SEO Audit

SEO Strategy

Technical SEO

SEO Analysis

ARTICLE #105

How to conduct an effective SEO audit?

How to conduct an effective SEO audit?
How to conduct an effective SEO audit?
How to conduct an effective SEO audit?

SEO Audit

SEO Strategy

Technical SEO

SEO Analysis

Written by:

4 min read

Updated on: August 30, 2024

Iryna Osadcha

Project Manager

Creative Operations, Project Coordination

Iryna Osadcha

Project Manager

Creative Operations, Project Coordination

Iryna Osadcha

Project Manager

Creative Operations, Project Coordination

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most integral parts of the online world. If your brand is online, you’ll need to have a robust SEO strategy in place, and you can do that by keeping an eye on the strategy’s performance! That’s where you’ll need to conduct an SEO audit.

But if you’re feeling lost when it comes to SEO audits, you’re not alone. For the first few times around, conducting a website SEO audit can be a confusing mess. That’s why we’ve come up with a simple and effective guide to conduct an SEO performance check! If you want to know all there is to SEO auditing, read on.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most integral parts of the online world. If your brand is online, you’ll need to have a robust SEO strategy in place, and you can do that by keeping an eye on the strategy’s performance! That’s where you’ll need to conduct an SEO audit.

But if you’re feeling lost when it comes to SEO audits, you’re not alone. For the first few times around, conducting a website SEO audit can be a confusing mess. That’s why we’ve come up with a simple and effective guide to conduct an SEO performance check! If you want to know all there is to SEO auditing, read on.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most integral parts of the online world. If your brand is online, you’ll need to have a robust SEO strategy in place, and you can do that by keeping an eye on the strategy’s performance! That’s where you’ll need to conduct an SEO audit.

But if you’re feeling lost when it comes to SEO audits, you’re not alone. For the first few times around, conducting a website SEO audit can be a confusing mess. That’s why we’ve come up with a simple and effective guide to conduct an SEO performance check! If you want to know all there is to SEO auditing, read on.

What is an SEO audit?

What is an SEO audit?

What is an SEO audit?

SEO audit refers to the process of analysing and evaluating your online pages to check if your current SEO strategy is yielding results— or not! Typically, an SEO audit is done half-yearly to see the strengths and weaknesses of your website’s SEO, fix mistakes and everything that’s not working out in your best interest as well as give you a vision of your SEO strategy’s future.

What is an SEO audit?

SEO audit refers to the process of analysing and evaluating your online pages to check if your current SEO strategy is yielding results— or not! Typically, an SEO audit is done half-yearly to see the strengths and weaknesses of your website’s SEO, fix mistakes and everything that’s not working out in your best interest as well as give you a vision of your SEO strategy’s future.

What is an SEO audit?

SEO audit refers to the process of analysing and evaluating your online pages to check if your current SEO strategy is yielding results— or not! Typically, an SEO audit is done half-yearly to see the strengths and weaknesses of your website’s SEO, fix mistakes and everything that’s not working out in your best interest as well as give you a vision of your SEO strategy’s future.

What is an SEO audit?

Types of SEO audits

Before we dive into the depths of how to conduct an SEO audit, you’ll need to understand the types of audits that exist. SEO audits come in many different segments and you’ll need to compile yours to get an overall picture of your SEO health.

Types of SEO audits

SEO content audit

This form of auditing works towards aligning your site’s content with Google’s E-E-A-T guideline. During an SEO content audit, your focus must be on improving your content's accuracy, reliability, quality, and relevancy.

You’ll also want to optimise existing content to become eligible for featured snippets, People Also Ask sections as well as passage rankings— more on this later.

Local SEO audit

Local SEO audits are for websites that have or want to develop a physical presence and dominance in a certain region/area. For example, if you’re a cafe located in Seattle, your local SEO audit would focus on content analysis, site speed, page visits, Google My Business reviews, and more from Seattle.

Off-page SEO audits

When it comes to off-page SEO audits, you’ll move your focus away from your own content and brand. Because your domain authority is impacted by the websites that link to you, you’ll be analysing other domains that link to you to analyse their current content and possible toxicity.

Off-page SEO audits usually involve analysing the current quality, quantity, distribution, and recency of websites that link to the pages you want to improve.

On-page SEO audit

An on-page SEO audit focuses more on the visual aspects of your website and content, diving into how the backend supports the visual to become useful for your target audience. This includes your keyword placement, simplified URLs, checking meta descriptions and image compressions, and alt text placements too.

Technical SEO audit

Technical SEO is an analytical process that helps your website improve and meet technical requirements set by various search engines such as Google in order to improve your organic rankings, reach higher web traffic, and ultimately profit!

Before we dive into the depths of how to conduct an SEO audit, you’ll need to understand the types of audits that exist. SEO audits come in many different segments and you’ll need to compile yours to get an overall picture of your SEO health.

Types of SEO audits

SEO content audit

This form of auditing works towards aligning your site’s content with Google’s E-E-A-T guideline. During an SEO content audit, your focus must be on improving your content's accuracy, reliability, quality, and relevancy.

You’ll also want to optimise existing content to become eligible for featured snippets, People Also Ask sections as well as passage rankings— more on this later.

Local SEO audit

Local SEO audits are for websites that have or want to develop a physical presence and dominance in a certain region/area. For example, if you’re a cafe located in Seattle, your local SEO audit would focus on content analysis, site speed, page visits, Google My Business reviews, and more from Seattle.

Off-page SEO audits

When it comes to off-page SEO audits, you’ll move your focus away from your own content and brand. Because your domain authority is impacted by the websites that link to you, you’ll be analysing other domains that link to you to analyse their current content and possible toxicity.

Off-page SEO audits usually involve analysing the current quality, quantity, distribution, and recency of websites that link to the pages you want to improve.

On-page SEO audit

An on-page SEO audit focuses more on the visual aspects of your website and content, diving into how the backend supports the visual to become useful for your target audience. This includes your keyword placement, simplified URLs, checking meta descriptions and image compressions, and alt text placements too.

Technical SEO audit

Technical SEO is an analytical process that helps your website improve and meet technical requirements set by various search engines such as Google in order to improve your organic rankings, reach higher web traffic, and ultimately profit!

Before we dive into the depths of how to conduct an SEO audit, you’ll need to understand the types of audits that exist. SEO audits come in many different segments and you’ll need to compile yours to get an overall picture of your SEO health.

Types of SEO audits

SEO content audit

This form of auditing works towards aligning your site’s content with Google’s E-E-A-T guideline. During an SEO content audit, your focus must be on improving your content's accuracy, reliability, quality, and relevancy.

You’ll also want to optimise existing content to become eligible for featured snippets, People Also Ask sections as well as passage rankings— more on this later.

Local SEO audit

Local SEO audits are for websites that have or want to develop a physical presence and dominance in a certain region/area. For example, if you’re a cafe located in Seattle, your local SEO audit would focus on content analysis, site speed, page visits, Google My Business reviews, and more from Seattle.

Off-page SEO audits

When it comes to off-page SEO audits, you’ll move your focus away from your own content and brand. Because your domain authority is impacted by the websites that link to you, you’ll be analysing other domains that link to you to analyse their current content and possible toxicity.

Off-page SEO audits usually involve analysing the current quality, quantity, distribution, and recency of websites that link to the pages you want to improve.

On-page SEO audit

An on-page SEO audit focuses more on the visual aspects of your website and content, diving into how the backend supports the visual to become useful for your target audience. This includes your keyword placement, simplified URLs, checking meta descriptions and image compressions, and alt text placements too.

Technical SEO audit

Technical SEO is an analytical process that helps your website improve and meet technical requirements set by various search engines such as Google in order to improve your organic rankings, reach higher web traffic, and ultimately profit!

Best SEO audit tools

Before you can jump onto conducting an effective SEO audit, you’ll need some tools. Below are the top SEO audit tools that can help you effectively audit your website’s SEO performance: working out in your best interest as well as giving you a vision of your SEO strategy’s future.

Best SEO audit tools

SEMrush

Perhaps one of the most prolific SEO tools of all time, SEMrush is as reliable, detailed, and authentic as an SEO audit tool can get. This tool crawls your site similar to how Google does and will offer detailed insight into all aspects of your SEO strategy such as position tracking, backlink auditing, link-building opportunities, and much more!

It can help point out toxic links and missing keyword opportunities, making your SEO audit a robust experience. While the subscription can seem expensive initially— especially for startups and individuals— a free trial of SEMrush might just justify the price.

Ahrefs

If SEMrush doesn’t seem like your jam, another great alternative tool for SEO audits is Ahrefs. Boasting one of the largest databases of live links, Afrefs is the most active web crawler in the SEO industry at the moment and offers you a deep insight into your site health, providing practical suggestions to improve the score.

It also doubles as a keyword research tool and a backlink profile!

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another sophisticated software designed by Google to help site owners analyse their SEO performance with ease. Featuring a simple user interface, Google Search Console allows you to notice technical fixes, organic CTR, page visits, keyword rankings, and even reindexes your pages when you make any changes.

Google Analytics

Another product of Google, Google Analytics is fixated on helping you measure the impact of your SEO actions and can be called one of the essentials when it comes to SEO audits. Google Analytics gives you an advertising workspace, e-commerce tracking options, custom reporting, and information about your audience.

PageSpeed Insights

Unsurprisingly, we have yet another Google product on this list, which is PageSpeed Insights. This free tool helps you analyse your page speed and gives you ways to improve it.

More than ever before, page speed highly impacts your SEO scores as users are less likely to wait around for a site to take more than 3 seconds to load! And that’s why you shouldn’t leave this one on the back burner.

Before you can jump onto conducting an effective SEO audit, you’ll need some tools. Below are the top SEO audit tools that can help you effectively audit your website’s SEO performance: working out in your best interest as well as giving you a vision of your SEO strategy’s future.

Best SEO audit tools

SEMrush

Perhaps one of the most prolific SEO tools of all time, SEMrush is as reliable, detailed, and authentic as an SEO audit tool can get. This tool crawls your site similar to how Google does and will offer detailed insight into all aspects of your SEO strategy such as position tracking, backlink auditing, link-building opportunities, and much more!

It can help point out toxic links and missing keyword opportunities, making your SEO audit a robust experience. While the subscription can seem expensive initially— especially for startups and individuals— a free trial of SEMrush might just justify the price.

Ahrefs

If SEMrush doesn’t seem like your jam, another great alternative tool for SEO audits is Ahrefs. Boasting one of the largest databases of live links, Afrefs is the most active web crawler in the SEO industry at the moment and offers you a deep insight into your site health, providing practical suggestions to improve the score.

It also doubles as a keyword research tool and a backlink profile!

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another sophisticated software designed by Google to help site owners analyse their SEO performance with ease. Featuring a simple user interface, Google Search Console allows you to notice technical fixes, organic CTR, page visits, keyword rankings, and even reindexes your pages when you make any changes.

Google Analytics

Another product of Google, Google Analytics is fixated on helping you measure the impact of your SEO actions and can be called one of the essentials when it comes to SEO audits. Google Analytics gives you an advertising workspace, e-commerce tracking options, custom reporting, and information about your audience.

PageSpeed Insights

Unsurprisingly, we have yet another Google product on this list, which is PageSpeed Insights. This free tool helps you analyse your page speed and gives you ways to improve it.

More than ever before, page speed highly impacts your SEO scores as users are less likely to wait around for a site to take more than 3 seconds to load! And that’s why you shouldn’t leave this one on the back burner.

Before you can jump onto conducting an effective SEO audit, you’ll need some tools. Below are the top SEO audit tools that can help you effectively audit your website’s SEO performance: working out in your best interest as well as giving you a vision of your SEO strategy’s future.

Best SEO audit tools

SEMrush

Perhaps one of the most prolific SEO tools of all time, SEMrush is as reliable, detailed, and authentic as an SEO audit tool can get. This tool crawls your site similar to how Google does and will offer detailed insight into all aspects of your SEO strategy such as position tracking, backlink auditing, link-building opportunities, and much more!

It can help point out toxic links and missing keyword opportunities, making your SEO audit a robust experience. While the subscription can seem expensive initially— especially for startups and individuals— a free trial of SEMrush might just justify the price.

Ahrefs

If SEMrush doesn’t seem like your jam, another great alternative tool for SEO audits is Ahrefs. Boasting one of the largest databases of live links, Afrefs is the most active web crawler in the SEO industry at the moment and offers you a deep insight into your site health, providing practical suggestions to improve the score.

It also doubles as a keyword research tool and a backlink profile!

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another sophisticated software designed by Google to help site owners analyse their SEO performance with ease. Featuring a simple user interface, Google Search Console allows you to notice technical fixes, organic CTR, page visits, keyword rankings, and even reindexes your pages when you make any changes.

Google Analytics

Another product of Google, Google Analytics is fixated on helping you measure the impact of your SEO actions and can be called one of the essentials when it comes to SEO audits. Google Analytics gives you an advertising workspace, e-commerce tracking options, custom reporting, and information about your audience.

PageSpeed Insights

Unsurprisingly, we have yet another Google product on this list, which is PageSpeed Insights. This free tool helps you analyse your page speed and gives you ways to improve it.

More than ever before, page speed highly impacts your SEO scores as users are less likely to wait around for a site to take more than 3 seconds to load! And that’s why you shouldn’t leave this one on the back burner.

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.

How to conduct an effective SEO audit?

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.

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

How to conduct an effective SEO audit?

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.

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

How to conduct an effective SEO audit?

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good SEO audit score?

A good SEO audit score lies between 80 to 100 because it shows optimal website health with little to no issues. This audit score represents a healthy keyword strategy, a lack of thin or duplicate content, and no technical errors.

How do you measure SEO success?

SEO success can easily be measured by your current position in Google SERPs as well as certain KPIs such as web traffic, impressions, click-through rates, domain authority, technical site health, organic search traffic, and bounce rates. Along with your ranking, these KPIs can help you analyse areas for improvement!

Who needs an SEO audit?

An SEO audit becomes necessary for any website that is noticing an unexplained fluctuation in its website traffic, ranking or position. An effective and detailed SEO audit can explain these fluctuations and help you analyse if you need to make any changes to improve the numbers.

Conclusion

And there you have it! Conducting an SEO audit can seem like a daunting task when you’re not sure when to begin. But it’s also one of the most critical aspects of existing online. In this guide, we’ve thoroughly gone through all the fine details you need to know to conduct an effective SEO performance check without losing focus.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good SEO audit score?

A good SEO audit score lies between 80 to 100 because it shows optimal website health with little to no issues. This audit score represents a healthy keyword strategy, a lack of thin or duplicate content, and no technical errors.

How do you measure SEO success?

SEO success can easily be measured by your current position in Google SERPs as well as certain KPIs such as web traffic, impressions, click-through rates, domain authority, technical site health, organic search traffic, and bounce rates. Along with your ranking, these KPIs can help you analyse areas for improvement!

Who needs an SEO audit?

An SEO audit becomes necessary for any website that is noticing an unexplained fluctuation in its website traffic, ranking or position. An effective and detailed SEO audit can explain these fluctuations and help you analyse if you need to make any changes to improve the numbers.

Conclusion

And there you have it! Conducting an SEO audit can seem like a daunting task when you’re not sure when to begin. But it’s also one of the most critical aspects of existing online. In this guide, we’ve thoroughly gone through all the fine details you need to know to conduct an effective SEO performance check without losing focus.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good SEO audit score?

A good SEO audit score lies between 80 to 100 because it shows optimal website health with little to no issues. This audit score represents a healthy keyword strategy, a lack of thin or duplicate content, and no technical errors.

How do you measure SEO success?

SEO success can easily be measured by your current position in Google SERPs as well as certain KPIs such as web traffic, impressions, click-through rates, domain authority, technical site health, organic search traffic, and bounce rates. Along with your ranking, these KPIs can help you analyse areas for improvement!

Who needs an SEO audit?

An SEO audit becomes necessary for any website that is noticing an unexplained fluctuation in its website traffic, ranking or position. An effective and detailed SEO audit can explain these fluctuations and help you analyse if you need to make any changes to improve the numbers.

Conclusion

And there you have it! Conducting an SEO audit can seem like a daunting task when you’re not sure when to begin. But it’s also one of the most critical aspects of existing online. In this guide, we’ve thoroughly gone through all the fine details you need to know to conduct an effective SEO performance check without losing focus.

ARTICLE #105

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We’re remote-first — with strategic global hubs

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