How to perform an SEO audit

How to perform an SEO audit - There are several reasons why performing a search engine optimization audit for your website is important. You can identify areas for improvement and this can help you create an action plan to fix them. In addition, well-conducted SEO audits will ensure your website follows the latest developments and recommendations in search marketing and is able to compete with competitors.

But what is SEO Audit really?

Before considering how to perform an SEO audit, it is important to determine what it is and what to expect from it.

SEO audit is the process of determining how well your website stands in a number of key areas. Website auditors should check it based on the checklist and prepare suggestions on what to do and why the website in question can improve search engine rankings.

Although you can use a variety of tools for website auditing, it is best to hire SEO auditors or self-audit using guidelines. If you decide to use a company's services, you should look for services that are reasonably priced. The price of 300 USD for a complete SEO audit is good. Recommendations should be customized for your specific website instead of as general as the tools will create.

What can be expected from SEO Audit?

There are at least three things one should expect and these are:

The current state of your website. This should be a detailed analysis of how well your website is performing on social media, search results, the number of internal and external links, and any other useful information. regarding the current state of the website.

The SEO Audit Checklist must include a list of actions, with explanations for all items on the list.

The final report describes a comprehensive SEO strategy to take full advantage of all the opportunities and traffic sources available on the internet.

Why you should regularly perform SEO Audit for the website

Everything in the SEO industry changes rapidly and what may be working today can become obsolete in just a few months. Therefore, performing regular SEO audits, no less than twice a year, is required to ensure that your website meets the latest developments in the industry.

Audit your own SEO and how you can implement it

SEO checklist in place

Let's define:

Each page has a unique title

The title length is between 50 and 65 characters

There are 150 to 150 characters in the description tag

Description tags cannot be stuffed with keywords

The most important part of onsite SEO is the SEO audit checklist. In practice, most audits cover only this section. However, as we explained above, we will also check other areas.

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You will need to take into account the following factors to determine if a website is search engine optimized:

The structure of the URL: You should check that the URLs of each page are properly formatted and unique. An example of a bad URL: child http://www.site.com/34/12345678

The following URL is much better: Feedback http://www.site.com/url-with-good-format online.

Well-structured URLs often include keywords, using hyphens to separate keywords and are really unique to individual pages. They are also less than 255 characters long, along with the domain name.

Title, description: Does the title tell the user the topic of the page? Does the ad properly describe what the page offers?

Text format: Make sure your pages do not just contain plain text. Use the right format for all titles and tags, using better italic or bold for the most important parts.

Content: Your website must have unique content. Using Copyscape can help you determine the unique level of website content. If you discover any duplicate content, it is better to remove it or unindex the pages that use it. Google Analytics should be used to discover pages with the most popular content. Make sure all your content is formatted correctly, has no grammatical or spelling errors, and is featured on social media sites.

Checking for freshness and content length is also important. There are pages with no content or content that is not recommended. You can use 301 redirects to merge them together. If you have outdated or outdated content, you should create schedules to add new content regularly. Although you are not required to post daily, you must maintain a consistent posting habit.

Internal link: Creating links between pages is important for both users and search engines. Make sure you create links between specific pages and related information.

Picture: these make the page more readable and social media friendly. However, note that images should be optimized to speed up page loading. In general, when it comes to images, there are a few things you should check out:

The filenames of images should be descriptive of their true nature. Some people use keywords in descriptions.

ALT tags must be specified in all images.

Compress all images to reduce file size. There are certain tools that will help you do that, and you can also use the CDN (content delivery network).

The link is broken: From an SEO perspective, having a bad image is bad because it leads to a bad user experience. There are several ways to check how many broken links you have on your website and some of them are:

The free Xenu tool allows you to check all your external links and generate reports of broken links.

Your Bing and Google website administration tool allows you to use the Crawl Errors report to identify broken links in your website. Making 301 redirects to a valid URL or fixing links will allow you to fix them.

Excessive use of banner ads: Google has started to penalize websites with too many ads. They don't specifically explain how many ads are too much, but if your ad implementation doesn't match their standards, you should rearrange your ads or even remove some ads.

How friendly is your website in the eyes of the user: Although it is not easy to determine the level of friendliness of a particular website, because it depends on many factors such as the design of the website, the content and what type of website it is, there are a few things to consider:

Does your website have a 404 page that notifies users when they enter the wrong URL?

How many clicks do users have to find to find what they are looking for?

Does it have a main menu with well-defined structure?

You will recognize what is content, where is advertising?

Do all pages have a consistent look?

Is there a user sitemap available?

Page loading speed: According to our own experience when talking to customers, handling website loading speed is the most important and difficult task, and especially for users without technical expertise. What is even more unfortunate: it is the most important factor for good SEO and must be solved successfully. Studies show that page speed affects your conversion rates and rankings too much.

If you are sure your website loads faster than your competitors, it will give you a distinct advantage when ranking.

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Structure of the website: No matter what type of website you have, certain factors are common to all and they are essential for both good user experience and SEO campaigns.

What you are checking:

Is the content structure of the website clear and is the content grouped into pages by related categories?

Does the website have a separate space, disclaimer, privacy policy and contact page?

Do all internal pages have a Breadcrumb?

The web is full of detailed explanations for all of the aforementioned factors, and some sources even contain practical and valuable examples, so you should definitely check these out.