How To Do An SEO Audit?

These steps will help you perform an SEO audit effectively and step by step.

The SEO audit is of vital importance to find the possible errors that a website may have. Problems that may be resulting in not being positioned in Google or other search engines. But it is not only about positioning in Google, in fact a good audit can also reveal the authority of your website and how pleasant it is for users who visit it.

First you must understand that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process of continuous optimization and optimization refers to the improvement that is made to a certain website, so that it is visible to Google. These steps will help you perform an SEO audit step by step and in a functional way. In it I will also talk to you about the operation of several tools that could be useful at the time of the audit.

What does SEO do on my website?

SEO determines what problems a web page has from a technical point of view, that is, things like: how functional its URLs are, if the descriptions are their own or if they are targeting keywords. But it can also identify if the web page has a good loading speed, if the site has damaged links and if it is complying with the requirements of Google algorithm updates so as not to be penalized.

In this way, the SEO audit for your website helps you improve the quality of your website based on Google's quality guidelines. One of the main search engines in the world and that if you are visible to Google, you will be visible to the world and your ideal client. But also with SEO you can:

✔Create content designed for your ideal client and have fresh ideas to create new content according to what your buyer person is looking for.

✔Increase your content visibility to give the site more authority.

How to do an SEO audit?

First before you start you should start analyzing the website from the outside in. That is, how is its external visualization and then go step by step improving the internal form of the web page that will be analyzed. In this way, the first thing you should keep an eye on is your competitors, make sure you know them and investigate them. Your competitors will be all those brands that are positioned in Google and belong to your field. What keywords are they ranking for?

☑Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to research your competitors and list at least 5 that you consider to be your competition. As advice that your content is occupying the first place in the search engine. This is achieved, for example, in the Ahrefs Top Pages feature.

☑Then go to your website and start investigating the general indexing problems (the difficulties that a page may have that do not allow it to be visible). You can do this using a crawler (a tool that measures the crawlability of your web page) such as Dreecrawl.

☑Then you have to make sure to analyze the structure of the links that the website you want to compete with is using, the architecture of the page and the information it is sharing. For this, use tools like SEMrush to see what content is in the first place, study its backlinks and identify the opportunities for improvement that your page could offer.

☑ What follows is to see the category pages of products or services that the web may have. Make sure that all products have the correct URL according to the category they offer. This part helps a lot to improve the user experience of the client.

☑Finally, go to the product detail pages and make sure that the descriptions of each product are your own. This helps the page stand out from other similar websites that offer the same product.

SEO audit example

It is important that you know that with SEO there are no magic formulas and that you must understand that these may vary according to new updates. So do not despair or try to make the same strategies for several clients. Well, one of the things that make SEO Analysts stand out is their personalized strategies.

✔When you open an account with tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs, you will be given the opportunity to enter a URL of the page you want to do an SEO audit. Put the exact URL example: Contenttu.com so that the tool gives you an overview of the web page.

✔Then within the same tool you will find options such as: the problems tab. Where the errors that were seen on the web page are listed. Pages that have duplicate content, that are not using HTTPS, duplicate H1 tags. In this way, you can suggest that the site become more secure with SSL security, ask the copywriters to improve the H1s so that they differ from each other and ask them to remove or improve the pages that have been duplicated.

✔After doing an exhaustive search of all the errors that the page on page may have. Go to the crawled pages tab and view the entire list that SEMrush displays with definitions such as correct or redirected. Make sure that the pages do not contain errors and you can do it in a personalized way, in this part you can see the status of outgoing links and incoming links, evaluate the page load time and suggest everything from a list of URLs.

✔Review the statistics: with this content you will be able to see much better the reasons why Google still cannot read the page clearly. Tools like SEMrush allow you to see a list and graphs with the crawl depth of the page, pages with the most clicks, among other things. This tab will give you endless opportunities to offer improvements, should you need them.

✔Finally, compare the Crawlers or web spiders. With web crawler like: Dreecrawl . These cyber spiders are bots that belong to every search engine. With this tool you can see duplicate content, redirection and meta tag issues.

How are crawler problems diagnosed?

Diagnosing crawler problems is important because it avoids penalties for low-quality content. Duplicate pages are usually not visible that easily, but not improving that detail can mean that google bots can't see the best pages on your website.

1)First you must enter a tool like scre@mingfrog or Deepcrawl and enter the URL of your page.

2)Then you can visualize the content of the page at this point, things like: that the titles and descriptions have the correct length, that they are not repeated. Because bots can see it as duplicate content.

3)Displays if the page has Thin Content or Brief Content. This is an error that is usually penalized by Google Panda, considering it not very useful.

4)Identify if the page has duplicate content and verify that web pages do not have more than one H1.

5) Check the pages that have a canonical tag and those that do not. These are part of an important mechanism that helps to properly index pages so that Google can crawl them.

Conclusions

Always when doing an audit, do not forget to create an adequate strategy where you show the company several improvement options and always think of the best for your brand. Remember that no strategy should be the same as another! However, I hope that these points can serve as a starting point.

Make sure that all pages have their meta descriptions and their titles oriented to the best user experience. That is, they provide valuable content about what they will see on the screen. Similarly try to have unique meta descriptions and remove broken links from the web. Also avoid the 302 redirect and recommend that you change it to 301.

Do you want an SEO audit for your website? Contact us for a free consultation.