A SEO Audit is a process of analyzing how well your website adheres to best practices. It covers both structural and content components of your online visibility.
The best SEO audit tools offer clear recommendations and a roadmap for future implementation. Ideally, these recommendations should be directly tied to business goals and metrics.
Site Structure
Site structure is the foundation of any website. It defines the information hierarchy that guides users through your content and helps search engines understand and effectively index it.
A well-structured site also enhances user experience and increases rankings by facilitating easy navigation. In addition, a solid internal linking and taxonomy structure can help to prevent duplicate or similar pages from competing with each other for search engine visibility.
A common SEO issue is a lack of proper canonicalization (pointing to the “canonical” version of a page), which can hurt your site’s ranking performance. To check for this, you can use either Google PageSpeed Insights or a site audit tool like Semrush’s Site Audit and select the “Canonicalization” category in the “Issues” tab.
On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization is the process of enhancing the content, HTML formatting, and internal linking on a website’s pages. This helps search engines understand a page’s topic and context, and can lead to improved rankings in search results.
During an SEO audit, we look at keyword opportunities, including those in your title tags and meta descriptions. Use tools like LSI graph or Google autosuggest to ensure that your keywords make sense and don’t sound unnatural.
We also look at site speed, as slow websites get bad marks from search engines. Use a tool like PageSpeed Insights to see how your site stacks up against your competitors’. And we’ll check for duplicate content, page errors, and more.
Off-Page Optimization
Using off-page optimization techniques, an SEO audit can help identify opportunities for improving the visibility of a client’s website and decreasing the need for paid advertising. This is a particularly important step for new websites that are struggling to establish a foothold in the search results.
Title tags and meta descriptions are key elements that can drive traffic to a site by helping search engines and users understand what the page is about. Using tools like KeywordsFX, LSI graph, or related searches to help come up with relevant keywords to use in titles and descriptions is an essential part of a content SEO strategy.
Technical SEO is the backbone of any online marketing campaign, and it should be checked at least annually. Using tools like Ahrefs or Moz to find and correct issues is an easy way to keep track of the health of your clients’ websites.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is a critical component of SEO audits. It helps ensure that your content is relevant to search engine users and aligned with industry trends. Keyword trends can change over time, so it’s important to update your research regularly using tools like Google Trends and related searches.
You should also make sure your keywords are properly included in your page titles and meta descriptions. These are visible in search engine results and help give search engines context for what your pages are about.
A full SEO audit will cover many different elements. Depending on the size and complexity of your website, it’s best to perform an audit annually. However, more frequent audits may be necessary for websites that experience significant changes or growth.
Link Building
It’s important to do a full SEO audit at least annually to maintain a strong technical foundation. It’s also a good idea to keep up with the newest SEO best practices, especially when it comes to link building and local SEO.
Any SEO software worth its salt will have a dedicated audit feature. It might be a standalone tool or a dashboard within a comprehensive suite.
Make sure to monitor your backlinks on a monthly basis for signs of a Penguin penalty (it’s an algorithm that penalizes websites that use shady tactics like exact match anchor text). Avoid the penalty by only building quality links from relevant sources. Try using Semrush to find high-quality prospect sites for link building. Then pitch them with a curated link that adds value to their site.