SEO (Search Engine Optimization) enhances the volume and quality of site traffic for a specific web page or a site by search engines. Due to its importance, there are many aspects that need to be checked to ensure that the SEO strategies are helping you attain your business goals. That’s why it’s essential to conduct an SEO audit from time to time to ensure all aspects of the website optimization efforts are working in the business's favor.
This article will explain what an SEO audit is an1d what should be included in an SEO audit checklist.
What Is An SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a method of identifying and analyzing current SEO problems. While optimizing the search engine's results for your website, an SEO audit will determine the following: the number of sites complying with the various rules and regulations of major search engines and crawlers, the amount of link building efforts that are being made, the existence and size of link directories, and the existence of links from domains not owned by the client.
To begin with the SEO audit process, assess your current situation. This includes analyzing your meta tags, keywords, title taglines, and any other static or dynamic information about your site. After this initial analysis, you can now evaluate your internal pages. This includes reviewing your sitemap, navigation, internal link structure, URL building strategy, and other pages that aren’t visible to users.
Your team should also check for duplicate content, cross-reference domains, and any other inconsistencies with the structure of your site. This entire audit process can take up to half a day, especially if you have a large or complex website.
Essentially, the SEO audit process will identify all issues with your site's current layout and architecture. After identifying, you need to highlight the main areas where you need improvement.
What Should Be Included In Your SEO Audit Checklist
Before you conduct an SEO audit, you need to establish an SEO audit checklist so that you won’t miss anything important. An SEO checklist covers every single aspect of your website that could affect your rankings on major search engines.
Here are some of the most essential items you should include in your SEO audit checklist:
1. Technical Aspects
Technical SEO stands for the process of optimization of your website for the search engine's crawling and indexing stage. With technical SEO, you help search engines quickly access, index, crawl, and read your site without or with little difficulties. It's also known as comprehensive optimization because it deals with various criteria that search engines use to rank websites.
Most technical SEO audits are done manually since crawling the web and analyzing its structure involves a lot of programming and coding. You should first review your sitemap, index page, site map, internal linking forms, and links from other domains that point to your site. You should also check all of the files that make up your website, including template and image files, JavaScripts, stylesheets, and security headers.
2. Local SEO
Local search engine optimization (Local SEO) should also be included in your SEO audit checklist. This is especially important for businesses that want to strengthen their customer base around their physical store. Local SEO is the process of optimizing your site to attract more business from the relevant local searches your target audience makes on search engine pages.
A local SEO audit may have the same components as a technical SEO audit. However, the former puts more focus on the performance of the site on local search results. In a local SEO audit, you need to check if the business has an accurate name, location, and contact details across the major online listing.
3. Content
An SEO content audit is a powerful means of improving your site's performance on search engines. But it can also be tricky and time-consuming if you've never done one before.
An SEO content audit offers you a clearer picture of how to improve your SEO approach by showing you which content is beneficial, what keywords to use, and what to completely delete. By examining the audit results in this light, you'll have a better idea of what to do next to boost your site's rankings and make more money.
Aside from the mentioned benefits, conducting an SEO content audit provides a more detailed analysis of a website’s indexable content. This information is used to determine which pages are driving traffic and conversions and which are the ones that are duplicated or slate for removal.
4. Links
An SEO link audit can reveal exactly which (if any) links on your website present some risk to your ranking. This detailed information is essential for many reasons:
- Allows for early damage control
- Allows for a more thorough analysis
- Allows for a greater understanding of your competitors' strategies
- Provides quick analysis and feedback
An SEO link audit can also prioritize checking backlinks, which analyzes a website’s link profile. It’ll check if the website has good or bad links pointing back to the site. Having bad links connected to your site can hurt your search engine ranking.
5. Keywords
When it comes to the success of any SEO strategy, keywords are critical. The importance of keyword selection is emphasized to ensure your site ranks high on search engine pages. Keyword audit remains one of the most critical practices for conducting an effective SEO audit, so it should always be included in your SEO audit checklist.
A keyword audit will give you insights into your target audience's thoughts, needs, and preferences. By using a keyword management tool, you can check how your keywords are already ranking on search engine pages. You can also check how these keywords perform in the past and compare it to how it performs today. With this information, you can update your relevant keywords so they’re also viral keywords used in your niche.
When To Hire An SEO Agency
You probably can handle some SEO tasks, but not everything. If you’re too busy to create your SEO audit checklist and implement SEO strategies, you can seek the help of a data-driven SEO agency, such as Traffv. A good SEO agency can help you grow your long-term organic traffic in order to reach new customers.
If you want do a more in-depth SEO auditing and implement a more extensive SEO campaign, hiring an SEO agency can help you make the processes faster and easier with the guidance of SEO experts. A good SEO agency conducts a website technical audit using software integration in order to analyze your website. With the help of accurate data setup and keyword position tracking using tools like keyword.com, an SEO agency can help improve SEO quality and decisions.
If you want to optimize your business on local search and search engine maps, an SEO agency can also help. This way, your prospects on certain geographical locations can easily spot your business on maps and local searches.
SEO agencies are also experts in monthly reporting to assess campaign performance, as well as keyword mapping to assign target keywords. They can also help in link building campaigns, without hurting the websites. In addition, they can help create relevant content outline, tailored to your intended audience.
Final Thoughts
The importance of SEO audit lies in a couple of aspects. The process helps improve the ranking of the current page by removing any invalid entries, as well as improving the overall performance and quality of the web pages, subsequently increasing the site's visitors.
The importance of SEO audit lies in the fact that it helps fix the problems related to the site's usability. All the pages of the website have to be examined for any on-page issues and then the methods implemented to rectify them. That’s why it’s essential to have a comprehensive SEO audit checklist so you won’t miss checking anything that can affect your site’s ranking.