SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization keeps on changing. This makes it essential for businesses to assess their website. Are you getting quality traffic and is the website well-optimized? These are definitely some of the questions that need to be answered. People might have advised you to go for SEO Audit! If ‘yes’ you are on the right track. Let’s check out and get to know more about this.
What is this SEO Audit?
SEO Audit is an evaluation of your website. The evaluation is based on many factors, which help in listing and identifying the problem areas that needs to be worked upon to improve the search results of the website. You might come across plenty of SEO Audit suggestions and tools, but all of them might not work so fine.
Here, you will be provided with the ultimate guide that will help you conduct SEO audit and know how well your site is functioning.
There are three main areas of SEO and therefore there are three areas where you need to conduct the audit.
- On page
- Off page
- Technical
Let’s understand these:
On page audit
Considered to be the most important of all, it is all about content. Usage of the right keywords, the right information is very essential. The important elements that need to be analyzed are:
- Title tags with keywords and the missing title tags
- Meta tags
- Duplicate title tags
- Unique content that is also engaging(in short quality content)
- Analyzing optimized pages as per the latest SEO practiced trends
- Making sure there are no broken links
- Speed and structure of website
- Analyzing the presence of internal links that will facilitate search engine
- Image ALT tag
You might come across many auditing tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Netpeak Spider and so on. You may download and use the free version, but a paid one will certainly do a better job. These tools are quick and effective providing the user a page by page analysis. Netpeak Spider is regarded to be the best, as it can audit and analyze any website.
A comprehensive on-page audit can be carried out by accessing the following:
- User experience needs to be good and so does the layout and functional aspect. The web design needs to be simple, comprehensive, logically arranged and yes, it also needs to be keyword focused as well.
- The URL needs to be keyword focused. It helps SEO. The URL andit’s keyword usage needs to be small and relevant to the webpage.
- NAP presence is essential. The Name, Address and Phone number of the business should be present in the website.
- HTML sitemap needs to be included in the footer section.
- When the breadcrumbs are present in the website, it is important to scan and apprehend that they are relevant and functional.
- The home page is the most visited page and the content scan for this page needs to be flawless.
- Consistently providing the website with good content will surely help a ton.
Off Page Audit
Backlinks play a major role in SEO. The off page audit focuses on the backlink analysis. However, here you need to make a comparison and know at least five of your competitors before starting off with the audit work. Serpstat is a tool that will help you find your completion easily.
The important elements that effect off-page audit are:
Blog marketing – Adding links and commenting on the blogs does have an impact on SEO
Social media – It is the best platform to voice your opinion.
Directory submission – Improve brand recognition and build trust in the market.
Press releases – Attract journalists and strengthen your SEO strategy.
Social Bookmarking –Submission of latest blogs in book marking sites can generate quality traffic and this will certainly promote your web business.
For off page audit the following things will certainly help you out.
- Google Search Analytics – The ranking and performance of the website is analyzed.
- Site penalties are accessed – Whether it is a manual penalty or an algorithm one.
- Domain authority is checked.
- Page authority backlink analysis is made.
- Analyzing the link quality and link velocity is also a critical part of the audit.
- Brand mentioning and anchor text analysis are some of the other auditing portions that need attention.
Technical Audit
Here the aim is to check how the website is accessible to robots and search engines in general. A website cannot survive without a strong foundation and this area mainly focuses on web development and web design of the site.The check points that are involved here are:
- Crawl the website thoroughly – To crawl the website thoroughly one might download web applications and see how it works.
- Checking duplicate content and other URL directs – One can rely on Google web master for addressing issues related to duplicate title tags. Redirecting the URL will also enable better user experience to the visitors, which again is a USP for the website.
What you need to check in the technical audit and how:
- The Google Search Console will help in looking into the DNS Settings and this will help you to know the problems that need to be dealt with.
- You should check server errors and drill down to analyze where things are going wrong. Again the Google search console will help immensely.
- The robots.txt file should be checked, as even if there are no errors, the robot.txt should not be locking major portions of the website.
- Address the 404s issues.
- Site security is important and so is https.
- HTML validation is essential and if there are errors coming up, then the problem needs to be addressed.
- Website speed and mobile friendly testing is important to analyze.
- XML sitemap is mandatory and malware scanning is also a crucial element that needs to be analyzed.
- Lastly, all pages should be indexed in the search engines and this needs to be checked.
Concluding it all
An assessment of your website through the eyes f search engine is important if you want to generate quality traffic to your website. An SEO Audit does that function. Even if your online venture is a small one, SEO Audit is essential; otherwise you might miss out on important things that the web world has to offer. So, are you game for a web hosting review? Let us know!