What Is an SEO Audit?

Nowadays, marketing isn’t only about who has the better strategy, but also how quick and accurate their SEO is. Regardless of business type, everyone wants their website to rank high on Google’s search results pages to increase the likelihood of customers clicking to visit their site.

As you know, SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is complex, and it can be easy to overlook some of the details, or you might struggle to know which areas need to be improved.

Today, we will talk about how to do an SEO audit to dust off your website and allow it to shine on the search results pages once again. So, let’s take a look at what an SEO audit is and what it includes.

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What Is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit refers to the process of checking a website’s performance by assessing both the technical structure of the website and its content to identify anything that may harm the website’s ranking. It enables you to keep improving the website regularly to make it appealing to both Google and users, allowing you to gain traffic from organic searches.

An SEO audit can be compared to a physical examination you might have at the doctor’s. It tells you which parts of the website should be fixed and accurately identifies the cause of the problems. You can perform an SEO audit yourself, and most importantly, it can cost almost nothing.

 

Which Websites Need An SEO Audit?

  • Hard-to-find websites that can’t be found even when relevant keywords are used
  • Websites that used to rank on the first search results page but have since fallen or disappeared from the search results pages
  • Websites that have content but are not ranking
  • Websites with an increasing number of competitors in the industry
  • Websites not using the right keywords
  • Websites with poor elements, such as bad UX/UI, poor page speed, or broken links

 

How To Do An SEO Audit

An SEO audit can be performed in various ways. We’ll outline 7 factors you should assess to perform an SEO audit of your website and check its health. 

Your Website’s URL 

You may not know that Google can index your website’s URL in several ways, such as:

http://domainname.com

https://domainname.com

http://www.domainname.com

https://www.domainname.com 

Having many domain versions can harm your website as it counts the rates or statistics separately, even though they are the same website. Therefore, in Google’s eyes, a quality site needs to have only one version of its domain. You must choose which URL you want to use – https://domainname.com or https:///www.domainname.com. There’s no difference when performing SEO for a website with or without “www.”; today’s websites just don’t need it. Once you’ve chosen your URL, you must redirect the rest of the URLs to the main URL so that no matter which URL is typed, it only navigates to the main URL.  

Mobile-friendliness

A good website shouldn’t just be well-displayed on a desktop. In an age where everyone uses mobile devices, you should ensure your website supports them. If you want to check whether your website meets the criteria for being mobile-friendly, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool

Page Speed

Page Speed is one of the main factors that affect SEO rankings. According to statistics from Think with Google, 53% of users visiting websites via their phones usually exit the webpage if it takes 3 seconds or longer to download.

 There are 2 ways you can check your page speed:

  • Visit your website on a mobile phone. The page speed shouldn’t be longer than 3 seconds.
  • Use the tool PageSpeed Insights. Your score for page speed on a mobile phone should be more than 60.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is a metric to help evaluate the user experience (UX), which will affect a site’s SEO ranking. You can check it via Google Search Console and choose “Core Web Vitals” on the left to see how many good, poor, and need-to-be-improved pages you have. Ideally, a website should have mostly ‘good’ pages.

404 Page Not Found Errors

404 Page Not Found is displayed on a page when the URL cannot be found. This can be because the URL was edited, didn’t redirect, or the page was unintentionally deleted.

A good website shouldn’t have any 404 Page Not Found pages, especially if that page was ranked on Google’s first search result page before. You can check whether your website has any 404 Page Not Found errors directly via Google Search Console by clicking “Coverage” and then “Errors”. After that, you should fix them by redirecting the URL immediately.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO involves optimising a website to align with Google’s criteria. Websites that want to rank highly must contain these six elements:

  • Page title
  • Meta description
  • Simple, concise, and easy-to-remember URL
  • Images with alt text
  • Keywords included in the H1
  • A correct number of keywords embedded across the content

When checking these six elements, you need to look at each page manually, as there are still no tools to support this part of a website audit for you.

Quality Backlinks

One of the key strategies for achieving this is by gaining backlinks to your website. Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. They allow Google to learn that your content is accepted by other websites, making the algorithm give you more points to rank higher.

Those who perform SEO know well that when gaining backlinks to your website, it’s essential to focus on quality, not quantity. Though many backlinks can boost your website’s credibility, the result can be detrimental if the linked website is not high-quality. For example, if the website that links to your site is fraudulent, Google will assume your website is the same and might ban your site from the results pages.

Therefore, before gaining backlinks to your website, you should first understand what quality backlinks look like:

  • They have to come from a website with content relevant to the main keywords on your website.
  • Any website that links to your site needs to have at least 50 clicks per month.
  • The backlink’s anchor text must include exact or relevant keywords to match those on your website.
  • Backlinks from content give you more points than links from the sidebar or footer.
  • You shouldn’t create backlinks to other websites with the same main keywords.
  • They must be do-follow links.
  • Backlinks should be placed at the top of the content as they are more likely to get more points than those below it.
  • Even if they use a no-follow link, if the website is reliable, Google still gives you points when someone clicks on the link to your website. 

Now you can analyse all the backlinks you have received to check they align with the above checklist. Then, check how many backlinks pass the criteria on Ahrefs and Ubersuggest.

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Primal Digital Agency’s SEO Audit Service

Primal can help you check your website SEO structure, give advice and customise your website for better SEO results, as well as optimise your website so it can be found more easily on Google’s search results pages.

Our SEO audit service:

  • Increases website performance and SEO-friendliness
  • Advises on HTML length and tags, site descriptions and H1 usage
  • Reports your content quality as well as any repeated content on the site
  • Helps identify focus points and how to use keywords
  • Provides an overview of the improvements and changes needed
  • Includes advice on prioritising internal links
  • Increases your page speed
  • Boosts your backlink score

When optimising your website, you must undertake an SEO audit before you make any changes. That way, you will know what needs to be improved or developed on your website to rank higher on the search results pages. If you are interested in our SEO audit service, contact us for a consultation today.