How to conduct an effective SEO audit?

Now that you know the tools and the techniques, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty details of SEO auditing.

Identify link-building opportunities

Link building is one of the strongest pillars when it comes to building your website’s authority, and therefore, you simply can not ignore this one during your SEO audit. There are two types of links within SEO: external links and internal links. While the former are links on your page to other websites, the latter are links to your own website or page.

For internal link optimisation, you’ll want to ensure you are adding a few relevant and helpful hyperlinks to your older content whenever you create a new blog or content. For example, if your blog’s CTA is to book a call with your team, you can add an internal link to your sales page!

However, when it comes to external link-building opportunities, you should be focusing on hyperlinking authoritative domains only as it builds your domain authority. So, for instance, you’re writing a blog on SEO audits, adding external links to Google’s blogs, press releases, or other SEO giant sites such as HubSpot, SEMrush, and Ahrefs.

Improve site structure 

The way your site and content are structured makes a big impact on your SEO positioning because visitors want a smooth experience when they’re navigating through your site. But how do you begin improving your structure?

Work with UX developers to find user-friendly solutions to improve the user experience. Double-check for repetitive content or visual elements that can put people off, such as having the same recommendation button twice on one page. You can and should also rearrange the pages and give them parent categories to create a seamless experience!

Fix thin content

If you're hearing about thin content for the first time, you're in for a treat. Thin content refers to any page or material that doesn't meet your users' needs because it's either not detailed enough or overly lengthy. For a simpler rule, technical content (blogs and case studies, for example) will have a higher word count, while pages that are close to your homepage will often have a minimal amount of content.

To fix thin content, select pages that have dropped performances recently, export the top 20 pages by traffic for analysis in an SEO audit tool of your choice, analyse the reports of the SEO tool, and improve your content appropriately.

Remove any duplicate content

Having duplicate content on your website gives birth to SEO cannibalisation where Google will implement site penalties, bringing down your ranking, web traffic, and domain authority. While the search engine can technically see whether the duplication is intentional or not, it’s better to do your auditing and fix it before something bad happens.

Both SEMrush and Ahrefs can analyse your pages and point out duplications that you can remove or edit so they’re not flagged in the future.

Conduct keyword optimisation

Keywords are the road signs that tell your target audience where they need to go to find what they’re looking for. But if you put the wrong signs up, they might be tempted to go elsewhere.

That’s where keyword optimisation comes into place. You’ll need to conduct thorough keyword research and pick keywords that can help you become visible in organic searches. Remember, it’s normal for some pages of your website to not be easy to optimise so you shouldn’t push it if that’s the case.

Your main target keyword must optimally be within the URL, the title, H1, H2, meta title, and meta description as well as a few times within the body copy— all naturally, of course!

Optimise meta tags

Meta tags refer to your meta title and description, the very text that comes up on Google SERPs whenever you Google anything. This piece of information is vital because it not only helps Google understand what your page is about but also helps visitors know if you’re offering them the value they’re searching for.

That’s why you should optimise your meta tags to be concise, relevant, and keyword-optimised. You can perform keyword optimisation by ensuring your meta title and meta description both have the main keyword in place while avoiding keyword stuffing.

Identify page updating opportunities

Constantly updating your pages when they add real value can earn you a gold star from search engines. These updates indicate that your website is relevant, updated, and consistent in offering the best information to its visitors.

You can generally keep updating your pages by compressing images, fixing broken links, adding relevant keywords, or removing redundant links as well as adding new information within your blog posts. You can also prune content that is counterintuitive to your offerings, i.e. any page that has close to 0 visitors in a while.

Optimise page speed

According to Google, 53% of users will abandon a site if it takes over 3 seconds to load. This statistic has only grown since Google threw the Speed Update and Page Experience update in the mix— all thanks to mobile searching.

It also means that the faster your website is, the more Google will push you upwards in SERPs. For this one, PageSpeed Insights can tell you what your page speed looks like and offer you ways to improve the speed even more.

You can improve your page speed if you compress all the images through an online image compressor to reduce the size, implement lazy loading so that the initial structure of the site loads instantly, limit the number of HTTP requests, minify your CSS and JavaScript code and optimise it, opt for third-party dependencies!

Scan for site errors

Double-check your website to find any links that lead to a 404 error and remove them as they add to a negative user experience. While search engines don’t imply site penalties for site errors, you still need to prioritise a good user experience.

Luckily, site audit tools can quickly and efficiently identify any 404 errors so you won’t have to rely on manpower to find broken links through multiple pages of your site. Once they’re pointed out to you, simply edit the URLs to working ones or simply remove the hyperlinks!

Swap HTTP with HTTPS

In today’s time, digital security and speed are at the top of mind for millions of users and organisations. And that’s why you should switch to HTTPS in case you’re stuck on HTTP.

Not only is HTTPS more secure and faster, but it is also one of the top-ranking signals used by Google. You can use the Index Status report in Google Search Console to see where your site’s URLs are canonicalised so that you can make the switch.