SEO Audit basically means analyzing and checking all on-page and off-page elements of your website that can have an impact on the website’s performance on search engines.
To put it simply it’s like analyzing every element to create a wide picture of the website that allows determining its strong points and errors that affect its work.
With a properly conducted SEO Audit you can determine:
- technical issues that bring a website down in ranking
- every page indexing issues
- incorrect website structure
- problems with content or its development
- website look in the search results
- the website position compared to competitors
Personally, when someone mentions SEO Audit for me it means all the key elements that SEO Audit should include. So, by this I mean:
- Competitive Search Engine Analysis – to put it simply an analysis of the website’s main competitors meaning the keywords they use, estimated monthly traffic from organic results that go to their website, backlinks to websites, their domain authority, and linking domains.
- Indexing and accessibility in Search Engines – finding out whether your website isn’t blocked by Search engines, examining robot.txt files on the website, and checking its visibility on search results.
- Meta Tags Analysis – checking how well the website’s content is described. At this point, people mostly focus on examining title tags, meta descriptions, keywords used in the mentioned elements, headers structure on the website, alternative texts, and how the keywords are tagged.
- Web design and Mobile-friendliness – whether the website works well on mobile devices and how responsive it is. The UX matters are also very important when it comes to generating traffic to the site.
- URL analysis – the name says it all, here you’re analyzing the URL structure
- Content Analysis – checking the content’s quality, keyword usage. Also, you’re making sure no content is duplicated (internally or externally)
- Backlinks analysis – determine if the website has some quality links that improve its position in search engines.
- Website Loading Speed – here you are determining how long it takes to open a website and whether you have to optimize your graphics
