A Detailed Guide on SEO Audit

When did you last check how your site was working?

If you’ve never done an SEO audit for your website, or it’s been a while since you last did, or you are planning to redesign the website in the future, consider this as your go-to guide.

An SEO audit is important as it can help boost your website’s search engine rankings to attract more leads and visitors.

But what is an SEO audit? How to do an SEO audit? Let’s find out!

What is SEO Audit?

An SEO audit can be considered an evaluation of the website that grades your website for its ability to appear in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

Wondering how to do an SEO audit?

SEO audit is done by checking every step of the audit list and finding issues that need to be repaired. Think of an SEO audit as a report card for your website’s Googleability. No matter how well-designed and clean the website looks, your efforts would go in vain if search engines can’t read it.

An SEO audit –

• Helps you to compare yourself to competitors
• Identifies the changes required
• Provides a general overview of SEO efficiency
• Finds the website’s weaknesses
• Helps set some expectations for the future

Benefits of Performing an SEO Audit

Improves the Website’s Overall Performance

It isn’t surprising to know that Google prefers a healthy website. In fact, ranking is highly affected by site performance.

Running an SEO audit will bring website issues to your notice, such as issues with site maps or low speed. While you can solve some of these issues immediately, others would take some time. You must regularly run an SEO audit.

Helps Find the Best Ranking Keywords

It often appears as a surprise when we tell our clients about their best ranking keywords. An SEO audit provides valuable information to improve your organic ranking. Once you know which keywords you’re ranking for, you can optimize your content strategy accordingly.

Pro Tip – Use short tail and long-tail keywords to make your content rich in SEO. While short-tail keywords have a high search volume, long-tail keywords will help you target a specific audience who are more likely to convert.

Helps Find Keywords that Bring Traffic and Convert Leads

If your website is ranking well for certain keywords, it’s great. But what if those keywords are not bringing in any traffic?

In case your website is ranking for a certain keyword, but that keyword is bringing little traffic, there are chances that your buyer persona is not searching for that term. For this reason, using an SEO audit is important as it helps understand the search terms and variations used by your customers.

Allows to Check Your Competitors

Do you have those annoying competitors who always beat you in the ranking?

If yes, consider running an SEO audit for your competitor’s site as well. It allows you to analyze competition and extract information that you can use in your SEO strategy. Remember, competitive analysis is totally acceptable and worth doing.

Best SEO Audit Tools

SEO audit brings in a lot of benefits. But what tools should you use to run an SEO audit?

Let’s find out!

SEMrush

It’s been more than a decade since SEMrush became the leading veteran in the SEO space. It comes in as a one-stop shop for digital marketing, with more than 40 tools. These tools specialize in content optimization, paid ad research, rank tracking, social media monitoring, keyword research, and competitor intelligence.

Talking about SEO audit, SEMrush has a site audit tool that crawls through your site and warns of issues related to JavaScript, internal linking, meta tags, SEO content and page loading speed.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another great tool for SEO audit and touts itself as an all-inclusive SEO toolset. Ahrefs offer a keyword explorer, a rank tracker, a site explorer, a content explorer and a site audit tool.

This tool allows you to discover issues related to the website’s external pages, JavaScript and CSS, duplicate pages, low word count articles, missing or incomplete social tags, poorly optimized HTML tags and the page’s performance issues.

SEO Site Checkup

More than 5000 webmasters use SEO Site Checkup. It is a suite of tools for checking backlinks, spying on competitors, creating sitemaps, tracking regional performance, monitoring keywords and auditing SEO issues.

This is a great tool for finding issues affecting your SPF records, mobile usability, page keywords, headings, page loading speed, etc.

Screaming Frog

This is one of the popular tools among SEO experts as it can analyze both small and large websites. Screaming Frog is primarily a website crawler, then an SEO audit tool. However, it can still help detect potential SEO issues, such as unoptimized meta descriptions and titles, duplicate content, broken links, etc.

This tool is recommended for auditing websites with up to 500 pages.

Who Uses SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is important in a marketer’s arsenal, but who else can benefit from it? Take a look!

Digital Marketers and SEO Specialists – SEO audit can be used by digital marketers and SEO specialists to make an informed decision when doing an SEO campaign.

SEO Consultants – SEO consultants who educate clients about their website will find SEO audit important while talking to them.

Agency Owners – Agency owners can use SEO audit as a supplementary document when giving a quick SEO report to the client.

Business Owners – Business owners can use certain SEO audit tools to check how their website is performing.

Final Thoughts

It’s evident; SEO audit is important for every website. Since Google’s algorithm is constantly changing and getting more complicated, you cannot rely solely on keywords.

Google considers several factors for ranking. Plus, it tweaks the algorithm more than 3k times every year. This sounds a lot and can become challenging for someone who does not know much about SEO.

If you are also struggling to keep up with Google’s algorithm changes and ranking your website, you can contact our dedicated team of SEO experts. We, at AdLift, take pride in announcing that we have helped several giants boost their ranking and get more traffic. This is done by offering services like SEO audit, content marketing, paid marketing, keyword analysis, to name a few.

Contact us, fill out a form, and one of our experts will connect with you in no time.