If you have just signed a new client with the plan to provide SEO work or you have decided to commit to improving your own website’s SEO, which you should, you will have to complete an SEO audit.
Don’t worry; this doesn’t mean being trapped on the phone with HMRC for four hours, though numbers will undoubtedly be involved.
To be honest, SEO audits aren’t the easiest thing to do, which is why companies usually come to people like us, where our experienced SEO team can do all of the hard work so that you don’t have to.
To complete a thorough SEO audit, SEO managers usually depend on a selection of tools, all of which have their own individual uses. Though the tools offer support, they don’t do the whole thing for you, so there is an expectation of a certain level of knowledge.
If you’re already confused, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s explore SEO audits, why they’re essential, and how to conduct one.
Strap in and let Blaze give you the lowdown on everything SEO audits.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit evaluates how well your website is optimised for search engines. It will highlight any problems your website may have and point you in the right direction to amend these errors.
Once you have drafted an SEO audit, you can take the necessary steps to improve your website’s SEO performance.
Some aspects of your SEO audit, such as finding backlink issues, can be automated, which makes the process slightly more convenient.
However, even though AI is becoming more advanced, some things require human eyes. This is especially true for your site’s content, as there are just some nuances that AI can’t track, such as readability.
Humans:1- Robots:0.
Types of SEO Audits
Now that you know what an SEO audit is, let’s examine the types of SEO audits you can carry out on your website.
SEO Link Audit
An SEO link audit examines the links directing people to your website. It determines whether or not the links you are using are helping or hurting your website’s visibility.
Links are good, but not all of the backlinks you use will benefit your business. You may have completely broken links that you’re unaware of, so performing an SEO link audit is essential.
Lead Conversion Audit
Through a lead conversion audit, you can determine the success of a website’s conversions and pinpoint what may prevent you from gaining more leads. A key aspect of this audit type is determining where your traffic is coming from.
Performing a lead conversion audit is a great way to get an insight into your customer’s user journey and assess whether you’re investing your money in the right place.
Social Media Audit
If you have set up social media accounts for your business (which you should have), these accounts can also impact the success of your website.
If your social accounts aren’t driving more traffic to your website, they need to be audited. If your social accounts are not giving you the leads you expect, it could be because of the content you’re posting or even when you’re posting.
Competitive Website Audit
A competitive website audit tracks the success of your competitors. This type of audit allows you to analyse the success of their SEO strategies and implement what they are doing well on your own site.
It can be easy to dismiss your competitors, but their strategies could give you valuable insight into changes you need to make to encourage the success of your own website.
Why do SEO Audits Matter?
SEO audits matter because SEO matters for the success of your business.
If you depend on your website to generate leads and conversions for your business, you want it to be in the best shape possible. However, your site could have huge issues you can’t identify just by using it, and these issues could cost you money.
For example, if your site has not been getting much traffic, it could be because of the titles you are using for your content or a lack of SEO-optimised keywords.
Sure, you could acknowledge this without an SEO audit and create an action plan to solve the problem, but there is no way of knowing if that was the only issue. If that’s the case and there is still a clear and present problem, you’ll need to think up another solution.
Work smarter, not harder. Perform an SEO audit.
An SEO audit can help you make smart, data-driven decisions and dramatically improve your website’s success.
If you’re not convinced, other benefits of performing an SEO audit include:
- Improving conversion rates.
- Identifying site issues early.
- Outperform your competitors.
How to Perform an SEO Audit
Now that you know more about an SEO audit, you can choose between carrying out your own or employing the help of talented SEO experts, such as the Blaze team.
If you want to conduct your audit or are just curious about the process, here is how to do it.
Decide What to Audit
To get the best idea of what aspects of your site to audit, you must first put yourself in your users’ shoes.
Load up your site and note anything that you notice. Is it slow? Is the content too long? Are there links that lead nowhere? It’s important to really get to know your site.
Why not send a SEMrush crawler through the site? We still suggest that you do that to find any errors, but looking at the site from a human perspective is the only way to get a true view of how it is operating.
List the Pages you Want to Audit
If you have a big website, realistically, you will have some smaller pages, such as your About page or the page where you list your workers. Not every page will need an audit, so you should determine which pages will.
It is best to consider key pages like your product or service pages, as these often lead to more conversions.
You will then need to decide exactly which pages to audit. We suggest examining key issues such as your site’s speed and content effectiveness.
Start Collecting Data
You will collect the following data when you perform an SEO audit on your page.
- Page speed.
- Quality of links and backlinks.
- Metadata.
- User journey.
- Content evaluation.
- Indexing.
You can collect much more data through an audit, but we consider the data listed to be the most important.
Obviously, you can cater this analysis to the data you value most, and we won’t get mad if you don’t audit our recommendations (we’ll just be disappointed).
Analyse Data.
Once you have collected the necessary data, you can then do the fun part: analyse it.
When analysing data, we suggest using tools to track your metrics, as this will help you understand the data much better.
Data Analysis Tools
We suggest using the following tools while completing your SEO audits.
SEMrush
SEMrush allows you to analyse and compare your competitors’ backlinks. With the site audit tool available through SEMrush, you can identify and fix over 140 potential issues.
SEMrush is great because it helps with all the confusing bits and creates a report of the collected data so you can assess it quickly.
With an SEMrush account, you can analyse up to 100 pages for free, so you should easily be able to assess your website’s data from the information you gain from the SEMrush report.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a crawler tool for analysing site maps. It will identify problems or abnormalities across the site and instruct you on how to amend them.
Screaming Frog will give you valuable information about your site’s performance and analyse your website’s URLs.
Google Search Console
If you have a content-heavy website, you will want to analyse what keywords you are ranking for while monitoring your site’s overall performance. If you want an overall site analysis, Google Search Console will be the best tool to use.
Google Analytics
One of the most important purposes of any site is gaining traffic, which will hopefully turn into conversions.
Google Analytics allows you to measure your organic traffic and engagement on the site while mapping out a typical user’s journey, allowing you to experience it for yourself.
Having this insight is incredibly valuable for measuring the current success of your site and planning its future success.
Turn to Blaze for Your SEO Auditing
Hopefully, we have given you an insight into what to expect and look for during an SEO audit.
SEO audits are incredibly important if we haven’t clarified that enough. You must do them right to ensure the success of your business.
It may not surprise you to hear that we suggest hiring an SEO agency to complete an SEO audit. Our expert SEO team knows how to complete a thorough audit, and they will create a report of their findings that will be explained in detail.
You know what they say: if you’re going to do something, make sure you do it right the first time.
Get in touch with our team today to find out more about how we can help you.