Nowadays, many companies have the organic discovery of their websites as one of their main needs.
The SEO audit is the perfect starting point, as this process allows you to identify improvement opportunities and find different errors to correct. It serves as a useful baseline for optimizations, enhancing your visibility on the internet.
What do we mean by an SEO audit?
It is an analysis of a website aimed at detecting issues and finding optimization points to improve the website’s positioning within search engine results pages (SERPs).
This investigation includes the analysis of both internal and external aspects of the website to create accurate and updated information. For these reasons, the audit should be the first step for any SEO optimization aimed at achieving strategic objectives.
Why is an SEO audit important?
As you create a website and add more content and configurations, it’s likely that you’ll lose control of user behavior over time. Additionally, with Google’s algorithm changes and evolving user behavior, monitoring your website’s performance becomes necessary.
An SEO audit allows you to identify areas for improvement to optimize your website’s positioning, attract more organic traffic, adapt to algorithm changes in search engines, and make strategic decisions.
Steps to Perform an SEO Audit:
There are many factors influencing the organic position of your keywords. For a comprehensive audit, it’s best to enlist professionals to analyze each of these factors in-depth. However, if you’re not an expert, there are simple checks you can perform to set your website on the right path.
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Check your current position on search engines:
It may seem obvious, but it’s essential to know your website’s current position for both brand and target keywords. This helps understand the starting point, identify direct competitors, and establish a benchmark for measuring progress over time. SEO tools can show your initial position for each keyword and its evolution over time.
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Ensure everything is properly indexed:
If your website appears on search engines, it means it has been indexed. However, some URLs may not be indexed correctly. In this step, check that your page has no indexing issues, and everything you want users to find is indexed correctly. Tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console can help check indexing.
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Analyze your page content:
Within this part, review the structure of titles and subtitles, ensure meta descriptions are present and not duplicated, check multimedia resource weights, assess content readability and length, examine keyword appearance ratio, review internal/external linking, and check alt attributes.
Optimizations in this category are the easiest within an SEO audit, but for websites with many pages, it can be time-consuming. Start with the homepage and crucial sections as they generate more organic traffic. If you use a CMS, there are likely plugins or add-ons to assist with this.
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Check the page loading speed:
Google considers a page’s loading time when ranking websites. Faster-loading pages provide a better user experience. While there’s no specific seconds threshold for penalizing a site, as a general rule, if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, users might abandon it. Use free tools like PageSpeed Insights to check page loading speed.
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Always prioritize mobile devices:
More than 60% of searches are conducted on mobile devices today. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, Google may penalize it, impacting search results. Numerous free tools can check if a page adapts well to mobile, such as Google SpeedInsights’ mobile report.
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Examine the website structure and content organization:
Information should be where users expect to find it, easily accessible without too many clicks. Organize information as you would like to find it as a user. If unsure, observe what well-positioned competitors do.
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Adapt your content to your target audience:
Make your content appealing to your target audience in terms of tone, aesthetics, content type, resources, etc
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Analyze competitor strategies:
Positioning your site involves competing with many others in the same industry. Even if your business is local, you likely compete with larger companies serving nationally or internationally.
Spend time understanding their products/services, content, audience, and linking practices. Tools like AHrefs, SEMrush, or Similarweb can help identify effective competitor practices.
These are the simpler aspects of conducting a good SEO audit. However, technical SEO and off-page SEO involve more in-depth tasks that may require professional assistance.
Count on us
As seen, various factors influence website positioning. At Lifting Group, we assist in analyzing and improving your website’s positioning for sustainable organic results, enhancing your sales consistently.
Contact us, share your concerns, and we’ll prepare a customized quote for you.
