Is your website not reaching the audience as much as you would like? Are your sales below expectations? This could be a sign that your brand’s visibility on the internet is low!
But don’t worry, have you ever imagined finding the weak points that prevent you from ranking well in search engines and having the tools to outperform your competitors? This is possible with an SEO audit.
Therefore, if you are looking for an increase in organic traffic, know that investing in an SEO audit may be the solution you need. Shall we go?
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a complete analysis that reveals all the existing flaws on a website. To start, I use a Screaming Frog tool that does what we call a scan on the site. For SEO professionals, this tool is already well known.
Screaming Frog will do a complete analysis of all the pages that are within your site, that is, each URL. Still in this content, I will bring more details about the possibilities of this tool for an audit.
In addition, during the audit process, some other tools are also usually used, in addition to the results presented in Google’s own SERP.
To analyze some details directly in the browser, we use some simple techniques, such as accessing the robots.txt files or your site’s sitemap.
In summary, the audit identifies errors, site blocks, improvements and lack of information. It also identifies possible virus risks. There are numerous pieces of information, it is really a complete survey on the functioning of your site.
What is the importance of an SEO audit
As highlighted above, the SEO audit reveals all errors and points out the main improvements indicated for your site. And all these errors or pending improvements end up harming your site’s ranking in search engines.
That is, it proves to stakeholders the value of SEO for your business. This happens because after this task is performed, improvements and corrections can begin to be applied by SEO professionals and company developers (in cases of more technical errors).
How will your site be improved if you don’t actually know what is hurting, does it make sense? Let’s say your site has 500 URLs, how will you know where the errors are? That’s where the SEO audit comes in!
What types of problems can we find during an SEO audit?
There are several problems that affect the performance of a site and the SEO audit is the key to revealing what these flaws are, so that then, as I explained in the previous topic, an SEO professional can correct them.
Check out some of the most common problems that can be found in an SEO audit below.
- Indexing failures: the audit analyzes pages with indexing errors so you can correct them. Pages not indexed by Google are not visible in searches;
- Loading speed: we know that slow sites frustrate any visitor and affect SEO. Therefore, this factor is extremely important;
- Mobile friendly: currently, most internet searches are done directly by smartphones. This means that a site that is not friendly to a mobile device will certainly lose relevance in search engines;
- Duplicate content: identical content on several pages of your site also harms SEO. That is, this is another problem that the SEO audit can indicate and help you solve;
- Keyword cannibalization: this happens when several pages of the same site end up competing for the same keyword, which can affect the ranking of all of them;
- Titles and descriptions: find out if some pages are without titles and description. Or if they is not optimized for the SEO. That is, if they are short or long, they do not have the main keyword;
- Virus: is your site at risk of attacks? The SEO audit can also identify;
- Sitemap: check if your site has a sitemap and, of course, if all important URLs are inside it;
- URLs: find out if there are broken URLs, etc. Remembering that there are many other problems that can be observed in an SEO audit.
It is worth noting that the SEO audit is the first step to solve the problems that are impacting the performance of your site in search engines, after all, it reveals them.
How to do an SEO audit?
There are numerous questions that should be asked when conducting an SEO audit. The first of which is whether there are accessibility and indexing errors. Shall we start?
Accessibility and Indexing
Remember that I explained earlier that pages not indexed on Google are not visible in searches?
So, first, you should analyze if your brand appears in Google’s SERP. If so, confirm if it appears in the first position. In addition, are there subdomains of test environments that should not be indexed?
Now, it’s time to check the robots.txt file, remember that I already commented on it? By the way, does your site have this file? Well, if we delve into all the errors, the content would be huge. But don’t worry! There is a step-by-step guide to the SEO audit in the Dominating Technical SEO in Practice Course.
There you will find uncomplicated content and short videos, made to demystify technical SEO. In addition, all the questions that should be asked in an SEO audit are shared in a model made especially to facilitate the life of SEO professionals.
Crawling Problems
Now, going back here to how to do the audit, you should start crawling the site and for that you can use Screaming Frog. I used it as a tip, because when you download this tool you will be able to crawl up to 500 URLs for free.
You can also purchase a license to remove this limit and access more advanced features.
Technical Structure of On-Page Content
Shall we talk about the Title Tag and the meta Description now? Are they all optimized for SEO? And do they have the keyword (I talked about this at the beginning of the text), do they mention your brand on important pages?
In addition to them, within the content structure, images come in. So, it’s time to check if they are heavy, if they have alternative text, etc.
Another important point is your own content. Are the contents well divided into paragraphs, are there duplicate contents, are you working on internal linking correctly? All these points are also important for SEO.
Still considering this step, SEO professionals should check Page Experience and authority issues.
Speed and Security
Within this step, several factors are analyzed, including:
- Responsiveness;
- Responsiveness/AMP;
- PageSpeed;
- Resources and security.
Site Architecture
The site architecture refers to the correct use of heading tags, URLs, structured data and navigation paths.
Using the heading tags as an example, several issues are analyzed. Including whether they are following a hierarchy and whether there are pages on your site that do not have H1.
Types of Sites
Here we are already going to a more technical part, including:
- JavaScript and rendering;
- International SEO (when applicable to the site);
- Subdomain and subdirectory.
Google Tools
And last but not least, let’s go to Google Search Console and Analytics. Here come some questions about more complex codes and simpler things, for example, if the selected country is correct.
It is worth noting that the topics described above go far beyond what I could describe in each paragraph. After all, each point of improvement or errors involves several different tools and step by step for each conference. Although, of course, Screaming Frog helps a lot, it will not do your entire audit, see?
It is also important to list all URLs with errors in a separate spreadsheet, to facilitate at the time of recommending improvements that involve SEO services.
What to do after the SEO audit?
After conducting the SEO audit and analyzing the results, it is crucial to draw up an action plan to implement improvements and optimize the site.
Prioritizing actions is fundamental, focusing on problems that significantly impact SEO and user experience.
It’s time to talk to your site developer so that he can implement all the improvements. Remember that it is extremely important to have a Technical SEO Specialist to avoid new errors. In addition, this professional can also guide your team.
Do you want to take your site to the top of Google? So, buy an Technical SEO Audit with SEO Liddi!
