What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a comprehensive process that evaluates all aspects of a website that impact its performance in search engines and identifies opportunities for improvement. This process involves analyzing on-page elements, content, website speed, backlink profile, and technical issues to ensure the website adheres to SEO best practices.
A complete SEO audit covers:
- On-page SEO: Examines elements of a page such as meta descriptions, titles, headings, image alt text, and internal links to ensure they’re read and understood correctly by search engines.
- Off-page SEO: Looks at external factors, primarily backlinks to your website.
- Technical SEO: Involves technical aspects of a site such as crawlability, indexability, site architecture, localization, and mobile-friendliness, focusing on resolving any problems that would prevent search engines from crawling and indexing the site’s pages.
- Local SEO: Focuses on the website’s ranking in local search results.
Why is an SEO Audit Important?
SEO audits are important because they offer insights about a website’s performance in search, identify issues that need to be addressed, and suggest improvements to enhance the website’s organic search traffic.
An SEO audit can help you:
- Ensure that your website adheres to SEO best practices recommended by search engines.
- Identify opportunities to enhance your online presence.
- Discover and rectify issues that may negatively impact your search rankings.
- Adjust your content marketing strategy and link-building approach for long-term success.
Regular SEO audits are an integral part of holistic SEO.
When to Perform an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit shouldn’t be seen as a one-time event. Ideally, you should conduct an audit regularly—preferably every three to six months—and whenever you notice certain “warning signs,” such as:
- A sudden decline in organic traffic
- A higher-than-average bounce rate
- Lower conversion rates
- A drop in Google rankings
If you’re experiencing any of these issues and you haven’t done an SEO audit in the past six months, it’s likely time to conduct one.
How to Perform an SEO Audit?
Generally speaking, to perform an SEO audit, you need a good checklist and proper SEO tools.
1. Choose Your Tools
Except for very small websites, SEO audits are impossible without special tools. Audits process massive amounts of data about the site’s traffic, technical elements, backlink profile, content, and rankings, among other things—in addition to competitor insights. It would be hard, if not impossible, to obtain and go over that data manually.
The tools that you can use for an SEO audit are:
- Google Search Console offers access to tools and reports for monitoring your website’s search traffic, performance, and troubleshooting issues.
- PageSpeed Insights analyzes the loading speed and user experience of the page (on both desktop and mobile devices).
2. Go Over Your SEO Audit Checklist
The specific steps of an SEO audit can vary from website to website. However, here are the basics that need to be checked for any website:
- The pages’ accessibility and indexability in Ranktracker Site Audit.
- Broken links and broken backlinks in Ranktracker Site Audit.
- Duplicate content.
- Manual actions (Google penalties) in Google Search Console.
- Page Experience report in Google Search Console.
- Core Web Vitals metrics in Google Search Console.
- Mobile-friendliness issues in Google Search Console.
- Issues related to basic on-page elements: missing H1 tags, meta descriptions, and title tags in Ranktracker Site Audit.
