Do you skills well is your website is performing?

SEO experts understand the importance of doing regular audits, except for many folks who only have a basic knowledge of SEO, it’s going to sound sort of a daunting task. However, in today’s world of digital marketing, it’s becoming more and more important to possess a transparent understanding of this.

If you’re trying to find recommendations on the way to perform an SEO audit, learn more about the newest tools and obtain a couple of tips for a far better understanding of the what, where, and why behind the method.

What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit checks the health of your website and in doing so, prevents spam and makes suggestions on the way to optimize. SEO audits are important for a variety of reasons, not the smallest amount of which because Google changes their algorithm frequently in accordance with new technology and new search patterns.

Conducting a radical SEO audit is an important start line for any digital marketer, whether you are doing so in-house or outsource the task. this is often because it allows you to research your current SEO efforts, regardless of how prolific or sparse they’re, and take immediate action off the rear of these insights.

Areas an SEO Audit will cover

An SEO Audit is actually a checkup for your system to ascertain how well it’s functioning as compared to the market. Below are a number of the foremost important areas that an SEO audit will cover:

Keyword Usage:

An audit will assist you to find out whether your keyword usage is on point, placed well, and poised to usher in the optimal amount of traffic.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI):

LSI may be a term that essentially refers to the context and intent behind a given search. to place it into context, as technology, specifically AI, progresses, it’s ready to understand more and more within the way of specific meaning, thereby possibly accounting for things like secondary and long-tail keywords with more frequency.

Organic Search Rankings:

If you’re paying for sponsored ads, you’ll want to always search for ways to chop down on this spending. An SEO audit can check to ascertain how well you’re doing in organic searches, thus possibly lessening the necessity to try to do paid advertising. you’ll also use the knowledge gleaned from this a part of the search to continue on with more strategies that ensure organic reach.

Keep up with Competition:

The competitors in your marketplace should even be doing this regularly to see their SEO rankings, keyword placement, and therefore the like. They’ll be checking their meta tags, links, and everything else, so so as to stay up with them, you would like to also imitate.

Understand Problematic Code:

An SEO audit can help to review the rear end of your site for bugs and other issues that will be slowing it down or pushing you down further in search rankings. You’ll want to urge a technical expert sort of a web developer to assist you with this if you don’t have the knowledge.

Crawling and Site Audits

Every effective SEO audit starts with a comprehensive site crawl. this enables you to assess the present situation and identify any issues your website may need. Essentially, a crawl will assist you to line a baseline for the remainder of your audit.

It’s good practice to try to to an automatic scan once a month just to watch basic factors like bounce rate, conversions, and page views. this may be often enough to mention major issues, like all on-page errors within the sort of broken links, page titles and meta-data or duplicate content. And if you discover any significant issues, you’ll then contact knowledgeable for an in depth audit. A more thorough check should be done annually.

When you do a scan or a full audit, your site is assessed, and bugs are often found, plus it gives you key indicators to optimize your site for better SEO and building brand awareness.

Here are a few key areas to consider when doing an SEO check:

• URL Structure: Are all of your URLs unique, clean and simple?
• Content: Is your copy well-written, formatted, informative and fresh?
• Meta descriptions: Are they unique on each page, and the right length?
• Links: Do you have an average of 5 per page? Do they all work?
• Images: Are the descriptions on point?
• Website structure: It is clear and easy to navigate?

A thorough check will analyze your landing page and how it relates to other pages, the overall user-friendliness of the page, the menu, and whether ads and banners are effective or in the way.

Page Speed

Page speed is additionally huge when it involves doing an SEO audit, and your page load time matters. a quick site speed promotes a positive user experience, whereas a slow one will doubtlessly end in higher bounce rates in our age of limited attention spans! this is often obviously faraway from ideal if your website is one among your primary channels for conversion.

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to research the speed of your website because it renders both on desktop and mobile. YSlow is another tool that will check your webpages and supply suggestions that you simply can easily implement, like properly formatting and compressing images. Pingdom Website Speed Test, meanwhile, examines every part of each website and provides an in-depth list of the things on a page, their size, and individual load times.

The importance of a speed test lies within the incontrovertible fact that you’ll determine which elements of your website are acting as obstacles from an SEO perspective. Once you recognize which areas you would like to enhance, you’ll be ready to optimize your site’s performance.

Assess your Site Architecture

Another factor which will improve your site’s SEO is ensuring it’s a solid structure. the higher the architecture, the higher the user experience, both in terms of website visitors, also because the bots that crawl it to work out its search ranking.

It’s for this reason that having a transparent, logical, organized structure that’s reflected during a complete, accurate sitemap (that has been submitted to your webmaster tool accounts) is important. a robust URL structure is equally important.

Make sure that it relates back to your site hierarchy which you adhere to clear and straightforward naming conventions, avoiding any symbols or numbers where possible.

An example of a strong URL structure would be:

Another component of a robust site architecture includes ensuring all of your main webpages are listed within the top navigation menu of your website, again so site visitors and bots can find everything they have easily and efficiently.

For an equivalent reason, you ought to also include internal links that will take users and bots from one page of your website to a different one in one simple step. In these ways, you’ll be ready to guarantee a robust site architecture that will benefit your SEO!

Check your Site’s Content

Content may be a fundamental on-page SEO factor and one which will strongly influence the effectiveness of your site. Google may be a proponent of regularly updated, unique content that’s relevant to the requirements and preferences of a searcher. this suggests that you simply need to confirm that your website’s content fulfills this brief, so you’ll enjoy enhanced brand visibility and better rankings.

When creating content, you ought to use keywords in a consistent, natural manner. you would like to strike a balance between using targeted keywords but not conveying your brand to be ‘spammy’. When it involves creating content for SEO, value and relevance are key!

Check your Tags

Concise, descriptive title tags that accurately convey the aim of the webpage in question. Longer titles are going to be stopped by search engines so, during this instance, less is more. attempt to include a relevant keyword where possible!

A meta-tag is an outline of a webpage’s content. If optimized, they’re going to incentivize a searcher to click through your listing on a SERP to your website. Alt tags for images, meanwhile, are a text description that’s essential for bots when crawling an internet site. If you include accurate descriptions of your site’s imagery (and again, use targeted keywords if it feels natural), this may significantly impact your SEO.

In terms of other important tags, ensuring each of your pages includes a rel=” canonical” link (otherwise referred to as the canonical tag) in its HTML will prevent duplicate content issues, while blog post tags will assist you to arrange your site’s content for crawling- provided you’ve got a blog of course!

Check your Backlinks

Sometimes, it’s not what you recognize, but who you recognize. Often, search engines can determine the standard of your website, and its perceived value to searchers supported the standard of the websites that link thereto. Historically, there was a practice referred to as ‘link farming’ that involved exchanging reciprocal links with other sites so as to reinforce SEO.

However, as time has gone on, the practice of SEO has refined and algorithms became more sophisticated. In terms of backlinks now, it’s quality over quantity, and if an inquiry engine believes that questionable websites are linking to you, it could bring your own site into disrepute. Similarly, it’s important to verify that your links are coming from a spread of domains, instead of an equivalent website as this may also impact your SEO.

SEO Audit Tools

Fortunately for most of us who aren’t SEO experts, there are quite a few tools out there that can help you perform an effective SEO audit. Here are a few examples.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider: 

You can crawl up to 500 URLs for free and then a license is £149 per month. All you need to do is enter the URL you want to crawl – in our case, it would be www.digitizal.com – and the tool will carry out an analysis for you.

Google Analytics: 

This is a must-have for any digital marketer in any industry. It will give you key indicators of all kinds of metrics and will guide you towards better SEO in a number of ways. It’s something that can be used continually to track and monitor traffic. It can be integrated into Screaming Frog so you can compare site data such as sessions, page views, and bounce rates, which will give you a more granular, all-encompassing insight into what’s happening with your site.

Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console):

 Google provides several affordable tools that allow anyone to do regular SEO checks and help you see your page “as” Google sees it as a way of checking the performance of your site.

Check My Links:

This tool allows you to try to check on your links to form sure they’re all working in favor of traffic instead of against it. as an example, it’ll mean any broken links, appropriate density of links, and structure of both internal and external links. While this is often something that’s fairly easy to be done manually, this literally takes seconds to try to do.

SEO Report Card:

this may analyze your site to ascertain how well it’s shaping up as compared to the competition. it’ll undergo things like rank analysis, link building structures, trust metrics, and authority baseline. it’ll also assess your site’s overall speed and user-friendliness.

MOZ’s Crawl Test Tool:

once you get a professional subscription with MOZ, you’ll also get a tool that helps you boost your page ranking for particular keywords and provides you growth reports. Basically, what this does is uses MOZ’s crawler to research your pages then sends a report.

Browseo:

This tool will allow you to view your webpages even as an inquiry engine will read them. this may allow you to audit the more technical elements of your content and refine them where necessary.

Majestic:

The tool that’s self-described as ‘the planet’s largest link index database’, and can assist you to discover who is linking to you, so you’ll discern if they supply a relevant and valuable connection.

You can find an in depth list of SEO audit tools on HubSpot.

How important is an SEO-audit?

It’s important to check a website’s overall health to ensure its usability in both an internal and external context. You’ll need to have an internal investigation of a number of factors, including the sitemap, anchor text, and even social media platforms. Load time is big, and doing a thorough audit will also bring up red flag issues that you need to address.

One of the reasons that doing this is so important is to make sure that you’re not getting penalized by Google for doing something that might damage your site ranking. There are a lot of little details that can result in this, and if you’re not an SEO expert, you could very well be doing it without knowing it. When you get an external audit, you can then receive detailed feedback about best practices with your content, linking and so on.

The last thing you need is to be attacked or penalized due to having some sort of content on your site that you had no idea was hurting its ranking; this could be costing thousands of dollars. But it’s a complex issue that should be investigated by a professional.

Doing a full SEO audit is quite complicated and technical, and you can find many more technical descriptions of how to complete one elsewhere. It may not sound like the most fun activity in the world if you’re not a techie, but it can actually boost your revenue in ways that you might never imagine if done right. It’s important that you investigate the overall performance of your website regularly. Do a check once a month using some easy tools, and have an expert review your website yearly. You can glean valuable information about all kinds of metrics if you keep on top of this and your business, or clients will thank you for it.

Let Digitizal help you when your SEO isn’t working

If your SEO doesn’t work like you want it to, hopefully, the tips above can help you resolve the issue. But if you’re still struggling to drive results, it might be time to partner with an agency — and there’s no better SEO agency than Digitizal.

With over 05 years of experience, we know what it takes to run a stellar SEO campaign. Our SEO services can help you excel at page speed, content creation, keyword integration, and more.

To get started with us, call +92 317 8866096 or contact us online today!