What is an SEO Audit?
Introduction
An SEO audit is a complete analysis of a website’s visibility. The study lets you understand why your site is not generating traffic and stagnant sales. This analysis reveals all its interest in e-commerce stores, online sales sites, agencies and auto entrepreneurs. In short, for all professionals who want to be visible on the web and gain more traffic, an in-depth SEO audit is essential.
Previously, it was enough to add links and keywords to a little tag and visual content on the Internet. Today, search engines like Google use a particularly sophisticated algorithm to determine the order of appearance of pages within the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Therefore, successfully hosting your website on the first page of results requires careful SEO techniques.
Advantages of an SEO Audit
A good SEO audit should give the owner a starting point for improving their web presence. It also makes it possible to correlate all the facts that prevent the excellent performance of the site and indicate the necessary actions to enhance the site’s visibility.
The Defining Elements of a Successful SEO audit
A comprehensive SEO audit includes, at a minimum, the following:
On-site auditing (technical): On-site auditing is necessary to ensure that your site is coded well and fast enough. It also includes a full review of all pages to see if keywords are being used correctly. They are in all relevant fields (H1-H6, title tags, content, etc.).
Off-site Audit (authority and legitimacy): Analysis of backlinks, anchor text, management, and site trust rate.
A good SEO audit should provide a detailed analysis of each SEO-related element of the site. It is a complete report of 20 to 30 pages created according to the rules of art and with respect for confidentiality!
Techniques for Conducting an SEO Audit
First and foremost, you must create a workable audit strategy to help define your goals. Then start with a general check:
- Have an overview of the competition
- Analyze your keywords
- Improving the technical aspects of the site.
After initiating these procedures, you can contact an SEO expert to perform an audit. In terms of SEO auditing, you should always choose a technique that includes auditing:
- On-site
- Off-site
- Competitive analysis and keyword research
On-site Audit
This internal Audit combines two parameters: accessibility and indexability. If your potential visitors can’t see your pages, there is no point in creating new content. Accessibility allows you to rate how difficult it is for Google and your users to access your sites.
This step also includes the analysis of the robot .txt file. You need to check the robots .txt file and meta tags that help web crawlers crawl and index the site. This two internals are essential because they restrict crawler access to certain areas of your site. Unintentionally, the webmaster makes certain pages impossible to access through Google.
Another crucial aspect of the site is the XML sitemap, a map for Google bots. Failure to format it can result in the site being inaccessible to crawlers.
Internal analysis requires checking the overall structure of the site and the status of redirects.
A well-structured website is easy for crawlers to access. Redirects must allow access to a page that has been moved or deleted. These elements are essential because they can negatively affect your ranking in search engines and harm your web referencing strategy.
After doing the first step correctly, you should move on to indexability. If accessibility makes your pages accessible, indexability makes it possible for them to appear on the search engine after being referenced by a Googlebot. Again, note that the content is engaging to the audience. Also, content selection should be selective and not have plagiarism issues.
The importance of structuring individual pages:
The individual page structures indicate how each page is organized. They consider several things, such as the text’s length and the URL’s legibility.
Therefore, your URL must adequately and concisely describe your content. In addition, your content must be at least 500 words, and your images must be optimized. Finally, your external links should be relevant and functional.
Off-site Audit
An off-site audit is, in a way, the result of your work. It is a sign of your website’s level of popularity and trustworthiness.
A high trust factor guarantees relevance in the eyes of Google. The level of popularity is related to the number of visits to your pages by Internet users and the general bounce rate. It considers the level of traffic to your site, your external links, your social signals, and the length of time you visit your site. In a way, off-site analysis shows how internet users interact with your site.
Competitive analysis and keyword research
After analyzing all these questions, let’s move on to keyword analysis. In SEO, keyword research and competitive analysis are almost identical. It is impossible to analyze the performance of a keyword without considering the potential competitors for that keyword.
Good SEO depends on your ability to position yourself on target keywords. In this regard, it would be better to focus on long-tail keywords. Many tools are available to determine which keywords will bring you qualified traffic. Concentrating on keywords between 5 and 20 positions is best to improve your SEO significantly. Then, using them wisely, you can put yourself on the first page of SERPs.
