Have you ever wondered why your website isn't getting more traffic or converting leads and sales? Well, it probably doesn't rank well on Google's search engine result page (SERP).
So, how should you start working on ranking in Goole to increase your traffic? Of course, it is through search engine optimization (SEO).
Before optimizing your website for search engines, though, you should run an SEO audit report.
But what is an SEO audit? An SEO audit of your website analyzes how well your website is optimized for search engines (basically Google and Bing).
It can identify errors and issues on your website that prevent it from ranking well in Google and find opportunities to help it gain more visibility in search engines.
As such, an SEO audit is critical as it helps you analyze your website and formulate a plan to optimize it for your visitors and readers. This, in turn, lets you increase traffic and better rankings from search engines like Google.
In this blog, I will explain in depth what an SEO audit comprises, what tools can be used to complete it, and how to complete the SEO audit report.
Why Is SEO Audit Important?
The picture below is a prime example of why an SEO audit is essential: The webpage is challenging to navigate on a mobile device and looks terrible on a desktop.
This alone and many other issues are hurting the website's ranking on Google and Bing. An SEO audit's sole purpose is to find such problems and provide an in-depth report on what can be improved about the website to increase its SEO rankings.
What Does An SEO Audit Report Cover?
An SEO audit is a multifaceted report that covers several aspects of a website. When your SEO agency does a site audit, it checks different components of your website and gives you a comprehensive report that helps you understand what problems your site may have that need to be resolved for your website to rank better.
Below Are The Aspects That a Comprehensive SEO Audit Report Will Cover:
Mobile Friendliness
Whether the site is optimized for mobiles and if mobile visitors can easily navigate and browse through the site.
Indexing and Crawling Issues
If the web pages are properly indexed and can be crawled, and if non-indexed pages are blocked.
Website Loading Speed
An SEO audit checks whether the site loading speed is good per Google's recommendation and if the load speed is slow it identifies the issues that are causing the slow load speed.
Organic Search Traffic
The audit report should cover the organic search traffic you received within the last 14 months, it should also mention what locations you are getting the most traffic from and the top search queries for which you are currently ranking.
Backlink Analysis
An SEO audit report will cover an in-depth analysis of the existing backlink quality of the website.
Broken Links
The report will also show whether any webpage links are broken or have errors.
Keyword Ranking
Along with organic search traffic the report should also include the current keywords that your site is ranking in.
Competitor Analysis
The report will also include what keywords your competitors are ranking for and their backlinks report
Website Architecture
The report should indicate whether all your web pages can be reached in 3 clicks or less from the homepage and whether the most important pages are closer to the home page.
Opportunities to Improve Site Content
Finally, the report should include how the site content can be improved through modern copywriting practices to increase
engagement, reduce bounce rate, and make the content more "for the reader" instead of "for the search engine".
SEO Audit Tools
To complete a comprehensive SEO audit on your website, using SEO tools is a must. This is because the audit is dependent on complex data about the aforementioned factors of your website and your competitor's website.
Some SEO Tools are free, while others are paid. Below are some of the SEO tools that you should be using if you want your site audited:
1) Ubbersuggest
Ubbersuggest is one of the most affordable SEO tools for optimizing your website. For a one-time $200 payment, you get lifetime access to keyword research, website audit, website traffic estimation, and tools to acquire backlink opportunities.
2) Google Search Console
GSC is a must for auditing your website. It shows the monthly traffic you are getting and breaks down the traffic source by country, page, and keywords.
3) Moz
Moz is one of the renowned SEO software that many use for their SEO needs. Its Moz Pro product can be brought at a monthly subscription rate of $99/month and gives you access to keyword research, rank tracking, website crawling, on-page optimization tools, and Backlink research tools.
4) Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO is a website crawler that helps with website auditing. It provides a comprehensive report about all on-page optimization factors and tells you where issues lie and what can be improved. It has both a free and a paid version.
5) Semrush
Semrush is one of the most popular SEO software tools that is a complete digital marketing tool for all your SEO and digital marketing needs. It not only can help you with site audit but also with link-building, competitor analysis, keyword research, content writing, and much more!
Below is a step-by-step guide on how to do an SEO audit of your website. Of course, if you think it is too much of a hassle, you can always hire our SEO agency to help you.
1. Use An SEO Tool to Run A Crawl Of Your Website
SEO tools such as Screaming Frog SEO, Ubersuggest, and Semrush all have the option to crawl/scan your website to find SEO issues.
Web crawls show issues such as whether your pages are indexable, have appropriate H1 and Title tags, meta descriptions, etc. The site crawl also tells you whether you have slow-loading web pages and whether any of your internal links are broken.
This helps to figure out what needs to be done to improve your website.
2. See If There is Any Indexing Issues
Use Google's Search Console (GSC) and your Site Audit to see if there are any indexing issues.
This will help you determine whether Google does not index any of your Web pages and, if so, what the reason is.
3. Check To See if There are Any Organic Traffic Drops and Find Out What Caused Them
Use GSC to find out if there have been any recent organic traffic drops on your website. Traffic drops can happen for several reasons, but the most common reasons are:
Google's Algorithm Updates
Google Penalty
Your competitors' websites are doing better, causing you to decrease in ranking.
If Google penalized your website, you can find it through Google's Search Console's Manual Action section.
If you have been affected by Google's algorithm updates, the decrease in traffic will be around the time when a new update has been released. You can easily track this through Google Search Central.
If your competitors are taking over your Google ranking, use SEMrush, Ahref, or Moz to find out which SERP rankings are decreasing and what you can do to resolve the issue.
4. Is there a 301 Redirect for Multiple Versions of Your Website?
There can be multiple versions of your website, such as:
To Google, these are all different websites. This is why it is essential that the various versions of all 301 redirect to only one version, namely to https://www.aslpreservationsolutions.com/
If the 301 redirect is not set, your website will run into many issues, as Google will consider all of your web pages to have duplicates. Which also dilutes your PageRank, among other things.
5. Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly?
As of 2024, 60.67% of worldwide website traffic comes from mobile devices. That means your website MUST be mobile-friendly first. If it isn't, chances are that due to poor user experience, your website will not rank well in SERPs.
Because, Mobile-friendliness is one of the main Google ranking factors for SEO and it can directly influence your ability to rank in Google.
You can check your site's mobile friendliness in the Mobile section of the Core Web Vitals report in GSC.
It will also tell you why the mobile web pages are not considered good and what needs improvement.
6. Check Your Core Web Vitals
The Core Web Vitals report found in GSC shows how your page is performing in terms of user experience based on real-world usage data.
The report checks 3 metrics measured by actual user data:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The time it takes to render the most significant content element (usually an image or video) visible from when the user clicks on the URL.
Interaction To Next Paint (INP): INP assesses a web page's overall responsiveness to user interactions by observing the time it takes for the webpage to respond to mouse clicks and keyboard key presses. The final INP value is always the most extended interaction observed.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures the sum of all individual layout shift scores that occur for all the unexpected layout shifts that happen during the entire lifetime of the web page. The score is zero to any upward value, where a higher number means more frequent layout shifts occurring. Since layout shifts are a lousy user experience, it is essential to fix CLS issues if your webpage has a high value (>0.1).
7. Fix Broken Pages
Check to see if your website has any broken web pages (for example, if the link to that web page is not working).
Broken web pages create a couple of issues for your website. First, they make a terrible user experience because your user clicks on a broken internal link, which does not lead to a web page. Second, if the broken web page has backlinks, these backlinks are effectively useless as they do not point to anything.
You can find broken web pages through Google's Search Console's Indexing section or any SEO software tool such as SEMRush or Ahref.
8. Make Sure Your Web Site Has a Sitemap
A sitemap lists the web pages on your website that need to be indexed by search engines. Sitemaps do not list redirects, non-canonical pages, and dead pages because they should not appear on search engine result pages.
You can monitor your sitemap issues through GSC's sitemap section.
9. Your On-Page Elements Should Conform To SEO Best Practices
Your website's web pages have several on-page elements, such as a title tag, H1 tag, meta description, photos, videos, HTML elements, etc. These elements help Google understand what your content is about and help you rank in SERPs.
Site audits through SEMRush, UberSuggest, or Ahref can help you identify and resolve issues on your on-page elements.
10. Set Up Keyword Rank Tracking For Your Website
Next, create a keyword rank-tracking project for your website using SEO software such as Ahref, SEMrush, Moz, or Ubersuggest.
This is important because you want to be able to track your rankings in the SERPs for the keywords you are aiming to rank for.
Although you can also use GSC to see which keywords you are ranking for, these SEO tools allow you to add specific keywords (that are of value to you) to track your rankings.
Personally, I think SEMRush is the best for rank tracking as it offers a plethora of different options. But if you are tight on budget, Ubersuggest is also very cheap and gives you plenty of options to track your rank in SERPs.
11. Check And Analyze Your Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the most important Google ranking factors according to Google. In fact, most research shows that top-ranking contents always have backlinks from many different authoritative websites.
This is why you need to analyze your current backlinks, research your competitors' backlinks, and create a strategy for acquiring good backlinks for your web pages.
One of the best tools for this is undoubtedly SEMRush.
First, it lets you do a Backlink audit where you can check the quality of your backlinks, the number of referring domains, the top referring domain categories, and the backlinks by anchor type.
Second, it lets you analyze the backlink of your competitors and let them compare it with your website to see the backlink gaps that you have.
Lastly, it has this amazing link-building tool that helps you find prospective articles and websites from which you can potentially get relevant backlinks.
12. Do A Competitor Analysis
The next part is to identify your competitors and find out how they rank in the SERPs.
SEMrush has the option to monitor your competitor's domains; from here, you can check what keywords they are ranking in, what their estimated organic traffic is, and what domains are referring to them (competitor backlinks).
The best part about this tool is that with this data, you can work on your strategy for getting backlinks from domains that refer to your competitors and target keywords that your competitors are ranking in.
13. Improve Your Content
To maintain your rankings, your content needs to be regularly updated and improved. You also need to ensure that it follows current trends in the writing of blogs and online articles.
Some of the critical things you need to look out for when improvising your content are:
Ensure that you have short paragraphs, no more, maybe two to four lines per paragraph.
Have short introductions, as no one has the time to read a very long intro.
Use sub-headers for each sub-topic you will discuss in your content.
Ensure you include visuals such as images and videos in your content, as they make your blogs and articles much more compelling.
Furthermore, when improvising your content, optimize it for UX signals. Make sure your content satisfies the searcher's query and makes him happy.
Sometimes, this requires you to analyze the posts that are failing to find out why they are not performing well and, if need be, overhaul the whole content to improve it.
14. Optimize For Featured Snippets
Lastly, featured snippets can help you stand out from your competitors in the SERPs and significantly boost your organic traffic.
Although you cannot guarantee that you can get a featured snippet (as this is fully automated by Google), you should still optimize your content for featured snippets, especially if your content is ranking in a SERP that already has featured snippets.
To optimize for featured snippets, do the following:
Your topics should start with words like "what," "who," "who," "where," etc., because snippets are given for content that answers such queries.
Try to give bullet points for your answers, as one of the major types of snippets is answers in the form of lists.
Explain your topic in detail.
Do not use your brand or company name, and don't use first-person language.
You should optimize for snippets in keywords where you are already ranking in the top 5.
Use high-quality images and videos.
That's it for the step-by-step guide on how to do an SEO audit. Follow these steps to ensure that you can improve your SEO rankings in search engines.
SEO Audit Template
Finally, if you are looking for a template or checklist, Here are a downloadable template, guidelines, and checklist for FREE. Click below to download them and feel free to use:
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