How To Conduct SEO Audit Of Your Company’s Website
In organic SEO marketing, a few sharks take a large portion of the attention of search engines. According to Ahrefs, 90.63 percent of content gets no organic traffic from Google. In fact, only 5.7 percent of two million pages ranked in Google’s top 10 search results.
These numbers may seem outrageous, but they are the reality of SEO. When you’ve set up a solid website but you’re not getting traffic, it’s time for an SEO audit. Hiring SEO services, like peaksdigitalmarketing.com, can be extremely helpful in the long run for your company’s website. Let’s look at an SEO Audit and how to conduct one for your company’s website.
What Does Seo Audit Mean?
SEO Audit means going around your website to ensure it is optimized for ranking on search engines. That is, it is the process of checking your website for problems or errors that can prevent your website from ranking on Google and other search engines.
Conducting an SEO audit regularly, at least twice a year, is essential to ensure your website is up-to-date with the latest search engine developments.
How SEO Audit Works
To perform an SEO audit, you need to go through some processes. In fact, you do not necessarily need many SEO tools to perform an SEO audit successfully.
In this guide, we’ll be going through these processes:
1. On-page SEO Audit
This SEO audit process is carried out on the website itself. Check if Google recognizes the site and has indexed it. Also, for a consistent call to action on the site and ensure that the necessary pages like the about section, contact, privacy, and terms of service exist, as this will help Google to know if your website is genuine.
You should also check for SSL redirect presence and page speed, as it must not take too long for the web page to open. Is the site mobile-friendly? That is a necessary on-page audit you can’t ignore. You should also ensure the page title, meta titles, and meta descriptions are adequately optimized.
2. Off-page SEO Audit
For your off-page SEO, you need more backlinks. A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website. The more backlinks you have pointing to your website, the more popular it will be.
For a more in-depth off-page SEO audit,
- look for trailing internal link issues. Trailing internal links are links that lead to pages that don’t exist or have been moved. That can be a problem because it can confuse your website visitors and cause them to click on a link that leads nowhere.
- Look for nontrailing internal link issues. If you have a link pointing to another page on your website, but the link does not have a “/” at the end, this is called a “non-trailing.” They can cause issues with search engine crawlers and can result in lower rankings for your website.
- Make sure no spam comments are approved. Not only do spam comments clutter up your site, but they can also hurt your reputation and search ranking.
- Make sure the website doesn’t link to low-quality websites. Keep external links to government websites, research reports, and authorities in a specific niche. Keep off from linking to competitors or outdated information.
- Check for redirect chains. Here, a page first directs to another page before redirecting you to the destination page. Redirect chains can also cause problems for users because they can make pages take longer to load.
3. Analytics Audit
For the analytics audit, you should check out important metrics for the company to see if they’re working correctly. It is important to analyze the design and user experience. You can use Google analytics for a full audit and check for weird traffic irregularities.
4. Search Console Audit
For the search console audit, check for hidden errors and irregularities like:
- if the sitemap is submitted
- core web vital errors
- mobile performance error
- manual penalty
The process for conducting a search audit for your company’s website can be easy with the right resources. The summary and main key takeaway:
- Audit the actual site first
- Then audit the off-page profile
- Finally, check the analytics and search console for any irregularities.
Importance of SEO Audit
There are several benefits of conducting an SEO audit, but we have listed some of the most important ones. SEO audits are crucial to help your site and business avoid:
- Losing out on organic traffic: When the website is not healthy, you may lose out on organic traffic, which will be bad for the company. You may lose significant rankings on search engines and prospective customers.
- Losing out on sales opportunities or losing the competitive edge to other brands: When your competitors are ranking in Google brands, and you’re not, you’ll eventually lose out on sales opportunities to other brands producing similar goods or services you offer.
- Having your site improperly indexed: When your site is not properly indexed, searchers and users won’t be able to find your website. You could also face penalties from Google for toxic backlinks.
SEO audits will also help you to:
- Enhance your content strategy and tactics: SEO audit will help clarify keywords driving traffic to your website. This knowledge will help you have a better content strategy backed up with stronger tactics.
- Stay up to date: SEO is an exceeding dynamic discipline with hundreds of new degrees of best practices. How do you keep track of these changes? An audit can help identify these practices.
- Increased satisfaction of website users: The effective usage of SEO recommendations will make your website more user-friendly and increase their clients’ comfort while using the site. If your website often shows error information or it takes too long to load pages, potential clients will get turned away quickly.
Get Your Website Ranking Again
You can reduce the risk of clients leaving your website quickly by removing these errors that make your site unhealthy. A well-functioning website will make users spend more time browsing the site. Google notes the time users spend and how they act on the website.
Longer time on the website suggests that the content is precious and engaging, which affects the website’s position in a browser. Clear and visually appealing content may also make website users more inclined to browse the website, prolonging the session time and positively influencing the website’s positioning in a browser.
You can avoid Google penalties by doing regular audits to help you stay on top of SEO affairs. The capacity to do more than your competitors on search result pages will most probably increase if you understand how your search engine organic ranking strategy functions.