An SEO audit is important in order to give you the big picture and determine what is currently working for your website and what issues are causing you to miss out on potential leads and sales. From a technical on-page perspective, there may be quick-win solutions that are holding your site back from visibility within Google results page, but what exactly is an SEO audit? In this article, we take a look at some of the key aspects that form a technical SEO audit report.
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is an analysis of the on-page and off-page aspects of your website’s current SEO strategy. The purpose is to reveal what is currently working for you and any elements that need improvement going forward. As search engines, in particular, Google, are regularly updating their algorithms, SEO is constantly evolving and this is why it is important to carry out regular SEO audits. Your competitors will be doing this for their websites so it’s vital your business is as well.
What affects the SEO performance of a website?
In general, the main aspects which affect SEO performance are as follows:
- Technical SEO – examples of this include; overall website and page loading speed, web server response time, HTML, CSS and JavaScript code optimisation, database connections and user experience.
- On-page SEO – website content, meta titles and descriptions, internal linking and external linking.
- Off-page SEO – backlinks, brand mentions and reviews all form important off-page SEO factors.
All of these elements need to be included in your SEO audits.
What should be included in an SEO audit?
Some of the factors that should be included in an SEO audit are:
- Site performance analysis – one of the most important steps to go through now Google has launched their Core Web Vitals algorithm update. It involves running a check through the Google Pagespeed Insights tool which gives you a score out of 100 on desktop and mobile devices, from this you can identify issues and take the neccessary action.
- Security – is your site currently using https with a valid SSL certificate? Site security is a ranking signal for Google and its important your site uses https.
- Responsive design – with smartphones becoming increasingly advanced and powerful, most users now browse websites on their phones and tablets, testing on both desktop and mobile devices is carried out to ensure a website is responsive and gives a good user experience on both platforms.
- Sitemap – a valid XML sitemap lets Google know the pages on the website which should be indexed in search results. Is your website using an XML sitemap?
- On-page SEO audit – an on-page audit of current site content to check tags, meta data, images, internal linking and content are all fully optimised.
- Keyword audit – your target keywords, how you are currently ranking for these and measuring impressions and click-throughs. Its important your site content is keyword rich but in an effective way so as not to be excluded by Google.
- Duplicate content checking – this ensures that Google is only indexing a single version of your website.
- Backlink analysis – backlinks or outbound links as they are also known as are an important factor in how your website ranks in results pages, they show the search engines how valuable the content on your website is for the users. A thorough analysis of current backlinks will identify those which are serving your site well and those that are not and need to be removed.
- Link check – broken links make for a poor user experience, which in turn sends a negative signal to Google and other search engines. Checking for broken links across your website which could be penalising your site is an important step.
Need a professional SEO audit? We can help.
Now you know some of the key factors included perhaps it’s time to give your website a professional SEO audit? Faze47 Digital offers a free personalised audit, get in touch with us here to schedule yours today.
