An SEO Audit is a crucial part of any successful digital marketing strategy. It ensures that your website is technically sound, and optimizes your on-page elements to meet search engine guidelines.
Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced SEO, an audit will reveal several areas for improvement. It’s important to break these up into smaller projects and prioritize your tasks accordingly.
On-Page Optimization
The on-page element of an SEO audit focuses on optimizing elements within the website that impact search engine rankings. This includes things like page titles, meta descriptions and content. It also includes internal links, so Google (and users) can navigate through the site easily.
Performing an on-page audit can help you identify issues that are hindering the site’s performance. It can also help you identify opportunities that can improve the site’s content.
Using a free tool such as Screaming Frog or Small SEO Tools will give you a comprehensive on-page SEO audit. They will scan for a variety of factors, including keyword density, title tags and meta tags, image alt text, and much more.
Keyword Research
Performing regular keyword research is a vital part of the SEO audit process. It allows us to identify the keywords that are driving traffic and conversions to your website, as well as assess their competitiveness.
This involves assessing search volume, competition and user intent to identify high-potential keywords that could drive the most traffic. It also involves reviewing competitors’ keywords and identifying opportunities to gain a competitive advantage.
Once the technical SEO has been addressed, it is time to focus on the content elements of your site. This is a vital part of the audit process, and it can help you to uncover many hidden opportunities to improve your SEO and drive more visitors to your website. Each SEO audit recommendation should be clearly articulated and ladder up to your overarching business objectives, as well as include a clear path forward, with projected impact and associated effort. This will allow you to effectively manage and measure the success of your SEO strategy.
Link Building
Like a car, your website needs regular inspections and maintenance to keep it running smoothly. That’s why you need to perform SEO audits to identify issues, fix them, and prevent future problems.
Performing an SEO audit can help you determine if your content is link worthy and provides search engines with the information they need to rank your site well. It can also help you find and fix technical problems such as broken links and slow loading times.
Another important aspect of an SEO audit is the review of your backlink profile. It is important to make sure that your links are coming from quality websites, and not spammy ones. This is especially important in our post-Penguin world where low quality links can hurt your website’s search engine rankings. A good audit will help you find and remove low quality links from your website, as well as look for opportunities to build links from other reputable sites.
Content Marketing
During content audits, marketers often discover pages that aren’t bringing in any traffic or don’t serve the needs of their marketing strategy. This is an opportunity to rethink those pages, improve them or delete them.
While performing a content audit, marketers need to collect and document all relevant data. This includes SEO information, such as keywords, meta tags, and alt text. It also includes page-level metrics, such as scroll rate, bounce rate, and conversions. Tools like Screaming Frog and Google Analytics are useful for collecting this data.
Once all the data has been collected, the next step is to create an action plan for your website. This can include things such as rewriting certain pages, creating A/B tests, or improving on-page SEO. It should be specific and goal-oriented. A status column can be included to track the status of these actions. It can be left blank or written as “in progress”. This is a great way to keep track of what has been decided and what still needs to be done.