How to Perform an SEO Audit – A Guide for Beginners

Are you sure your website is interesting, engaging, and works properly? Or that the content of your website is ranking in web browsers?

The solution to all your problems is running an SEO Audit. 

A Search Engine Optimization Audit is a research of all the factors that work on visibility in search engines. This method gives an idea of what your website looks like to Google or Bing and on which page it ranks organically. 

There are various methods and tools to perform these audits, which we are going to discuss in the next article. 

What are SEO Audits?

An SEO audit is a method of interpreting how perfect your web page is. If your website has any issues, this technique will help you to correct them.

The ultimate goal of Search Engine Optimization is to discover weak points of your website that will harm its performance. 

An SEO audit is done for marketing purposes only. As a business person, you need to understand the issues with your website and the suggested recommendations should meet your needs.

You have to make sure to complete all the suggestions to make your website SEO friendly. To complete this procedure, all you need to do is to follow a proper roadmap.

Learn 2 Approaches to Digital Marketing – SEO vs SEM.

Types of SEO Audits

There are three types of SEO audits mentioned in this section:

1. Technical SEO Audit: A Technical SEO audit plays an important role in the maintenance of websites. This process checks all kinds of technical parts of websites. A technical SEO audit reviews whether the site is properly optimized for search engines or not.

2. On-Page SEO Audit: An On-Page SEO audit reviews content uploaded to a website. This content can be uploaded in the form of images, videos, texts, etc. This is where keywords and meta tags are used.

3. Off-Page SEO Audit: Off-Page SEO are those activities that are made outside of your website. Such as adding links to other well-known web pages to your website. This shows your website is a trusted website. It also helps your website to rank higher in web browsers.

How to conduct a professional SEO Audit

Previously, we have discussed what an SEO audit is and its different types. In this section, we are going to discuss how an SEO audit is made.

At ISEB we prefer 2 SEO online tools to help you run your SEO Audit:

• Ubersuggest
• SemRush

After the audit, you’ll get different recommendations and an SEO audit score, the main pillars of these SEO recommendations are:

1. Keyword Research

Before creating content, keyword research is a must. You should understand what the user wants. Before producing any content you should search the keywords on Google. There you will get to know what the other competitors are doing to attract users. 

Researching keywords will help you to understand what people are looking for after that work according to it. So, if you create content according to people’s needs, then it will increase your rank.

2. Identify duplicated content

One of the most important functions of SEO is to create plagiarism-free content. This means, that you shouldn’t copy any content from other websites. To make sure you create your content Google searches whether the content is being deliberately copied on your website or not.

3. Optimize Title, Meta Description, and Slug

Meta tags contain meta titles and meta descriptions. Meta titles and meta descriptions help Google to identify the contents of the page. The title and meta description summarize your content to your possible readers and attract traffic to your website.

4. Creating Internal links

How can you make it easy for visitors to find related pages on your website? Internal links are the answer. While creating new content, link other internal pages to it. This will help users to find similar content in one place and in a short amount of time, this will improve your SEO.

5. Page Speed

When you are looking for content and the page does not load quickly, you usually close that window, don’t you? If your site is slow and loading takes a lot of time, the user will go to another page that is faster than yours. This will affect your ranking. So, make sure, while auditing, to improve your page speed.

6. Website Security

How can you know if a website is secure? The website shows a message, next to the URL, whether the website is secure or not. You can see it in the shape of a lock.

Website security is another metric of SEO and plays an important role in your ranking. But how? Website security makes sure that all your information and data are secure.

For example, ‘Website A‘ and ‘Website B‘ have the dress you want. But website A is a secure site and website B doesn’t show the lock in the URL. So where would you like to enter your credit card details? Definitely website A, as it will keep all your data safe.

Why an SEO Audit is important

Now we know how to perform SEO audits, but why they’re so important? In this section, we are going to discuss their importance.

1. Enhances Website’s Performance

You should do an SEO audit regularly, just like your vehicle needs to be checked and fixed from time to time, an audit will help you to boost your performance in web browsers.

Performing an SEO audit will identify all issues your website has and also works on its security. As we know, SEO parameters change from time to time. So performing audits is a constant process.

2. Uses Updated SEO techniques

Search engine optimization is an industry that does not remain static. Therefore, SEO audits make sure that you are using updated SEO techniques.

3. Keep Track of Your Competitor’s SEO

The best way to do an SEO audit is to do an audit on your competitors. Studying all the strategies and tactics of your competitors can be helpful. You will see their mistakes and beat them.

SEO Audit Tools

We have already discussed the SEO Audit providers that we prefer at ISEB. Let’s take a look at more SEO tools:

• SpyFU
• Screaming Frog
• SEO Checkup
• SE Ranking
• Page Speed Insight
• Copyscape
• Word Counter
• Google’s Schema Markup Validator
• On Crawl
• Lumar Website Intelligence 

SEO Audit Checklist

10 steps to boost your SEO score after an SEO Audit:

1. Speed up your website.
2. Set up your keyword rank tracker.
3. Fix broken links.
4. Check whether your site is mobile-friendly or not.
5. Include keywords in the Image Alt-text and Title Attribute.
6. Improve your SEO on-page for all your content.
7. Make sure your content is useful and interesting.
8. Remove low-quality and unnecessary pages.
9. Switch from HTTP to HTTPS to ensure website security. 
10. Scan for website errors and broken links.

Conclusion | SEO Audit Beginners Guide

In this article, we have discussed all the things you need to know about SEO Audits. As a business owner, your website needs to be updated and helpful to users. And for that regular auditing is necessary. 

Let us know in the comment section if you want us to write about a tool in particular or anything SEO related.