Wondering what is SEO audit and why do you need it? In this article, we’ll help you understand the importance of audit so that you drive organic traffic to your site. We have also covered useful information on how to do an SEO audit and take your business to higher growth.
What is SEO Audit?
Why do you go to a salon regularly? Of course, to look groomed and pamper yourself with professional help. Similarly, you regularly take your bike for servicing to keep it well maintained and ensure your safety. So, who do you go to ensure your website is error-free, up to mark to stay relevant in search engine results, and constantly drive organic traffic your way? That is when an SEO audit comes into play.
An SEO audit is like a regular medical check-up of your website’s technical infrastructure along with the on and off-page elements to ensure that the SEO, speed, usability, functionality, and most importantly, conversions are on point. By showcasing the strengths and weaknesses, SEO auditing ensures the SEO strategy of your site is perfect and you don’t miss your target audience.
Types of SEO Audit
Three major types of SEO audits are performed on sites to carry out a detailed review of the site’s structure so that you can implement relevant changes.
1. On-Page SEO Audit
An on-page SEO audit gives an in-depth review of the visible technical elements on a web page such as content, keywords, titles, meta descriptions, images, etc. This audit allows you to rework outdated content that is not fetching fresh views anymore.
2. Off-Page SEO Audit
Off-page SEO auditing ensures that internal elements such as link building, broken links, errors, etc. are analyzed.
3. Technical Audit
A technical SEO audit checks almost all the technical aspects of all your webpages to determine that the website’s SEO is up-to-date and the errors are fixed if any. It also ensures that the search engines crawl your websites and let them appear in SERPs.
Benefits of an SEO Audit
The importance of audit is more than just pointing out errors in the SEO strategy of your site. The benefits of SEO auditing are even more and here are a few to be named:
- Â Â Â Â SEO auditing constantly checks for the health of your website enabling you to take action on the elements that require reworking.
- Â Â Â Â It also improves the visibility of your site on search engines.
- Â Â Â Â SEO auditing makes sure your website remains compliant despite the frequent algorithm changes in various search engines.
- Â Â Â Â It also helps you understand the strategies of your competitors and learn from them.
- Â Â Â Â Most importantly, SEO auditing helps to create a fine user experience by analyzing the site’s speed, bugs, etc. thus improving the engagement on your site.
How to Do an SEO Audit
Since SEO auditing can be quite technical sometimes, hiring an SEO specialist will help you share the load. However, if you want to audit your site, here are a few steps that you can take:
Sign up for Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an important and free tool that helps you analyze the traffic on your site in real-time thus enabling you to measure the success of your site. Through Google Analytics, you can monitor the web-pages that are driving high traffic or the ones that are dead and dull. Furthermore, you can also improve your landing page and even your products and services by understanding what interests your audience more.
Improve the On-Site SEO through Screaming Frog Crawler
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a free website crawler that helps improve on-page SEO by identifying URL issues, SEO content including headings, keywords, LSI keywords, title, descriptions, etc., and pointing out duplicate and redirect pages.
Monitor the Performance Further through Google Webmaster Tools:
Register your site with Google Webmaster Tools which is another free tool that monitors your website’s performance and helps in Search Engine Marketing.
Build and Submit Your XML Sitemap to Search Engines
Once you’ve analyzed and improved all the technical aspects of your site after an SEO audit, submit your XML sitemap to search engines to help them scan, crawl and index your site.
What to Expect After an SEO Audit?
SEO auditing can significantly help your site’s SEO and boost its online visibility. However, it takes somewhere between two to six weeks to crawl a site depending upon how big and heavy it is. If you hire an expert, here is what you can expect after the SEO auditing is completed:
Attention on Site Speed & Mobile Friendliness
After analyzing the website in-depth, your SEO specialist will work on the speed of your site and how to optimize your site for a better user experience on mobile view. Thus, reducing the sizes of images, and reducing the CSS, JavaScript and HTML will help improve the site significantly.
Working on Internal Linking, Guest Posting, etc.
Once the off-page SEO auditing is done, the expert will also work more towards creating stronger backlinks by guest posting and internal linking.
More Emphasis on SEO Blogs, Content & Images
Furthermore, your off-page SEO will be improved through detailed keyword research related to your niche and posting regular SEO blogs to fetch organic traffic. SEO content for every page along with interesting and original images will also be worked on.
The Key Takeaway
We hope we helped you understand all about SEO auditing. It is important to audit your site regularly so that you can fix critical issues before they do any potential harm to your site and even business growth. You must at least conduct an SEO audit once a year to stay relevant, on-the-edge, and error-free. Working constantly on your SEO strategy ensures your traffic is converted into customers in no time.
Sundeep Reddy is a seasoned expert in the digital marketing landscape with 15 years of comprehensive experience encompassing analytics, design, and UI/UX. As the founder of Growth Hackers, the top digital marketing agency in India for the past 7 years, Sundeep has established a reputation for innovative strategies and a results-driven approach. Recognized for his authority in the field, he’s not only led his agency to success but also actively shares his wealth of knowledge, mentoring the next wave of digital marketing professionals.
