When you build a website, you should make sure that people will visit it regularly. An SEO audit can help with this. It is the first step to creating an implementation plan that will have measurable results. By doing so, your website will attract more visitors and rank higher on search engine results. Let’s take you through the steps you can take to polish and improve your website furthermore.
What is SEO?
Seo stands for Search Engine Optimization which ensures that your website shows up in the top google searches so that more people are bound to click on it. This gives a major boost to your website rankings and the visitor count reaches the sky. It’s one of the first steps you should take after setting up a website.
Now let’s see how with the help of an SEO audit you can improve your website stats and ensure its optimization.
How is SEO Audit different from SEO?
Seo audit is not much different from SEO. It is a process in which you track down ways you can improve the quality of your website. It requires a deep analysis of your website and tweaking its flaws.
The SEO Audit process
The SEO audit process is famous for the number of people it has satisfied. Website owners all around the globe have tried it and been satisfied with its results. Most SEO Audit processes take days and even weeks to finish. But this one is different. It’s far better and faster at its job, it can optimize your website’s performance in a matter of hours. You won’t have to spend more than a few hours doing it.
However, if your website is large and has many pages, it might take more than a few hours but for small to regular sized websites, this is a dream. It can be done in just a few hours. Now we will cut to the chase and take you through the 15 steps which will lead you to an optimized website. Just follow along as these are very simple and don’t require a special degree in computer science to follow through.
SEO Crawler
Before running through more manual checks, you must have an SEO crawler running in the background. What this crawler does is scan your website and let you know about the current SEO situations of your website. This way you will know what you are working with. You should use trustworthy SEO crawlers such as:
- Screaming frog
- Beam us up (free)
Site audit or SEO crawlers will also scan through all the eternal links present in your website along with any JS links.
Indexing on Google
Taking this step will ensure that no indexing issues exist. If your site is not indexed in google, this is likely the main reason you are not getting any rankings. In order to check if Google has indexed your page, you should go to the “google search console” and click on “google index”. You then can check your index status by clicking on “index status”.
You can find out how many search pages Google has indexed for your website, making it appear in search results. This is vital information, and you should never skip this step.
A Fresh SEO Campaign to Start
Now head on to google and search your brand name. it should appear as the top search unless your brand is new or has a generic phrase. If your website doesn’t show up as a top search, then Google thinks that some other website is more appropriate for that search. Here are ways you can climb up the ranks and end up as the top search:
- Have strong names, links, and URLs for your websites and avoid using generic names and phrases
- Run PR campaigns
- Getting mentioned by well-known pages
- Have a google business listing on your site.
- Construction of citations on business directories to help improve your ranks.
- Having a bold presence on all social networks.
By following these steps, you will climb up the search result ladder and finally reach the top. We recommend you check Google Search Console for any penalties.
On-Page SEO
It’s time for manual SEO checks. You start by doing this to our homepage, but it is advised to do this to every important page on your website. After going to the homepage, you right-click and select the “view page source”. Now you can quickly look at the basic on-page SEO. To be mindful of things like “is your title clickable and catchy?”, “Does your site have a custom meta description that attracts visitors?”, “are there well-optimized H1 tags?” and “is there a correct use of subheaders?”.
Answering these questions will help you determine whether your website is SEO or not.
It’s time to dig deeper and check your SEO crawl report. By now the crawler must have done its work and came up with a report. You can view it and look at the issues in depth. This will help you recognize flaws you missed manually.
Site audit> project> internal pages> HTML tags
Here you can view all the on-page issues found by the crawler. To save time you can filter them based on importance.
Duplicate Content
It’s key that you check for duplicate or thin content. Google puts the websites with duplicate content lower down the page. It’s advised that you check your web pages for duplicate content and fix it to achieve a higher ranking. It’s even worse if you have duplicate content on other websites. With a quick search, you can now detect these flaws using Copyscape.
Speed
Making sure that your webpage loads fast is also important. Statistics state that loading speed is also one of Google ranking factors. If your website contains bugs and loads slow, it will most likely have less traffic. Ensure that your web pages load faster to optimize them. You can use tools such as:
- Pingdom
- GTMetrix
- Ahrefs site audit
Structured Data
The proper formation of structured data plays a huge role in the performance of your website. Make sure that your structured data is properly formed. If it isn’t, we recommend you spend some time structuring it. Avoid spamming and mention content such as reviews, events, and product information.
Website Traffic
The motive behind doing this SEO audit process is to check if your website traffic is having good traffic. So it only makes sense to check how much visibility your website is having currently. We recommend you run a few reports in Google Analytics, Ahrefs to gain insight.
Now you need to ensure that your rankings are increasing! Check the updates on Google Analytics, Search Console, etc. We suggest you use Ahrefs site explorer to see your rankings and whether they are progressing or not. You can ensure this by viewing keyword reports as well.
Create High Quality Links
Figure out which keywords are helping your website be at the top 5th position! You can get a list of top keywords with the help of Ahref’s site explorer. After you have got your keywords, you can do the following to excel your webpage even further:
- Adding more internal links
- Building fresh backlinks
- Updating and relaunching
- Ensure keyword optimization.
Sort out Any Broken Links if Found
Broken links and pages will affect the quality and link equity of your page. You must see these bugs and fix them asap. To find broken pages, go to Site explorer> pages> best by links> add a “404” filter. You can filter these results by RD to see which pages contain the most broken links and fix them. You can fix these links by replacing the phrases, redirecting them to some other page, or leaving it as a 404 page.
Compare your Content with Competitors
With a quick search from Ahrefs site explorer, you can find plenty of content gaps. These gaps are what make your competitors better than you. Run a Competing Domains report to see your competitors. In this way, you can learn new keywords that you can incorporate into your content for a higher ranking.
Wrapping it up
Lastly, delete low-quality pages from your website to ensure that your site doesn’t end up in lower rankings again. Low-quality pages are of no use and can often cause strain on your website. Thus, it is better if you just delete them.
