An SEO audit is a process of evaluating a website to see how well it fulfills the conditions to get a high rank in search results. Most SEO strategies are tailored to Google. This search engine generally has the strictest requirements but produces the best results.
Figure out what to audit
Before you start diagnosing your SEO success, decide which factors you want insight into. This is especially important if you’ll be hiring an agency. They need to know what your focus is so they can give you the best information. Typical key aspects to audit include:
- Broken links
- Duplicate content
- Keyword use
- Loading speed
- Link quality
- User-friendliness
- Mobile optimization (or optimization for several kinds of devices)
- Session data
- Bounce rates
Use the right tools
If you decide to do the audit yourself, rather than hiring third-party help, you’ll need the right tools for the job. Consider brushing up on your skills with Google’s tools like Search Console, Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights. Also, consider non-Google ones such as SEMRush or Ahrefs.
Do a crawl of your site
In other words, imitate the spider bots. They track certain factors across the different pages of your website. Based on what they find, they decide whether your small business site deserves to rank high in the search results. The factors they consider include page and section titles, inbound links, optimized meta description, broken links, etc.
To do this, you need to download and install a website crawler. There is a number of tools you can choose from, but you should look for one that provides a reliable white label SEO report. Once you choose a crawler, feed it the URL to your business’s homepage and let it work.
Keep in mind that some of the free tools have limited capacity. They might only work for a set number of pages or you might hit a paywall. If your website consists of many URLs, take a moment to ensure that the crawler tool can process them all.
Check if Google penalized you
If you notice that your website isn’t getting as much traffic as it used to, Google might have imposed a penalty. Their guidelines regularly change, so check your pages’ status every once in a while.
Go to Google Search Console (previously known as Google Webmaster Tools) and select your site. If your account is connected to multiple websites, double-check you have the right one. Then select Manual Actions. You should see your site’s status.
If you get a green tick with “No issues detected” – great, you're in good standing! If not, there’s some issue that’s preventing your site from appearing in Google’s search results. You should see some feedback about what's happening. Adapt your SEO according to those recommendations and the penalties should be removed.
While you’re in the Search Console, you may also want to check the following:
- URL inspection
- Mobile usability
- Performance
- Core web vitals
- Coverage
- Sitemaps
- Page experience
These sections can offer some valuable insight that will let you further enhance your SEO content strategy.
Review the staples
In addition to guidelines compliance and an overall crawl, check the following:
Site speed: Use PageSpeed Insights or another tool to see how long it takes for your website to load. Faster pages mean more user engagement and better ranking. Slow pages mean losing traffic and falling down the results list. Measure this factor and see how you can optimize your loading time.
Additional resource: WordPress SEO Services
Keywords: Do some research to see which ones might have stopped being relevant since you set up your site. If new ones are in-demand, update your pages. Then, take a look at your competition. How does their content rank? Which of their keywords are relevant to your website? How do they acquire backlinks? Adapt what works for them and make it work for you.
Duplicates: Duplicate content doesn’t get penalized, according to Google. However, search engines become confused about which page is the original that should rank higher. If there are multiple duplicate pages on your site, its ranking potential will severely drop. Another problem is third-party websites copying your content. You can use tools like Copyscape to scan for them. Those sites’ admins might not even be aware that they’re using your original work, so consider reaching out and asking them to remove or properly credit it. You may also use unique content writing services to help you improve your SEO through engaging and relevant content.
Backlinks: Do your best to obtain links from relevant, reputable sites. Getting lots of referral traffic from low-quality, irrelevant ones will actually backfire. They get recognized as spam, reflect negatively on your site’s reputation, and can sink your business on the search engine result pages.
Finally, consider a second audit tailored to Google alternatives, like DuckDuckGo or Bing, to maximize your small business’ reach.