How to conduct a comprehensive review of a site with an SEO audit?

With so many websites, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of how your competition ranks in search engines. If you want to know if you’re number one (or not), there’s only one way to find out—search engine optimization audit. This guide will help you conduct an on-site audit with our step-by-step instructions and screenshots. You’ll learn about the specific places on your site where search engines look to rank your content and figure out what’s needed to improve your rankings.

What is SEO audit?

An audit is a detailed examination and evaluation of something, especially in order to ensure compliance with regulations or standards. An SEO Audit examines and evaluates your website’s meta data, HTML code and site architecture in order to determine how effective your strategies are performing.

Sometimes one mistake can cause problems for your entire site. A complete examination of each page will help you find critical issues before search engines find them. When you understand how search engines work, you can use that knowledge to create compelling content that will engage your visitors and improve their experience on your website. By using dynamic content, not only do search engines have a better understanding of what your page is about but also they are able to serve more targeted ads when displaying listings based on results related searches.

An audit will not solve your problems, but it will allow you to find and evaluate them. You will know what steps you need to take to improve the quality of your website. Perhaps not everything is fit for change, but you need to find out first!

Types of audits

It is very important to determine what kind of audit you want. This can be done using a combination of methods: a manual, automatic or manual-automatic audit.

Manual audit is performed by a specialized SEO expert. Each element on the page is checked manually, which is why this form of page analysis takes much more time. Nevertheless, it is thanks to this that it is the most accurate, and each defect is accompanied by an appropriate comment.

Automatic audit, in turn, is carried out by selected computer programs. This makes it much faster, but less accurate. Only the result of the given indicators is taken into account and there is no comment on them. So it’s also not that personalized.

It is best to combine both methods. Then we have a chance to receive the most complete website quality assessment result.

Most important steps in an SEO audit

Step 1: Check domain registration information

When conducting a technical SEO audit, one of your first steps should be determining if a website has been registered properly. In addition to checking that there are no typos in your domain name, you should also check that an expiration date has not passed for your domain. Many people register sites for 2 years, which means you’ll need to re-new registration when it expires. However, some hosting companies have made renewal automatic and continuous.

Step 2: Check for homepage errors

Conduct a technical SEO audit of your homepage using on-page analysis tools. You will want to focus on checking for duplicate content issues, as well as errors regarding title tags and meta descriptions. These errors are usually easy to fix right away. The last thing you want is for search engines to be unable to read or understand your page. This can lead to poor rankings, loss of traffic and even lost revenue if you lose customers because they can’t find what they’re looking for on your website.

Step 3: Identify keywords on the homepage

Keywords are a cornerstone of search engine optimization and they’re just as important in an audit. By identifying keywords on your homepage, you can make sure that your brand is making its presence known where it matters most—online.

Step 4: Run internal link audit

The next step is to analyze and assess every aspect of your current website’s architecture. Does it meet all Google’s best practices ? Is it user-friendly, fast and responsive? Does it have social sharing buttons in place that help your users share your content on their favorite social media sites? Are there missing elements from your website that could be adding extra value?

Step 5: Analyze site architecture

Search engine optimization professionals must understand HTML title tags, meta descriptions, internal links, external links and image filenames because all of these features help Google index and rank websites. Conducting a website analysis involves searching for problems (or at least areas that need improvement) within each of these components. These issues can be found by using various analytic tools and instruments such as Screaming Frog, Raven Tools Site Explorer or Linkody.

Step 6: Perform on-page optimization

On-page SEO technical audit focuses on elements such as friendly url, mate tags, headers, titles and subtitles, sitemap, robots.txt file, multimedia optimization. In short, everything that builds the structure of your website. This is important because it helps search engines understand what your page is about and how to rank it in search results. This step requires you to have some knowledge about HTML/CSS and other web technologies.

Step 7: Page speed optimization

There are many tools that help you get an idea of how fast your website loads, but my favorite one is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. I think it does an awesome job of not only giving you feedback on how fast your pages load, but it gives you ideas about how to make them faster. In fact, according to surveys from Google and other search engines, page speed is one of major search ranking factors. Generally speaking, if you want your web page to be indexed by Google quickly and have it ranked highly on its SERP (search engine result page), it’s not enough for your page to only have good content.

Summary

SEO audits are procedures for checking if your website is in line with Google’s Quality Guidelines. This is important, because you can get into trouble by getting hit by one of Google’s penalties. An SEO audit will help you detect and fix any problems on your site that could cause issues with search engines.

The idea behind an SEO audit is to check every aspect of your website (or multiple websites) and find out what’s working well and what needs improvement. It’s also important to keep track of how changes affect your ranking over time so that you know which fixes work best.