Whether your website is new or old, you need to conduct an SEO audit at least twice a year. Practicing regular search engine optimization analysis on your website is highly advisable because it helps to spot or detects problem areas in your WebPages. Identifying errors in your websites will enable you to correct your website and its backlinks for better SEO ranking and ultimately boost your organic traffic. What exactly is SEO audit, what are the benefits, and does an SEO audit require any tool?
What is an SEO audit?
Generally, an SEO audit is defined as the procedure adopted by professionals in analyzing the performance of a website. Whether the website has just a page or multiple pages, auditing is very portent. Before, we get to the benefits of auditing a website, below are some reasons why the exercise is needed.
Reasons for executing an SEO audit for new and established website
For a new website, the reason for performing an SEO audit is to:
* Find out the real market opportunity for your online business
* Discover what is required to compete in your niche market
* Discover what the best social media technique condition is for your business
* Find out whether a new blog is required as a support for your website
* Find out if your website plan is sufficient.
SEO reasons for an already established website:
* Find out if your website is search engine optimized at the content level
* Discover the health condition of your internet presence
* Discover if your pages are fully optimized at the coding stage
* Find out how to handle internet reputation issues
* Find out the best way to improve your website visitor sales or leads conversion, etc.
Benefits of SEO audit
1. Increase your websites general performance
How your website performs is very vital for search engine ranking? Major search engines like Google loves a strong website, and executing an SEO audit is an excellent strategy of having and maintaining a healthy website. This is because if your website has any problem, it will detect it.
2. Keep up to date with current search engine practice
Conducting SEO audit regularly will help in detecting old SEO practice that does not comply with the current search engine updates and puts an end to it. This action will keep your website in the good grace of Google and others.
3. Discover the keywords your site is ranking for
Another vital importance of SEO audit is that it shows the current keywords a website is ranking for. It is not commonplace to see website owners surprise to see the ranking keywords for their website. Therefore, this SEO analysis practice helps to provide pertinent information on your website.
4. Boost organic traffic
Regular SEO analysis of your website can boost your organic traffic by discovering the mistakes in your website and correcting them. A good example is broken backlinks, etc.
If your interest in SEO auditing has been piqued and you need your website analyzed, follow the tips below.
The best ways to perform an SEO audit for your website
When it comes to analyzing your website, you can choose to either do it yourself or hire professionals to help you. The former option isn’t advisable because you might not know what to look out for during the process. But if you have time and determination to DIY your SEO audit and save cost, follow these tips.
1. Scan your website to see if only one site can be browsed; this is done when you try to type in different ways that your site address can be typed in the address bar. Example:
https://www.yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com
http://yourdomain.com
https://yourdomain.com
Note that one of the above addresses must be accessible while the other should be forward to the canonical edition.
2. Check for background website crawl
Using an SEO crawler, the goal is to spider the website just like Google crawls websites. This will help to display very useful information. The tool that can be used for this exercise is Beam Us Up, Screaming Frog, etc.
3. Scan for indexation issues
The next step is to scan your website for indexation issues. If your website is not indexed, it means no ranking for you. So, this is a very vital step. To conduct this indexation process, locate Google search console, go to the Google index, then check your index status.
4. Are you ranking for your brand name?
The next step is to find out if you are ranking for your brand name. This is easy to do, simply search for your brand name on Google. If your site is new, you may not see your website, but if it’s old your website should appear in the search result.
5. Execute an on-page SEO audit
You can find your core web pages using Ahref’s tool to perform the crawl. Using this tool to perform this basic on-page SEO requires inputting relevant questions like:
* Is the web page’s title tag clickable, and is the page well-crafted?
* Does it have a custom Meta tag descriptions and is it well optimized for click-through?
* Is the H1 tag well optimized?
Apart from the SEO audit procedures stated above, many other website elements require auditing. The website analysis could be stressful, and to ease up the job below are some tools that will help you.
SEO auditing tools
1. Woorank
2. Raven tools
3. Semrush
4. Moz
5. WebCEO
6. SpyFu
7. SEO Site Checkup
SEO audit is very important because it detects mistakes on your website (among other benefits) and corrects them. Anyone can analyze their website and using SEO audit tools will make your job very easy.
