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SEO

How To Do An SEO Audit: Top 9 Steps

In this modern-day, ranking high in search engines is one of the best ways to sell your content. But to rank high, conducting an SEO audit should be a regular endeavor for any site. So here is a list of the steps to follow if you’re not familiar with SEO audits. But fast, let’s define what an SEO audit is. 

SEO Audit Definition

An SEO audit is like a payforit online payment tool: it provides a gateway of success at managed costs. And an SEO audit does this by identifying issues that prevent your website from ranking on Google and other search engines. 

For instance, improperly crawling and indexing your site and adding the wrong links result in loss of organic traffic. A regular SEO audit will help you identify these and other issues and provide insight to take the necessary action against them.

With that in mind, here are the SEO audit steps to take for your business. 

Step 1: Check For Google Penalties

Start by checking whether or not your site has been penalized by Google. If the site is subject to an algorithmic or manual penalty, this impacts your site’s ranking. You must determine the when and why of your penalization and plan to address the issue.

Log in to Google Search Console and select ‘Manual Action’ from the left top menu to see if you are subject to either Google penalties. This will reveal the reason for your punishment if any. You can also compare your Google organic traffic dates to the dates of Google algorithmic changes. A decrease or increase in organic traffic indicates that the changes have affected your site.

Step 2: Check Domain Search Appearance

The following step conducts an SEO audit Google search for your brand name and examines the results. Look for the following:

  • Is your website at the top of the search results?
  • Are your Google My Business page’s name and other information correct?
  • Are the remaining pages on Google’s first page relevant to your brand?

Scroll to the bottom of the results page and look for the section titled “searches related to. Are the ‘related searches’ for your brand relevant? If you don’t get the expected results, this indicates that your website has several problems. Prioritize solving these issues by; 

  • Reviewing and improving the structure of your website
  • Examine the SEO of your website.

SEO audit is really important for website

Step 3: Perform A Technical SEO Audit

Go over your website’s Technical SEO thoroughly. Technical SEO ensures that search engines can adequately access and index your pages. Use this Technical SEO audit checklist to your advantage.

Is your site listed in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools? If not, this is an urgent matter. Google Search Console contains site-specific information such as;

  • What keywords are you ranking for on your website?
  • What keywords resulted in Google traffic?
  • How many pages are submitted to Google, and how many are indexed?

You should specify your preferred domain by correctly setting your canonical URLs to avoid content duplication problems.

Step 4: Perform an On-Page SEO Audit

On-page SEO is critical. That being said, you may not have time to optimize every page on your site, and you are not required to do so. But, you can identify your five most important pages and optimize them. These could be pages that:

  • Target a critical keyword.
  • Already rank well, but have the potential to break into the top five.
  • They receive less traffic than they did previously.

After that, apply these strategies to improve your on-page SEO.

  • Incorporate your keyword into the title tag.
  • Include your keyword in the first 100 words of your sentence.
  • Include at least 5 internal links.
  • Include at least 5 external links.
  • Make use of LSI keywords.

Step 5: Perform an Off-Page SEO Audit

Off-Page SEO or link building are techniques used to promote your website on the Internet.  Backlinks are regarded as ‘votes of trust’ by the Google algorithm, and websites with high-quality backlinks rank higher in search results. 

You can learn about your Off-Page SEO by using the SEO audit SEMRUSH tool and checking which domains link to your site. It can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not. 

Look at gambling, for instance. One of its important rules is to never gamble with money you don’t have because you might incur significant debt and risk your livelihood. So one would be crazy not to jump on free slots no deposit when the chance is given. 

In the same way, avoid taking risks with your off-page SEO. Ask questions like, “which of these domains is regarded as trustworthy?” as you conduct your SEO audit. Concentrate your efforts on creating good websites (with good content), and links will naturally flow in. You can accomplish this by removing links from the home page or creating new ones. 

Step 6: Perform a Social Media Audit

Social media is part of your SEO audit importance. It affects your site’s performance both directly (in the form of links) and indirectly (more exposure, which may result in more natural links and direct visits), so it is a factor that can influence your efforts to have a properly optimized website.

Check to see if you have a good presence in the most important social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest) and if it is easy for people to find and follow you in those channels.

Additionally, your site’s online survival is on the line without a social media presence. Neglecting social media and relying solely on search marketing is akin to putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Step 7: Improve Your Content Quality

There is no way around it: your content must be of the highest quality for your site to rank higher. From your SEO audit website, ensure that:

1. You use short intros.

Keep your introductions short and sweet: lengthy introductions can be boring.

2. Short paragraphs.

People do not read online, and they skim, so small paragraphs help skimmers consume your content more effectively.

3. Include a lot of subheaders. 

Subheaders assist in breaking up your content into digestible chunks.

4. Make use of visuals, images, and video

Multimedia makes your content so much more enjoyable.

Step 8: Do a Competitor Analysis

It’s now time to spy on your competitors. Here’s how to do it:

  • Use an SEO audit tool like SEMrush to identify your competitors’ top keywords. If your competitors rank for these keywords, you have a good chance of ranking for them as well. Once you’ve found them, make them your target keyword.
  • Look at the pages that are ranking for those terms. Then, determine what those pages have in common. That way, you’ll know what kind of content works best in your niche.
  • Look at whatever links to those pages. SEMrush is a tool that can help you with this. This tells you who the influencers in your niche are, and that way, you can begin to form relationships with them.

Step 9: Analyze Your Site’s Speed

For a long time, site speed was a critical factor. The likelihood of a user bouncing increases significantly as a page loads slower. Your website must load quickly, both for SEO and user experience.

View the Performance SEO audit report from your dashboard to test your page speed. Alternatively, go to your SEMrush Site audit report and, under the issues tab, slow pages will be highlighted on the list of errors, along with load time statistics.

This will highlight any problems, and you can then go to Google PageSpeed Insights to get recommendations on specific actions to take to see improvements.

Conclusion

An SEO audit is essential and should be done regularly. The above recommendations are just a few of the many steps you can take to conduct your SEO audit.  For each step, ensure you are thoroughly familiar with the concept first. But if you still have a question about SEO audit? Get in Touch with us! 

Authors Bio

Christine J. Shepard is an SEO specialist that has gathered experience in internet marketing over the past few years. Experience gained in SEO results in relevant positioning. As such, the author is positioned to offer guidance on everything SEO and internet marketing for your business’ benefit.

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