How to Perform an SEO Audit on Your Website

a laptop with notes on how to perform an SEO audit on your website around it

Staying on top in the competitive market is a challenging task. Regardless of the quality of your products, affordable prices, and engaging marketing strategies, your business will struggle without a digital follow-up. Most people prefer doing their brand searching and purchasing online, so having a top-tier website is an absolute must. But you probably already know this, right?  But what if it seems your website doesn't bring all those leads and conversions you've expected it to. Why is it so? The most likely reason is the lack of efficient search engine optimization (SEO). If that's the case, you've come to the right place! In this article, we'll provide you with valuable tips on performing an SEO audit on your website. With a bit of know-how, you'll be able to find the issues and boost your website's performance significantly.

What is an SEO audit, and why is it important?

An SEO audit is a process of finding and evaluating the search engine friendliness of your website in many areas. Once you identify the issues, you can improve your site and ensure it ranks higher on Google. After all, the number of visitors to your site depends on how visible it is on Google and other search engines. That is the main reason why doing this type of audit is vital.

But there are many other reasons why it is important to perform an SEO audit of your website on a regular basis. For example, it will:

  • prevent you from losing traffic due to various issues
  • prevent you from losing out on sales opportunities and revenue
  • help you avoid Google penalties
  • enable you to keep your website up-to-date (search algorithm changes all the time, so it's necessary to follow the latest developments if you want to stay on top)

How to perform an SEO audit—essential checklist

So, how do you boost your website's Google ranking? Well, for starters, there are many excellent website marketing tools you can use, such as SEO PowerSuite or Google Analytics. However, before you choose which ones will work best for your business, you need to evaluate your current position. Here is a step-by-step checklist to help you navigate this process!

a person checking Google analytics

Google Analytics and similar tools will show you how your website ranks online

#1 Check for potential Google penalties

Firstly, you need to check whether your website is under any of the Google penalties. These penalties come in two forms - manual and algorithmic.

Manual penalties are issued by the human reviewer who finds the lack of compliance of your site with google guidelines. On the other hand, algorithmic penalties are a result of a change in the algorithm rules. You might not even be aware that your website is no longer up-to-date!

That's why doing this first step is important. If you discover your site is under penalty, the best course is to find as much as you can and adjust your SEO to better align with Google guidelines.

#2 Examine your Domain Search Appearance

This seems like a simple step, but make sure you don't miss it while performing an SEO audit of your website. Search the name of your brand in Google and check the results. You should especially pay attention to the following:

  • your homepage should come up first in the results
  • Google should show site links together with your listing
  • the description under your pages (homepage and others) should be accurate
  • Google My Business should be on the right panel for your business and accompanied by the correct information about it (name, contact information, etc.)
  • other pages listed on the first page of Google results should be relevant to your business

If anything is amiss, you should analyze the issue and correct it. Optimize the structure of your site, review your homepage SEO, and ensure all information about your brand is correct.

a person checking their brand on google

When you perform an SEO audit of your website, make sure you check your domain's quality on Google

#3 Technical SEO audit

Next on the list is checking the technical side of your site's SEO. This includes both on-page and off-page SEO audits. On-page SEO refers to your website's page and content optimization. On the other hand, off-page SEO deals with your website's promotion. Both are equally important and essential for your website's online health.

On-page SEO audit

  • Evaluate and optimize your titles and descriptions
  • Ensure you have proper headings and text formatting
  • Content SEO needs to be up to scratch (no empty pages or repetitive content; instead, aim for unique and fresh content and post it regularly)
  • Check the internal link structure on your website
  • Image SEO - try to strike a balance between attractive images and good page loading speed; if you find issues here, it's better to compress images than slow down your website)
  • Check for broken links and fix or remove them
  • Ensure your website is user-friendly and effective on mobile channels, too - this includes a 404 page, a well-defined menu, easy access to relevant pages, a user sitemap, etc
  • Banner adds - while it doesn't define how many is 'too many ads,' Google can penalize you for having too many ads above the fold, so consider whether you should remove or change the position of some of the ads
a graph showing different social media channels

A quality SEO will help you promote your brand on social media

Off-page SEO audit

Link building is an effective way of boosting your domain authority and promoting your brand on the Internet. However, it's only successful if you do it right. Therefore, you should:

  • have effective and trustworthy backlinks - quality backlinks rank higher in Google, and that is exactly your goal here
  • avoid low-quality incoming links - check how many unique and trusted domains are linking to you and how many of them are linking to your homepage vs. your internal pages
  • evaluate your social media presence - it's difficult to stay relevant without it; for that reason, make it possible for people to reach you through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc

Simply put, you need to rely on others to spread the word about your business and promote it. However, it's up to you to choose the right domains, social media influencers, bloggers, etc. Ensure they're reliable, trustworthy, and relevant to your brand so that you can enhance your image and reputation.

The bottom line

In the online world, SEO optimization is vital. It makes your website visible and available to wide audiences. As a result, it has a huge impact on your website's traffic, the number of conversions, and your sales rates. Therefore, make sure to perform an SEO audit of your website at least once or twice a year and ensure your brand is fresh and unique.

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