Every effective SEO audit begins with a site crawl. This will give you a baseline of your website’s technical standing and help identify any problems that need to be addressed.
One important element to look for is click depth. This refers to how many clicks it takes to reach a page on your website. The goal is to minimize this number, which could be better for search engines and users.
Use Google Analytics
An SEO audit can be one of the most important things you do to improve your website and boost your business’s online visibility. This is because it helps you identify errors that can hurt your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and find opportunities that could help it rank better.
An effective SEO audit can include both technical and content-driven factors. This includes checking for broken pages, duplicate content, low word counts, etc. It also involves looking at your competitor’s websites to see what they are doing right and what you can learn from them.
For example, you can use a tool to compare your keywords with the ones your competitors are targeting to see if there are any opportunities you need to take advantage of.
Crawl Your Site
Search engines use programs called bots to crawl the world wide web and create massive indices. They rely on links to discover and index new pages (link building should be part of your SEO strategy).
It takes several weeks for Google to crawl your website completely. This is why you want to ensure a good sitemap and that all the pages you want indexed are included.
You can also use the free SEO audits with automated tools to monitor how many pages are indexed. This is important because the more pages a search engine indexes, the better. If you have a lot of URLs in your site structure (like with faceted navigation or other systems) that need to be indexed, this will hurt your overall ranking.
Analyze Your Competitors
Using tools like Semrush can give you a complete understanding of your competitors. You can see which keywords are driving traffic to their site, and you can also discover their best-performing pages.
Analyzing your competitors is essential in figuring out how to grow your website. Whether you uncover new keywords to target in your content or find that paid search is a big part of their success, the knowledge you gain from competitor analysis can help boost your SEO efforts.
Consider other factors when analyzing your competition, such as their social media activity and the number of backlinks they have. These things can have just as much impact on your SEO as the keywords they target.
Look at Your Backlinks
Backlinks are a great way to improve the quality of your website’s content and increase traffic. However, focusing on quality rather than quantity is essential when looking at your backlinks. For example, avoid having a higher percentage of nofollow links than do-follow links. Instead, focus on having high-quality backlinks that are relevant to your niche.
For a free tool to see your top external links and referring domains. While this is a good starting point, cognitive SEO can provide more detailed information, such as unnatural link detection and a breakdown of all anchor text used on your website. This will help you make informed decisions about what changes to implement. Also, this tool lets you compare your backlinks with your competitors to identify opportunities for improvement.
Review Your Content
A lot goes into conducting an SEO audit, and there’s no one-size-fits-all formula. However, there are some things you should always look for to ensure your SEO strategy is a success.
For example, make sure your website content is up to date. Google favors websites that provide fresh, relevant information to searchers. Also, pay attention to your title tags. Your meta descriptions can greatly impact whether users click on your site or a competitor’s.
Finally, remember to check your social media engagement and ratings. This is an easy way to get more traffic and customers. Plus, it can give you a leg up on your competitors. A recent study showed that businesses with higher ratings on local review sites saw increased sales.