14 Simple Steps for an SEO Audit

Crawling a website is one of the first steps in conducting an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audit. This process involves a search engine, like Google, sending out a team of robots, also known as “crawlers” or “spiders,” to find new and updated content on the web. These crawlers go from site to site and page to page to gather information about each webpage, such as its topics, images, keywords, and more. Search engines then use the data collected to decide how to index and rank the website in search results. A website that is easy to crawl is more likely to be indexed properly and rank higher in search results.

When you crawl a website during an SEO audit, you’re checking to make sure that search engine crawlers can access and understand the content on your website. You’ll look for things like broken links, duplicate content, and poor website structure, all of which can make it difficult for crawlers to understand your site. For instance, if a crawler comes across a broken link, it won’t be able to access that page, meaning it won’t be indexed or ranked. You can use tools like Google’s Search Console to crawl your website and find any potential issues.

Website speed, also known as site load time, is a critical aspect of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and refers to how quickly a website loads when a user clicks on it from a search engine result page. Websites that load slowly can create a poor user experience. Imagine you click on a website, and it takes a long time to load; you would likely get frustrated and navigate away, right? That’s exactly what your visitors would do, too. Google and other search engines recognize this and, as a result, they tend to rank faster websites higher on search results. Therefore, having a fast website can help improve your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).

During an SEO audit, checking the website speed is essential. Several tools, like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, or Pingdom, can help you determine how quickly your website loads. These tools will not only give you a score indicating your website speed, but they’ll also provide suggestions on how to improve it. This might include reducing the size of your images, minimizing the use of certain scripts, or improving server response time. Implementing these changes can make your website load faster, improve user experience, decrease bounce rates, and ultimately boost your SEO ranking.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is all about making sure your website shows up when people search for relevant topics on search engines like Google. One of the things that can affect your website’s SEO is its mobile-friendliness. In simple terms, mobile-friendliness refers to how well your website works on a smartphone or tablet. This is important because a large number of people browse the internet on their mobile devices. In fact, according to BroadbandSearch, mobile traffic made up 54.8% of all web traffic in 2021 (source: https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/mobile-desktop-internet-usage-statistics).

When conducting an SEO audit, it’s crucial to check the mobile-friendliness of your website because search engines, like Google, consider this when ranking websites. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s likely to rank lower, which means fewer people will find your site when they conduct a search. Bing even provides a free tool that you can use to check if your site is mobile-friendly. To make a website mobile-friendly, you need to ensure that it’s easy to navigate on a small screen, that text is readable without zooming in, and that links and buttons are spaced out enough to be tapped accurately. Improving the mobile-friendliness of your website will not only improve your SEO but also provide a better user experience for your visitors.

On-page SEO, also known as on-site SEO, refers to the practice of optimizing individual webpages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. It involves both the content that is visible to users (like the words they read on the page) and elements that are visible only to search engines (like meta tags). For example, you would want to make sure the content on your page is relevant and engaging to users, using appropriate keywords that people might use when searching for the kind of information or products you offer.

In an SEO audit, analyzing on-page SEO would involve looking at various factors. First, you’d look at the content itself: Is it high-quality and relevant, and does it effectively use keywords? Next, you’d look at the HTML source code of the page to check things like title tags (the title of your webpage that appears in search results), meta description (the short description that appears under your webpage title in search results), and header tags (used to identify headings and subheadings within your content). You’d also look at your pages’ URL structure to ensure it’s clean and readable, with words separated by hyphens and no unnecessary parameters. By doing this, you can identify any weaknesses in your on-page SEO and make necessary improvements to help your website rank higher in search results.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is about making your website easier to find when people search for something related to what you offer. A vital part of this is the structure of your website and how the pages link to each other, known as internal linking. Essentially, internal linking is like a map of your website that helps users and search engines navigate your content.

Imagine you have a book, but the chapters are not connected, and you have to guess which chapter comes after the one you just read. It would be tough to follow the story, right? The same applies to your website. If your pages are not linked correctly, it makes it hard for visitors and, importantly, search engine crawlers to navigate your website. Internal links are like bridges that connect different parts of your website, making it easy for visitors and search engines to understand the structure and content of your website. During an SEO audit, you will check to make sure these links are working properly and are logically structured. If the links are broken or the structure doesn’t make sense, it can hurt your ranking in search results, meaning fewer people will find your site.

The content of a website is one of the most important factors that search engines consider when ranking websites. This content includes everything from the words on the page to the images and videos featured.

Analyzing website content involves investigating various elements. Firstly, you’ll want to ensure that the content is high quality, relevant, and valuable to the reader. This means it should be well-written, informative, and engaging. For instance, if a website is about baking, it should have well-detailed recipes, tips, and maybe even videos showing baking techniques. Additionally, the content should be unique and original, not copied from another source. Search engines value originality and can penalize websites for duplicate content. Secondly, it’s important to check that the content is optimized for SEO. This means it includes relevant keywords that people might use when searching for the topic on Google, but these keywords should be used naturally and not excessively. For example, if the website is about baking, some keywords might be ‘cookie recipes’, ‘how to bake a cake’, etc. Other factors to consider are the use of meta tags, title tags, and image alt text, which help search engines understand the content better.

One key aspect of SEO is your site’s content —search engines like Google use this content to understand what your site is about and how relevant it is to a person’s search.

One common issue that can harm a site’s SEO is duplicate content. This is when the same content appears in more than one place on your site, or on other sites on the web. This can confuse search engines and make it harder for them to understand what your site is about. It’s kind of like if you were trying to read a book, but every other page was a copy of the first one – you’d get confused and would probably stop reading. Similarly, search engines might not rank your site as highly if they find duplicate content. As part of an SEO audit, we’ll look for any duplicate content on your site and fix it by either removing the duplicates or using techniques like 301 redirects or canonical tags, which tell search engines which version of the content is the “original” or most important.

Backlinks are links from one website to another. In the world of SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, these are very important. When a website has a lot of backlinks, search engines like Google see this as a positive signal. It’s a bit like a popularity contest – if many different sites are linking to a certain site, search engines will think this site must have good and useful content, and will rank it higher in the search results. For example, if you run a website about dog training and many other sites link to your articles, Google will see your site as a trusted source of information about dog training.

Now, in an SEO audit, analyzing backlinks is a critical step. An SEO audit is a process of examining how well your website is optimized for search engines. When analyzing backlinks, you’re looking at the number and quality of other websites that link to yours. You want to make sure these are legitimate, relevant websites, not spammy or suspicious ones. For example, having a backlink from a well-respected pet blog to your dog training site is good. But if you have a backlink from a site about shoes, that could be seen as irrelevant or suspicious by search engines. Tools like Moz’s Link Explorer or Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker can be used to analyze your backlinks.

Broken links are links on a website that no longer work because the webpage they lead to has been moved or deleted, or the link itself was incorrectly typed. They are problematic because they lead to a dead end for both users and search engine crawlers. For example, if you click on a link hoping to find a chocolate cake recipe, but instead get an error message, that’s a broken link. This frustrates users and makes them likely to leave the website.

Broken links also harm a website’s SEO because they hinder search engine crawlers from indexing the website properly. These crawlers, also known as spiders, are automated programs that search engines like Google use to collect data about websites. They follow links on websites to discover and index new webpages. If a crawler encounters a broken link, it cannot index the webpage the link leads to, and this can negatively impact the website’s visibility in SERPs. Therefore, it’s crucial to regularly check for and fix broken links on a website as part of an SEO audit. Tools like Google’s Search Console can help identify these broken links.

Social media integration is one part of this audit. It refers to how well your website connects with your social media platforms. For example, do you have buttons on your website that lead to your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? These features not only make it easier for your visitors to find and follow your social media accounts, but they also signal to search engines like Google that your website is more credible and relevant, which could improve your search ranking. Moreover, when you post on social media and include links back to your website, this can also boost your SEO. This is because search engines see these links as endorsements of your content, which can help increase your visibility in search results.

The robots.txt file is a simple text file in your website’s root directory that instructs search engines on how to crawl and index pages on your site. Think of it as a guide that tells search engine robots which pages or files the robot can or can’t visit on your site. This is important because it helps search engines understand which parts of your site are important or relevant. For example, if you have a page on your website that you don’t want Google to index, you can use the robots.txt file to block that page.

During an SEO audit, checking the robots.txt file is an important step. This is to ensure that the file isn’t accidentally blocking search engines from indexing important pages. If a search engine can’t access and understand your content, it can’t index it, which means it can’t show up in search results. For instance, if your entire product catalog was blocked from search engines, your product pages wouldn’t show up when someone searches for them on Google. So, your robots.txt file needs to be set up correctly to ensure maximum visibility to search engines. Here’s a handy guide from Google on how to create a robots.txt file.

In simple terms, a sitemap is like a map or directory of your website that helps search engines like Google understand your site’s structure and find all the pages on your site. Think of it like the table of contents in a book. The XML format is a specific code format that’s easy for search engines to read. It’s like writing the table of contents in a language that Google understands. An XML sitemap is especially important if your site is large or has a lot of archived content that might not be linked to other parts of your site.

During an SEO audit, a review of your XML sitemap can reveal whether it’s functioning properly and helping search engines discover all your website’s content. For example, if a page on your site isn’t listed in the sitemap, Google might not know it exists and so it won’t show up in search results. On the other hand, if your sitemap includes pages that no longer exist on your site, it can lead to errors, which can negatively impact your site’s SEO. So, checking the XML sitemap is like making sure the table of contents in your book is accurate and up-to-date.

When you’re surfing the internet, you may notice that some websites start with “http://” while others start with “https://”. This extra “s” might seem insignificant, but it’s actually very important. It stands for “secure” and it means that the website has HTTPS encryption. This is a technology that helps protect the information that you send or receive on that website, like your passwords or credit card numbers. In other words, it helps keep your data safe from hackers. For example, if you’re shopping online and you enter your credit card information, HTTPS encryption would scramble this data so that it’s difficult for anyone else to read.

During an SEO audit, checking for HTTPS encryption is a crucial step. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is all about improving your website so that it appears higher in search engine results. And search engines like Google favor websites that are secure and protect their users’ data. So, if your website has HTTPS encryption, it could potentially rank higher in search engine results. This means more people could find your website and you could get more traffic. On the other hand, if your website doesn’t have HTTPS encryption, it could hurt your SEO and your website could appear lower in search engine results. This is why it’s important to check for HTTPS encryption during an SEO audit. You can easily do this by looking at the beginning of your website’s URL in your web browser. If it starts with “https://”, you’re good to go. If it doesn’t, you might want to consider getting HTTPS encryption for your website. You can learn more about how to do this from [Google’s guide on securing your site with HTTPS](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en).

Analyzing keywords and rankings is a crucial part of an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) audit. Keywords are essentially the terms which people type into search engines when they’re looking for something. For example, if you’re looking for a place to buy a new pair of shoes, you might type “shoe stores near me” into Google. These keywords are what businesses aim to rank for, meaning they want their website to show up in the search results when someone searches for those words. Thus, part of an SEO audit involves looking at what keywords a website is currently ranking for, how high it’s ranking, and whether those keywords are the most effective ones for that business.

If a business isn’t ranking well for its desired keywords, it’s a sign that they need to improve their SEO strategy. This could involve creating more content around those keywords, making sure their website is easy to navigate, or improving their site’s loading speed. Additionally, an SEO audit will also analyze how competitive certain keywords are. For instance, it might be very hard for a small local shoe store to rank for the term “buy shoes online” because they’re competing against large national retailers. In this case, the audit might suggest targeting more specific keywords like “buy running shoes in [city name]” instead. This is why analyzing keywords and rankings is so important – it helps businesses understand where they currently stand and what they need to do to improve their visibility in search results.