What’s an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is essentially an evaluation that gauges your website’s potential for appearing on the uppermost pages of Google’s search engine results.
Audits enable you to verify each thing on an agenda of SEO standards and spot any problems that require your focus to enhance your web index position.
View this as a scoring system for the SEO on your website. Your website could look amazing, be immaculately put together, and have excellent design, but if internet browseers cannot find it on the search engine results pages, you will not gain any earnings from the pages you put all this effort into creating.
Utilizing a tool such as SEO checker, it is simple to gain visibility of your website’s SEO rating.
However, you won’t gain an understanding of the potential outcomes that can be achieved from a complete SEO review.
A comprehensive audit provides a workable plan for:
- Comparing with competitors and benefit from your findings.
- Determine what adjustments must be made (and how to do them).
- Get an overview of your website’s SEO effectiveness.
- Discover and correct your site’s weaknesses.
- Set certain expectations for the future of your website.
It may be unrealistic to think that you can fix every single problem with your website right away, but you can work on improving a number of areas gradually.
Factors To check for in an SEO Audit
Prior to making any alterations, you must craft an efficacious plan. An SEO audit can be used to enhance multiple facets, such as keywords, technical elements, and beyond.
If you conduct an SEO assessment, your major focus is likely to be getting to the highest Google spot for your search words.
Getting to the peak of search engine rankings involves focusing on many intricate aspects that work together to enhance SEO. Let’s discuss these factors in detail.
Check your technical SEO
Conducting an SEO audit using the correct instruments will allow you to promptly identify various defects. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is highly regarded as one of the best tools available for this purpose.
This SEO program is the perfect choice to quickly review your website. You have the option to execute a number of useful trials utilizing the free edition.
Perform a Panda and Penguin check
Google released two algorithms called Panda and Penguin with the purpose of highlighting websites of superior quality on the search engine result pages.
The Panda process is concerned with the website material and the banners, while Penguin evaluates the outside and the inside links connected to your site.
To gain insight concerning the Panda and Penguin algorithms from Google, study the SEO guide from Moz. Google is consistently revising its algorithms, so be conscious of any upcoming alterations and suggestions.
Examine your page titles and refine them.
Check your web page titles
The main topic of the page should be highlighted in the title, and it should be finished off with a unique phrase that is associated with the website.
You can see all your page titles using by scanning them in Screaming Frog:
Creating effective titles is an essential capability for any SEO specialist. Why? The first thing a user will notice when they look at search engine results is the title tag. Google utilizes this information in order to recognize the subject of a page, which makes it an incredibly important factor in search engine optimization (SEO).
You should create an SEO title that will attract individuals to click on it, go to your website, and then peruse or buy your goods. If your title doesn’t meet expectations, individuals will disregard it and turn toward other outcomes. A good page title achieves two objectives:
- It must help you rank for your target keywords;
- It must persuade the user to click through to your page.
Google assesses your importance for a certain keyword by observing your click-through rate (CTR). Even if you start out high in search engine rankings, your relevance may drop if nobody chooses to click on your result in the search.
Investigate the “page title branding” area for any lost titles or duplicates. Read more about branding and titles here.
You’ll also require some excellent meta descriptions.
Improve your meta descriptions
A meta description functions as a type of advertisement that encourages a user to check out your website. A concise and comprehensive meta description will draw more visitors to your website when it pops up on search engine results pages.
Google tends to shorten the length of meta descriptions to somewhere between 155 and 160 characters. It’s advised that meta descriptions should be between 50 and 160 characters to make sure they accurately explain the subject. It is vital to consider that the best length can change depending on your circumstances. The ultimate goal is to give something of worth and attract clicks.
Meta description tags have no influence on search engine rankings yet they are essential in encouraging users to click on the link from the search engine result pages. These brief lines of text offer a great possibility to market content to users who search online. This assists users in evaluating if the material is pertinent and has the data they require.
The meta description of a page should include keywords associated with the page in a manner that does not appear forced, while at the same time making an appealing statement that will encourage the searcher to select it. The page should have a meta description that connects to the content presented and stands out from the other meta descriptions.
Go to the Meta Description section in the Screaming Frog SEO Spider program and make any changes to your existing meta descriptions. When you click on this section, you can check to see if any of your meta descriptions repeat themselves.
- Avoid double quotation marks
If quotation marks are included in the HTML of a meta description, Google will not display anything beyond the quotation mark when showing your page on its Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Check for Canonical URLs
Canonical URLs allow search engines to know that two URLs which look identical are actually the same. It is not uncommon to come across the same product or material located in various URLs or on various websites. Using HTML link tags that contain the attribute rel=canonical will ensure that this kind of duplicated content does not impact your search engine rankings on your webpage.
What is the canonical link element? The rel=canonical element, also known as the "canonical link," is an HTML element that helps webmasters avoid issues with duplicate content. It does so by specifying a web page's "canonical URL" or "preferred" version. This is almost always the source (original) URL. Your website's SEO will improve if you use canonical URLs. The concept is straightforward. If you have multiple versions of the same piece of content, you choose one to be the "canonical" version and direct search engines to it. This link eliminates the duplicate content problem, where search engines are unsure which version to display in their results.
For example, the canonical URL for our WordPress SEO article looks like this in HTML:
How rel=canonical improves SEO
If you select an appropriate canonical web address for each grouping of comparable URLs, your website’s search engine optimization will advance. Search engines are able to identify the exact version of a certain page which should be seen as the authoritative version, thus all links pointing to it will be seen as pointing to the official version. Creating a canonical URL is analogous to establishing a 301 redirection, but it does not actually involve redirection.
To view the canonical URLs related to your website, click on the Canonical Link Element 1 tab. Investigate pages without a canonical URL and determine if the canonical URL corresponds to the typical URL of those pages.
Page-Level Factors to Assess as Part of Your SEO Audit
Crawl Your Site
Using Screaming Frog, perform a crawl of your site.
I utilized Screaming Frog SEO Spider 7.2 for this crawl sample.
I additionally employed CNN.com as an example website for all these components.
- Fire up Screaming Frog.
- For most basic audits, you can use the following settings by going to Configuration > Spider.
What to Check
Make sure that all components in your SEO plan have been reviewed and applied appropriately. Confirm that everything is up to date.
If not, then you’ve identified fixes you’ll need to perform after this audit:
- Keyword in the title tag.
- Title tag starts with keyword.
- Keyword in description tag.
- Keyword appears in the H1 tag.
- Keyword is most frequently used phrase in the document.
E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
Annually, Google refreshes its criteria for evaluation that everyone has access to.
This has nothing to do with how the search algorithms work, but does involve Google raters (human readers) deciding the worth of a web page based on robustness and value.
The basis of the structure used is Expertise, Authority, and Credibility.
How to Check
Evaluating the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) of a website is not a rigid, methodical task but rather an imaginative one.
These points should help your audit process in finding E-A-T issues on a website:
- Does your site have personalized author information, and does it have personalization enabled?
- This means: author bio, author page, and contact information for the author.
- Does your site have personalized, authoritative content that’s trustworthy?
- This means: fact-checked, high-quality articles. Articles must have factually correct information about the topics they discuss.Articles should also be trustworthy in how they discuss the topic.
- If your writing is of lower quality, and is structured in a haphazard manner, you will not have good E-A-T score on your articles. DO NOT skimp on article quality.
Headlines
SEO headline writing is a different beast altogether.
You should integrate keywords for SEO.
You must adjust your headlines for people using social media and coming to your site. Besides that, they should still work to increase your SEO visibility by including important keywords.
It isn’t a case of just jotting something down for five minutes and being done with it.
Here are three points you can check on every page to make sure that your content headlines are written properly:
- Are your headlines written naturally and conversationally?
- These generally tend to perform very well in social, and integration of your SEO keywords just adds a nice ring to it, increasing the quality of your headlines.
- Write your headlines in such a way that they target user engagement and brand reputation as a result.
- Write your headlines to generate discussion and mystery on social.
- Using the AIDA sales principle (Attention – Interest – Decision – Action), you can identify whether or not your headlines meet this standard to be of high enough quality to be included in your site.
SEO Writing
People sometimes overlook the importance of SEO in their writing and fail to write their content in a way that optimizes their search engine performance.
They think that generating content is sufficient, and that “if it’s put up, people will arrive.”
Unfortunately, writing is only half the battle.
To guarantee success, it is essential to make sure that the SEO elements of your content are in check. This will ensure that Google perceives your material to be of good quality, allowing it to rise in rankings.
Don’t forget about content freshness! SEO was initially created for searches regarding timely matters, not for all content. However, up-to-date information still has a significant role to play.
Let’s take a look at some of the common SEO writing factors that should be addressed in a website audit:
Text Structure
The format of your writing is as essential as your search engine optimization.
Your text should be constructed in such a way that it conveys the information needed and is designed efficiently from a coding perspective.
To write good code from a coding standpoint, it’s important to incorporate the use of standard semantic HTML to indicate headings and the content areas, such as H1 tags for the main headings, H2 tags for subheadings, H3 tags for smaller subheadings, and P tags for paragraphs.
Keyword Integration
Integration of keywords is important, but don’t keyword stuff.
Do not try to stuff your content with a lot of the same words expecting it to be a top-notch article. That’s never going to happen.
Place emphasis on utilising your selected words and phrases in an organic way within the content.
Images
Pictures are an essential element of composed work, yet they are talked about somewhere else in this review direct.
If you believe an image will help to emphasize or solidify your content, then go ahead and incorporate it. This topic should be taken into account when carrying out evaluations of your website.
High-Quality Writing
Creating content that is of superior quality is a must if a website desires to reach its SEO goals. Producing writing that is of a high standard makes it effortless for readers to comprehend your SEO content, providing them with a precise understanding of what is being communicated.
One should not suppose that the readers will possess the same deep comprehension that you have regarding the subject. That never helps at all.
Ensure that your audit dossier is comprehensible to your audience.
Ensure that all subjects, points, and titles are accurately described in your composition.
