefits of an SEO Audit?
Implementing an SEO audit of your website comes with several benefits. They include:
● Improved website performance. One of the benefits of an advanced SEO audit is improved website performance. The audit reveals if your web server is overloaded with too many requests. It will discover if your web content is loaded as quickly as possible to your target audience. You can rectify and improve your website performance with such information at your fingertips.
● Optimized content. An audit will reveal if your website content is optimized for SERPs. While each website is built for a different audience, it is essential to know the keywords to focus on. An SEO audit will reveal that to your digital marketing team.
● Improved user experience. An SEO audit will also lower your website’s bounce rates. If people are spending more time on your website, it’s a great sign. It means your user interface and experience are excellent.
● Better SEO performance. An SEO Audit exposes technical issues affecting your website’s inability to reach SEO success. With better SEO performance comes better traffic for your website.
Types of SEO Audits
There are different types of SEO audit to implement for your website. They include:
On-Page SEO Audit
As the name suggests, on page SEO audit focuses on analyzing and optimizing elements and structures within your website that are affecting your SEO. These elements are under your control, and you can tweak them to your benefit.
It involves the following:
● Keyword research. One of the key elements of an on-page SEO audit is keyword research. This is an essential aspect of your SEO performance long term. Before creating and publishing content on your website, you need to research the keywords that will lead people to your website. You can check out your competitor’s websites to see what their content is focused on. You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush, KeywordTool, Ahrefs, and Keyword Kegs.
● Keyword Usage. Beyond keyword research, an on-page SEO audit also involves spreading those keywords across your meta tags, headers, and content. You should deploy this properly and avoid keyword stuffing. Google frowns at keyword stuffing and might penalize your website.
● Internal linking. An audit also checks if your web pages are interlinked. If you’re creating new content on your website, it should link to previous pages of your website. This will make people and search engines locate other pages faster.
● Sitemap. This is a file that contains all the important pages of your website. HTML and XML sitemaps help search crawlers and people to locate different sections of your page easily.
Off-Page SEO Audit
Off-page SEO deals with elements that are beyond your control but can’t still affect your SEO performance. This includes the following:
Backlinks.
These are links that direct people to your site from other websites. When a reputable website links to your website, some of its readers might land on your page for more information. Backlinks can also help you rank better for specific keywords. The reason is that search engines rate your website as valuable if other websites are linking to it.
You can use backlink checker tools like Ahrefs and Moz to see the website referencing your web pages.
Technical SEO Audit
Professional SEO audit also involves the technical aspect of your SEO performance. It deals with the inner workings of your website. It includes the following:
● Website security. Site security is also an essential aspect of your SEO performance. In fact, Google has confirmed that site security is a ranking factor. If your website isn’t secure, you risk having your content stolen. More so, users can interact freely with your content when they know that your website is secure.
● Mobile-friendliness. A record 63% of all organic searches come from mobile devices. Thus, your website should be optimized for smartphones. If your website isn’t, your website is going to experience higher bounce rates. Google focuses on mobile-friendliness when crawling and indexing web pages and considers it a ranking factor.
● Page speed. A web page that takes too long to load is bad for SEO. People want to click and access relevant content within the first 10 seconds. They will leave and seek the content elsewhere if your website’s slow loading speed. A Google Search Console SEO audit will ascertain if your page loading speed is satisfactory or not.
How to Do an SEO Audit
When it comes to SEO audits, there are several tips to deploy. They include:
● Conduct on-page technical SEO checks
● Manage your internal and external links
● Check your page speed with Ubersuggest.
● Perform a backlink audit.
● Manage your internal and external links.
A professional SEO agency can conduct all of these actions if you cannot handle these tasks efficiently.
How Long Does an SEO Audit Take?
An SEO audit is a comprehensive process that might take time to accomplish. If there are more on-page, off-page, and technical SEO errors, it will take longer to rectify and fix everything.
An SEO audit can take up to 6 weeks, depending on the changes and implementations.
What Are SEO Audit Tools?
SEO audit is a digital process, so there’d be tools to make the job easier. These tools include:
● Google Search Console
● GTmetrix
● Google Analytics
● Screaming FrogSEOmator
● SEMrush Site Audit
● Google PageSpeed Insights
Conduct an SEO Audit With Abstrax Web
If your website isn’t generating traffic and leads, then it’s due for an SEO audit. Some of the processes explored in the article may be too sophisticated if you don’t know how to perform an audit. Hiring an SEO expert to handle and fix these issues seamlessly is essential.
Abstrax Web is a leading SEO agency that helps businesses improve their visibility and performance from organic searches. Our services include web design and development, website architecture, content creation, digital marketing, website wireframing, and many more.
Reach out to us to learn how we can help your brand.