We hear this time and time again… optimize your website for SEO and of course user-experience.
Even though it requires a lot of work, but let’s face it. If you don’t do it, you’ll be at a huge disadvantage.
Even big names like Search Engine Land is teaching people how to prioritize SEO tasks.
This is the way I see it…
Your website is the foundation of your business.
It’s almost like your health is the foundation of your body.
That’s why you see a doctor foryour annual check-ups to ensure that you’re in good health.
Examining your Website’s SEO for optimal performance is highly beneficial in the long run.
SEO audit will allow you to fix things before it gets out of hand and improves your overall website for both traffic and conversion.
What is SEO Audit?
SEO audit is basically an examination of your website to ensure that your website ranks well on search engines, and ultimately reach relevant visitors.
There are some companies that offers FREE SEO audit only if you sign up for the first time. I’d say give it a shot, but only if it’s free to try.
Search engines have their own unique algorithms to crawl your website to gather information for ranking purposes.
Here are some ranking factors analyzed by SEMrush:
With the internet constantly evolving, you must also make changes to ensure that your website is going to stay relevant for many years to come.
For example, this is an older post that I wrote ages ago. I am currently updating it to be more relevant.
Even Neil Patel talks about updating older content to help with rankings!
In fact, I recommend conducting an SEO Audit on your website regularly as your website ages.
Personally, I don’t have a lot of time, but I try to SEO Audit my website at least once a month.
What Does An SEO Audit Check For?
Here are three factors that an SEO Audit looks for:
- Front End: Content, Meta Data, Keywords
- Back End: Indexing, Site Speed, Web Hosting
- Quality of your backlinks.
Another thing to keep in mind is the usability of your website on mobile devices.
With more and more users on the internet through mobile devices. Your website also gets indexed on the search engines for mobile as well.
With that being said, I’m going to provide you with a checklist for SEO Audit.
How To SEO Audit Your Website
#1: Crawl Your Website
Before anything can be done, your website needs to be analyzed. Here are two of my favorite sources when it comes to analyzing:
#2: Check Your Website For Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can negatively affect your SEO. This can happen when you publish multiple contents that relate to the same topic.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with writing multiple contents that relate to the same topic.
What you should be concerned about are duplicates of the same content. Fortunately, there are tools such as Copyscape to check for duplicate content.
#3: Check Your Internal And External Links
Over time, your backlinks can lose its juice. This can happen for various reasons.
For example, someone who linked to you in the past. But you made changes to your URL and forgot to redirect it to the new one.
This will result in a link to a 404 page which is horrible for user-experience and if the person who linked to you finds out.
He or she will probably just remove your link entirely.
Another thing to look out for are websites that have low authority and are probably penalized by search engines.
Not every link is equal. Some are high quality and some are nothing but spam.
What I like to do when I receive a backlink is to research the website it’s coming from.
If you’re getting links from questionable sources, you can always look into disavowing them.
Here’s an example of how you can find out if a website is indexed by Google:
#4: Check Your Website’s Speed
Let’s face it, most people are impatient and won’t wait for your website to load if it takes too long.
The longer it takes for your website to load, the more likely that user will bounce (leave).
On January 17, 2018, Google announced in its blog that page speed is going to be in mobile search ranking.
If you are curious as to how your website performs speed wise. You can use tools like GTmetrix to measure it.
Tools as such will often provide you with insights on how to fix your website for faster speed.
#5: Use Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a developer tool provided by Google. There you can check different data for your website.
Here are a few key ones that I personally love using:
- Performance: Checks impressions as well as clicks through Google.
- URL Inspection: Checks if your website has been crawled and indexed.
- Sitemap: Checks the status of your sitemap. This allows Google to crawl your website based on what you allow through the sitemap.
- Coverage: Displays errors found on your website.
- Mobile Usability: Checks for errors found on your website for mobile devices.
- Links: Displays both external and internal links for your website.
My Final Thoughts
Even though there are many great tools that you can use for SEO audit. In the end, it is up to you to fix any issues.
If you’re not doing it and your competitors are (which they most likely will). You’ll be left behind (smoked).
I hope you learned something new from this article. If you have any additional questions, please leave a comment down below and I will try my best to help you out.
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