What Is an SEO Audit? 12 Simple Steps to Maximize Your SEO!

Just like building requires regular maintenance, your SEO strategy needs regular audits, too. To do an SEO regular audit, you should first understand what is an SEO audit and how to make it work.

It's not easy to get a great SEO performance, but it'll pay off if you're patient and consistent because the results will be worth the effort you put in.

Let’s explore the explanation below to learn more about SEO audits and simple steps to implement them in your SEO business practice!

What Is an SEO Audit?

SEO Audit is one of the important parts of achieving SEO success. This includes all analyzing and evaluating practices of SEO performance from indexing status to rank monitoring.

SEO audit aims to control, gain insight, and evaluate the running SEO in your business to maximize its performance and get higher rankings on search engines.

This auditing practice should be conducted regularly, because, as you can see, the SEO industry is constantly changing, and the search engine algorithms continue to advance every period of time.

Why Is SEO Audit Important?

Of course, excellent SEO implementation can bring many benefits to your business website, such as an increase in traffic, brand awareness, conversion rate, and maintaining your website ranking. 

As you know, it is important for businesses to gain as much as possible audience to get brand awareness and increase sales, and SEO is one of the strategies to achieve that. 

So, an SEO audit is important as it can maintain and optimize your website SEO. 

With the help of an SEO audit, you can identify and fix any issues that are happening to your SEO practices and are causing harm to your SEO performance.

When You Should Perform SEO Audit?

After you know what is an SEO audit, you may want to know when you need to conduct it.

SEO audit is not only done once but on a regular basis, which can be every three or six months or when your business website shows some signs such as:

• Dropping in organic traffic.
• Unusual high bounce rate.
• Significant decrease in conversion rate.
• Decline in Google search ranking.

How To Do an SEO Audit

Now, you will go deeper than just knowing what is an SEO audit, you will learn how to do and implement the most effective one for your business. Here are some steps on how to do an SEO audit for your business.

1. Check Indexing Issue

After knowing what is a website audit, the first step you can take is to check your website indexing issue. Of course, checking the indexing of each page will be very time-consuming, but fortunately, there are SEO tools that can do the job for you.

Now, you can use some supporting SEO tools such as Google Search Console to look for errors on your website like server errors, “404 Not Found”, or “redirect errors.”

In addition, you can also check disallowed pages by Robots.txt file, examine your meta tags, and check your XML sitemap. If you find that there is a problem with your indexing, you can fix it immediately to ensure that search engines crawl your site properly.

2. Check Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can unintentionally occur on your website because of many reasons, but for your SEO practice, this is not a good thing. Duplicate content can confuse the search engine also harm your SEO, and in the worst-case scenario, it can cause Google to penalize your website.

With the help of Google Search Console, you can identify duplicate content on your website. In this tool, you can also check other aspects like URL parameters and canonical tags that can affect your SEO. From the insight you should make sure there is no duplicate content on your website.

3. Check Mobile-Friendliness

Mobile-friendliness is one of the most important parts that impact user experience and search engine rankings. Google provides tools to help you check your website's mobile friendliness with Google's mobile-friendly test, you can use it to do quick assessments.

On the other hand, you need to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly by having a responsive design that can be automatically adjusted to different screen sizes.

4. Analyze Website Speed

The next step in how to do an SEO audit is to analyze your website speed. If you want to improve your user experience and reduce bounce rate, your website should have fast loading page.   

You can prevent it by checking your website speed regularly. To do it you can use SEO tools like Google PageSpeed Insight, which helps you provide both mobile and desktop page speed analysis. From that insight, you can identify the areas you can improve to increase your website loading speed.

5. Analyze Core Web Vitals

Core web vital consists of 3 main aspects that is largest contentful color (LCP) which measures website loading performance, the first input delay (FID) which measures interactivity and cumulative layout shifts (CLS) which measures visual stability.

Just like any other aspect of your website, you can do core web vital analysis by identifying and fixing the problem with Google Search Console tools. Also, regular monitoring of this aspect can help you to improve the performance of your website and lead to higher audience satisfaction.

6. Optimize Internal Links

Internal links are other important elements that you can optimize to help your audience and search engines easily understand your website structure.

Start optimizing your internal links by checking your website mapping, anchor text, and link distribution. Make sure that all internal aspects are working properly and if there are any problems, fix them immediately.

7. Analyze Organic Traffic

When you're auditing your SEO, it's important to look at the volume and quality of organic traffic to your website. This will help you identify which keywords and pages are driving the most traffic and show that your audience is interested in that topic. 

You can use tools like Google Analytics to track organic traffic regularly, see how visitor numbers change, and link these changes to recent SEO efforts or algorithm updates to make improvements.

8. Compare Competitor Domain

Next up on your SEO audit list is comparing your domain to competitors. Checking out how your domain stacks up against the competition can help you make your website better and keep up with other companies in your industry. 

You can look at things like domain authority, backlink profiles, keyword rankings, and the overall site structure.

On top of that, checking out metrics like bounce rate, session duration, and conversion rates for organic traffic can give you a better understanding of how engaged users are and how well your content strategy is working.

9. Conduct Competitor Keyword Research 

If you want to improve your local SEO performance, it's really important to do some competitor keyword research in the local US market. 

Start by making a list of your direct and indirect competitors who operate in the same area or target similar customers. You can find your competitors on sites like Google Maps, Yelp, or local business directories.

Look for keywords that have a geographical component, like city names or regional identifiers (like "services laptop in Dallas" or "best pizza in New York"). 

Check which local keywords your competitors are ranking for and see how that compares to what you have to offer. Look at how they're using these local keywords in their content. This can help you think of ways to optimize your own content.

10. Do Link Reclamation

Sometimes when you make updates or changes to your website, you might find broken links or lose some of your links. If you let this happen, it can affect your SEO performance. But, you don’t need to worry, as you can do link reclamation.

Link reclamation is a part of SEO auditing that involves finding and fixing broken links that are used to point to your website. 

This practice can help your site get more authority and search engine ranking. To do that, you can use Search Console tools to find broken links, 404 errors, or links that were redirected incorrectly. 

11. Optimize Low-Rank Pages

The low-rank page is a page that can't compete and perform well on search engine result pages. When you're auditing your site for SEO, you should make all pages on your site perform better and be more visible. 

To start, look at which pages get the lower traffic and conversion rates. You can use tools like Google Analytics to do this. 

After identifying low-rank pages, you can do optimization like ensuring it's relevant, informative, well-optimized with targeted keywords, and enhance meta info (title, tag, description).

Also, make sure your low-rank page loads quickly, are mobile-friendly and has a clear call to action (CTA).

The last thing you need to do in your SEO audit is keep track of how your website is doing in the rankings. 

You can start by using local SEO tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and specialized local rank-tracking tools. 

With these tools, you can track specific keywords that are relevant to your business and also see how you rank in different cities or regions within the United States. 

Keep an eye on local-specific search terms, like ones with city names or regional qualifiers, to get a better idea of how you're doing with your local SEO.

Conclusion

From the explanation above, you know that doing regular SEO audits is important for improving website performance, gaining traffic, and increasing website ranking. However, you still need to be patient and consistent to get the desired result.

If you're short on time and struggling to do your own SEO, you can rely on SEO Services by cmlabs. 

Our professional and experienced teams will help your business website get a high search engine ranking and gain SEO success. Get a free consultation about your SEO needs by contacting our marketing team now!