Typically, optimizing your website for ranking on search engines requires a lot of work. You may have everything in place at any point but SEO isn’t a one-time job. Rather, you shouldn’t rest on your laurels and have regular checkups for your website to ensure that it always stays in good shape. An SEO website audit can help you in evaluating the health of your website, assessing the flaws, and identifying the opportunities for improvement. Moreover, it ensures that the site stays on-trend and ahead of the competition. Although it may take some effort, you should be ready to do it on a regular basis, at least once or twice a year.
Your site replicates the digital presence of your business and deserves all the attention you can give. A comprehensive audit comprises some key elements which need to be assessed in detail to get actionable insights for improving your website. Ideally, it should cover the entire structural and content elements affecting your ranking and visibility. Further, you should be able to comprehend the findings and connect the dots for finding the issues and addressing the right solutions. Here are the elements that you need to cover for a comprehensive SEO audit.
To start with, a complete technical analysis helps you determine whether the site is working properly. This is the ground-up approach because it serves as a foundation of the entire process. Unless the site is structurally sound, you cannot expect it to do well even if it has the best design and content. Technical analysis includes an array of parameters, which can be grouped under accessibility and indexability.
Accessibility means the ability of Google and users to access the site easily. After all, that’s what matters the most. The checks would include robot.txt, XML sitemap, URL structures, redirects, and the overall architecture. Website speed and responsiveness also come under accessibility. After accessibility checks, you need to ensure that the site is indexable to verify that the pages appear within the searches after being accessed. Here, it is critical to identify if a Google penalty has been imposed on the site. The sooner you address it, the better.
Perhaps, the most important aspect of SEO website audits is the on-page audit because it covers everything that visitors see when they land on your site. This really matters because you would want them to have a great first impression. Fortunately, some free SEO audit tools can help you carry a complete checkup of the multiple factors involved in an on-page assessment. There are general content issues and individual page issues you will need to identify during the assessment.
With content audits, you need to make sure that your posts are relevant and related. Further, there shouldn’t be any duplication in the content, while keyword cannibalization is another mistake you should steer clear of. When you try ranking for one keyword from different pages, Google will acknowledge only the strongest one, and a lot of good work will be wasted. Individual page analysis studies the pages deeply and picks issues like content, URL structures, metadata, keyword optimization, and internal linking.
Another key element of SEO audits is off-page analysis, which is basically about the assessment of your backlink building strategy. Google algorithm considers backlinks as trust metrics and your site is likely to rank higher only if it has good quality backlinks. If you are not watchful enough about linking with relevant and authoritative sites, you may even face a Google penalty eventually. The off-page analysis gives you a fair idea about such issues and can save your site from the worst.
The process starts with the evaluation of incoming links and you need to pick the toxic ones for eliminating them as quickly as possible. Ensure that you retain only the ones that link with websites in your niche that are trusted and have high domain authority as well. Aspire for diversity in terms of linking with as many unique domains as possible. Also, prioritize only legitimate measures for link building because black-hat practices do more harm than good.
Apart from analyzing your website, you can consider going the extra mile by investing in competitor analysis too. This approach can enable you to identify the areas where you are lacking and the scope for improvement as well. An SEO website audit can be valuable for any business because it gives you a clear perspective. Proper analysis and quick action to address the issues can help in making your website better for the users and search engines.
