You know that you need to improve your website to attract more users and convert them to your customers.
But the big question is, where to start from?
Here enters the SEO Audit of a website.
An SEO Audit helps you highlight everything you need to know regarding your website, all the goods and bads of your website.
Following the blog, I’m gonna provide you with a basic checklist for SEO audit and we will talk about every element of it to understand how to do an SEO audit?
But first, let’s start from the basics.
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO Audit is basically a health checkup of your website.
In this, you review if your website’s technical elements, SEO campaigns and strategies are working properly.
After the evaluation, you get to know what you’re doing well and what you can improve to perform better.
Now, the question appears,
When to conduct an SEO audit?
SEO Auditing is always suggested to perform every quarter to be regularly updated on your website’s situation.
If you’ve hired a digital marketing agency like ItsGeekynerd, your SEO plan would already have regular SEO audits included.
As SEO is an ongoing process, an SEO audit helps you find out issues and outdated techniques that you need to abandon. This helps save your money and efforts and put them in the right place.
Your Checklist For SEO Audit 2022
Now, let’s start the ride and discuss the big question, “How to audit a website?”
Following is the checklist for SEO Audit, which you can go through to audit your website successfully.
Here I’ve mentioned 12 elements to evaluate while auditing your website.
1. Indexed pages
First on our checklist for SEO audit is Indexed pages, as everything will be for nothing if your pages aren’t getting indexed.
In this step, you will check if any page is not getting indexed by Google and solve that issue to get indexed properly.
You can see that simply by checking your index status report in the GSC (Google Search Console). There, you can see how many pages of your website are indexed by Google.
If you notice that the number of pages isn’t increasing every time you create a new page or blog, then it might imply that some of your pages are getting indexed.
Now, how you can check which ones are not getting overlooked by google. There are two ways.
- First, you can search your URL by adding “robots.txt” at the end of it like this, http://www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt.
This way Google will show you all the pages that have robots.txt on them and are blocking Google to index them.
- The second option is searching “site:yourwebsite.com”. This way, you can see every page that Google has indexed on your website.
Now you can compare the total number of pages on Google with the total number of pages on your website.
Unless you are using robots.txt, the pages on Google and pages on your website should be exactly the same.
Learn How To Improve Indexability of a Website
2. Robots.txt
If a page has a Robots.txt file enabled then it won’t be indexed by Google or any other search engine’s bots.
This means that the page will exist on your site but it won’t be indexed on any search engine’s index, so it won’t be ranking on SERPs.
Now you have to make sure that all the important pages are getting indexed and don’t have the robots.txt file enabled.
3. Make Google index only ONE version of your website
This might sound odd, but yes Google can index different versions of your website. But you do not need that.
For instance, here are 4 different versions of the same site:
- http://digitalbrandingstudio.com
- https://digitalbrandingstudio.com
- http://www.digitalbrandingstudio.com
- https://www.digitalbrandingstudio.com
They might seem almost the same to you and me but to Google, they are 4 different websites, and it will index them separately. And that is not good.
You’ll have to redirect every version of your site to one domain.
Luckily, it’s easy to check and fix.
Just type in every URL one by one and see if they’re redirecting to your site or not.
If they do, then great! But if not, then you can simply put in a 301 redirect to the website you want to show up.
4. Mobile-friendliness
Mobile friendliness now has more importance in an SEO strategy than ever before.
As Google has stated that it has a mobile-first indexing approach. And not missing that 61% of users like to buy from mobile-friendly sites. It makes it one of the most crucial aspects to look up to in this checklist for SEO audit.
Now, the question appears,
How to Find If Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly or Not?
Best way: Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool.
Just pop up your website URL, and Google will tell you whether or not your site is optimized for mobile.
5. Page speed
Page or site speed is a pretty important ranking factor for Google and other search engines.
Users hate slow websites, and this creates a very bad first impression of your website.
If your pages are taking too much time to load, you might be losing a lot of potential customers. And worse, they are going to your competitors.
Fast websites are loved by Google too. Google want to offer users the best results, and having a slow speed can make you leave far behind in the game.
Now, how to know what’s your page/site speed?
You can make use of Google PageSpeed Insights to measure your page speed and identify the areas of improvement in order to make your site faster.
In the current competitive environment page speed can make a big impact on your conversions.
So, if your website is slow or if you want to make your website faster, you can read the best techniques to do so here: Best Techniques To Increase The Page Speed.
6. Security
While conducting an SEO audit in 2022, ensure that your website is safe and secure.
Because users don’t want to visit sites that aren’t secure and Google too doesn’t rank unsecured sites higher in SERPs.
So make sure that your site is encrypted with HTTPS. Many platforms offer free HTTPS encryption with certificates with domain and hosting for a lifetime while some don’t.
7. Competitors
Competitors have to be on our checklist for SEO audit 2022.
Analyzing your competitors help you find out how you stand against them.
You can identify which keywords are overcrowded already and which ones are not. You can take benefit of the opportunity to find out keywords that your competitors are not ranking currently. So, you can create quality content on them and outrank your competitors.
You can also identify what type of content is being liked by the audience and performing well.
By this, you will have a clear image of what your targeted audience wants and then you can tailor your content according to the requirement.
8. Improve your backlink strategy
Everyone knows that backlinks are the core of any large SEO strategy.
Some experts claim that backlinks can be the game-changing ranking factor for a website.
But with time, something surely has changed. Now, having the most backlinks isn’t enough to rank on top.
Here enters the Context.
Google does look up to the quality of the backlink that you’ve gained.
The site giving a link to you should be in the same niche, authoritative, and should link to you from inside its content.
So now, buying links from link farms is not enough. You’ll need to build real and quality backlinks and get some big results.
9. Errors
While conducting an SEO audit in 2022, it’s quite important to crawl your site to identify errors and fix them.
Google Search Console generally does the work and show up all the HTTP error codes the site’s having.
But still, if you wanna double-check you can use the crawling tool by Screaming Frog. It will crawl through your site and highlight all the errors like unindexed pages and broken links.
Looking for broken links that generate “Error 404” is pretty important too.
This error occurs when you delete the web page or change its URL. You can create redirects for these links so that the user doesn’t face a dead end and gets redirected to the content he/she was looking for.
Fixing errors and disallowed pages helps you keep your users on your website.
10. Duplicate content
Duplicate content degrades a web page’s authority and ultimately kills the SEO rankings.
You can stop that from occurring by using canonical link tags. These tags signal which ones are the “master copies” of web pages. Canonical tags help you in two ways,
In organizing your content
Making the most crucial content index first.
11. Voice search optimization
Voice search has been seen rising exponentially in the last few years. And missing voice search optimization means missing a good number of potential audiences.
To optimize your content for voice search, you need to modify your content to be easily readable.
Other voice search optimizations techniques counts
- Writing concise content
- Writing in the native language
Also, ensure that you answer the asked question direct and easy.
Doing these optimizations can make you show up in featured snippets also known as “position zero”. And voice search generally pulls up the answers of queries from featured snippets.
12. Other On-site factors
This last element on our checklist for SEO audit takes some time as it contains so much in it.
On-Page SEO ranking factors count
- Title tags
- Headings
- Meta descriptions
- Keywords and more
Every web page of your site should have its unique title, meta and alt tags and most importantly unique targeting keywords.
Unique target keywords prevent your own pages to compete with each other.
This can be one of the worst things for a business trying to grow online. And this makes it more important to audit your site on a regular basis.
I agree, it will take demand much time and energy, but it will pay off in the form of your business’s success.
Be Focused On Basics
Putting in your time and efforts only to know that it didn’t work out in the end, is the worst thing an SEO can expect.
That’s why running through the checklist for SEO audit regularly is crucial. It will keep your SEO efforts on the right path and find and solve errors as soon as they happen.
I know there’s a huge list to focus on in SEO such as keyword stuffing, writing attractive metadata, structured data and everything else that seems fascinating. But, while focusing on these details do not miss the main objective.
Effective SEO is entirely about continuity and keeping the basics right.
When you run an SEO audit, identify the issues and fix them, find out what you have been doing good and do more of it.
Also, keep focusing on the good practices and you’ll be in a much better place to get organic traffic than someone who is constantly worrying about every “new ranking factor”.
And here ends our checklist for SEO audit 2022. I believe you would have learned how to do SEO audit of a website.
If you still have any queries or doubts, the comment box is wide open for you or you can simply mail us at [email protected]. We will be more than happy to help you.
Also, Thank You For Reading Along, It Means A Lot To Us.
