Why an SEO Audit is Important
Before you start an SEO strategy, it’s important to diagnose how well your SEO is performing to begin with. An SEO audit assesses problems as well as positive performance indicators you might not be aware of. Not only does your SEO audit allow you to measure existing performance, it gives you a baseline for evaluating future improvements.
Did you know there are over 200 SEO ranking factors for a website? These factors are the different ways search algorithms judge your site and rank your pages.
You can learn about the majority of these ranking factors by downloading Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Elements. Search Engine Land presents the elements in the following clusters:
Content
Architecture
HTML
Reputation
Links
User
It also prioritizes these in terms of their importance. However, if you’re not familiar with manipulating and improving these elements yourself, you won’t likely have the confidence to do an SEO Audit on your own. By clicking on the link, you’ll be able to access my free starter SEO Audit Checklist. It contains instructions on how to get started.
However, a DIY audit is not necessarily the best approach. This is because undergoing an audit can be time intensive. There’s a learning curve to get a handle on the many ranking factors and special cases influencing your website’s performance.
Just to give you an example, sometimes a website has been penalized by Google. Without knowing the history of SEO penalties, it’s not likely you’ll know how to fix the issue.
An SEO Audit can identify penalties and many others related to ranking factors across your website. It identifies the good, bad, and non-existent SEO features of your website.
In fancier terms, it tells you how well your site is optimized according to the many ranking factors, any technical problems or challenges it has, and steps to fix them in the short-, medium-, and long-term.
What to check for in an SEO Audit
Overarching issues
Domain authority
While Google and other search engines don’t disclose this information, it’s widely believed that pages on a “high authority” site will rank faster and more easily. Examples include the New York Times or Wikipedia. These massive sites have a lot of engagement, they have massive content libraries, and they publish or update new content regularly. Professional keyword tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush will estimate the relative “domain authority” of different sites based on factors they believe are influencing the site’s reputation. This includes factors such as:
A high number of backlinks
Clicks and engagement
High traffic volume
High number of pages
Content is published or updated regularly
Opportunities for improvement: Of course, not everyone can compete with “high authority” websites, so SEO for new tiny sites often looks much different than SEO for large competitive sites. Simply put, tiny sites have a much harder time ranking for the same exact keywords. This is why it’s important to hire an SEO strategist. I specialize working with newer websites of 50 pages or less.
Page authority
Similar to a site’s overall domain authority, each individual page also has a relative rank for its authority compared to other pages on the same subject.
Search traffic value
In the pro SEO tool I use, Ahrefs, you can also learn how much value your organic search traffic is providing each month based on the estimate of how much it would cost to get the same level of traffic from other marketing efforts like PPC campaigns. Of course this number is not an exact estimation of the total ROI of your SEO efforts, it does provide a helpful metric for gauging improvement over time. I offer ongoing tracking and monitoring for all of my clients as a monthly service, after they’ve hired me to conduct an SEO Audit.
Onsite SEO issues
Organic traffic
How much organic traffic is going to each of your website pages?
Organic keywords
Do your pages already rank for certain keywords?
Which pages are not ranking and why?
Are the ranking keywords relevant to your brand?
Are there alternate keywords that would increase the potential for organic traffic?
Strategic keyword targeting
Are the ranking keywords relevant to your brand?
Are there alternate keywords that would increase the potential for organic traffic?
Keyword cannibalization
Do some of your pages rank for the same keywords?
How could these pages be retargeted, so they don’t compete with each other?
Content quality
Is the quality of your content helpful and informative for your target audiences?
Does the content provide original insights?
Does the content at expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to the site or is it thin content without much added value?
Is the content formatted in a reader-friendly style that is helpful for UX?
Duplicate content
Is the content on each page original or do they contain instances of duplicate content?
Is content on your site plagiarized from other sites/sources?
How much of your site needs to be re-written for originality?
Page elements
Does each page have a certain character counts for the title, meta desc, and URL?
Do the titles, meta desc, and URL contain the primary keyword?
Do the H2s and H3s contain secondary keywords?
Does each image contain alt image tags?
Does your media have descriptive file names?
Does your main page or contact page include your NAP (Name, Address, Phone-number)
Website structure
Does the website have an intuitive Internal linking structure that links sub-topic pages to category pages?
Does the anchor text for each link contain a relevant keyword for the target linked page?
Does each section of your site (blog, products, services, etc.) have a clear URL prefix?
Off-site SEO issues
Backlink quantity
How many backlinks does your website have as a whole?
Which specific pages have backlinks and how many?
What anchor text have the external sites used to link to your content?
Backlink quantity
Do the links to your sites come from high traffic, high authority sites?
If not, which ones should you request a “no follow” link from?
Checking no-follow links
Are there any links to your site that are “no follow” links? Why?
Opportunities for improvement
What ways could the site receive more backlinks and improve its offsite SEO?
Technical SEO Issues
Error codes and page redirect updates
Error codes show up on different pages when the page has been removed from the site, or other issues. To improve this, it is important to redirect pages with a 404 Error code to other relevant pages.
Unlinked pages
Sometimes pages aren’t linked in your website’s main site structure, and they are hard for search engine crawlers to find. It’s important to identify these and how to best change their location on your site.
Pages with broken links
Internal broken links: If you update the URL slugs for a page, you could leave a trail of broken internal links. An audit will identify these broken links and they can quickly be updated.
External broken links: Sometimes external websites’ resources you have linked will be removed from those sites. Reviewing your site for broken links will identify these. You can update the links with an alternate resource.
Schema
Does your HTML include Schema?
If not, does your CMS offer a plug-in for Schema to add on?
Does your team have the capacity to add this in manually?
Page loading speed
Does your website load in 1-2 seconds?
Core web vitals test
How well do your LCP, FID, and CLS perform in Google Analytics? LCP refers to page loading speed, FID measures how well your site responds to interactions like clicks, CLS refers to the amount of sudden, unpredictable shifts the user experiences in layout design. These issues can only be improved by a web designer, but in general having a simple, intuitive layout without large media file sizes helps.
Local SEO Issues
Google Business page
Have you created a Google Business page?
Does your Google Business page match the information on your website?
Optimizing for local search keywords
Do your keywords and content reference your local geographic region?
Business listings in local directories
Is your site listed on local directories for your business type?
How often should you conduct an SEO Audit?
Given that SEO is a long-term strategy, I’d suggest conducting an SEO Audit once a year unless you’re going through a content publishing spree. In the interim time period, you should be consistently applying the improvements recommended in your audit. Oftentimes, I’ll suggest publishing content onto your blog regularly, as this improves your content freshness, and it is one of the best ways to grow your organic traffic around different keywords linked to your core business value.
What to do with your SEO Audit information
After I’ve reviewed these items on your site, I’ll send you a report with the data as well as strategies to improve your site. I’ll format my advice in the form of a quick checklist of items to complete and how to do so. While I don’t usually implement the changes myself, you can easily get started on making improvements right away.
I suggest taking the next step in my SEO strategy sequence by undergoing in-depth strategic keyword research and competitive analysis. These two next steps are crucial for determining how best to attract visitors to your site. Without a sound strategy, your site will not likely generate much organic traffic.
Final Tips: Beyond these different factors, it’s also important to set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console and the equivalents for any other search engines you receive traffic from. You should also re-submit your site-map anytime you make structural changes or add new pages or blog posts to ensure faster ranking. If you use one, you should be sure to set up your content management system (Wordpress, Squarespace, etc.) properly and understand best practices for adding new content.
Tempted to skip the SEO Audit? Don’t.
Ok, I get it. Not everyone has unlimited marketing budgets and not everyone cares that much about SEO. By skipping an audit, though, you’re really missing out on an important opportunity to understand your website performance better.
For anyone who takes their business seriously, it’s a must-have item for getting the most out of this asset, which you’ve spent so much time developing. If you love your website, schedule an SEO audit.
Download a free SEO Audit Starter Checklist to learn more.