In this article we will show you the steps you need to take in order to do a successful SEO Audit.
When the cat's away the mice will play. Same thing goes for SEO. If you leave your website unattended and leave, the little SEO spider will dance play and it will not like what it finds. So how do we prevent that from happening? By doing an SEO Audit of course!
"What is this SEO spider you are going on about?"
The SEO Spider is a website crawler, that allows you to crawl websites’ URLs to analyse & audit technical & onsite SEO. The SEO Spider is a powerful and flexible site crawler, able to crawl both small and very large websites efficiently, while allowing you to analyse the results in real-time. It gathers key onsite data to allow SEOs to make informed decisions.
1. Crawl website
So first things first, we need to crawl our website. I personally prefer Screaming Frog
but there are other tools like Deep Crawl.
2. Find problematic pages. I find it very exciting to visit a page and use SEO Quake to audit each problematic page that results from step 1. If you have too many pages on your website then try with categories and sample at first.
3. Measure your websites Page speed
With PageSpeed Insights report on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices. It provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.
4. Keyword research
My favorite part. Find relevant keywords to your product/business/new initiative and compare volumes, ranking. Choose the top 10 keywords to move forward. Stay tuned for more on keyword research at a later article!
5. Organic search for top keywords
You've chosen your top keywords. Now you want to see how these perform. You can use tools like SEMrush, Moz but a good bet is if you just Google these damn things!
6. Meta tags
Remember this ol' little tool we mentioned, SEO Quake? It will tell you all you need to know about the elements that affect SEO: URL, Canonical, Title, Meta Description, Rel, H1-H3 Headings, Alt Text, Text/HTML ration, Frames, Flash, The Open Graph.
7. Backlinks for landing page URLs
Each search you did resulted in a number of URL's from your website. Now you need to find backlinks for those URLs! Is recommend using SEMrush and/or Ahrefs.
8. Competitor URLs presence
Now find which of your competitor's URLs came up in your search!
9. Backlinks leading to competitor URLs
AND LOOK FOR THOSE BACKLINKS AGAIN for these URLs!
10. Google results
Look for other clues that come (or not) when you type those keywords. For example Google maps results.
11. Scan for duplicate content
Look for duplicate content and try to change it. Remember, we said we want original content! Try using Siteliner for this task.
12. Scan social channels
Social mentions are not a direct ranking factor but they surely boost your brand image!
13. Find backlink opportunities
Take advantage of backlink opportunities, work with publishers relevant to your customer.
14. Brand authority
Establish your brand!
15. Leverage content gaps
Evaluate the difference between your keywords and the competitions. Are your competitors ranking for them? Are you? If not why? Maybe you should?
16. Creation of AMP pages
Last but not least, AMP pages or Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is a simple and robust format to ensure your website is fast, user-first, and makes money (source AMP).
This concludes our article about how you will perform an SEO Audit!
Are you still afraid? If yes, contact me and we're going to slay this mythical beast together!
Stay tuned on my blog for more articles about SEO.
#SEO #SearchEngineOptimization #Digital Marketing