Website owners do an SEO audit to find the mistakes in their websites. These mistakes affect the website’s ranking on search engines. Using a good tool, you may run an audit test to find and fix these mistakes. 

These mistakes may be technical in nature or they may be about your content. Both these aspects of a website are crucial for SEO and for page rankings. Therefore, your website’s visibility would be better if you fix such issues at a regular interval and not let them pile up. 

In this article, we have listed some tools you may use to have better website visibility. We have also discussed some important elements of SEO audits. 

What Is An Seo Audit? 

Many website owners have to do an SEO audit to know if their site is working in accordance with the industry best practices. These audits allow the site owners to rectify mistakes if their websites have any. When they get the whole audit report, they understand where they’ve to improve and where they’ve to maintain consistency. 

The whole audit process ensures that your website is performing well in the search engines and search results. The auditing process isn’t exactly something you can do in one go. There are multiple layers to this process. If you want your website to have a good report and have better search rankings, you’ll have to understand all elements. 

There are many marketing tools that would help you in your website’s SEO audit. You may use tools like SEMrush, Copyscape, or SpyFU. These tools would let you do any type of audit. Usually, large websites have to do more than just one type of audit. These types may include SEO content audit, on-page audit, off-page audit, technical audit, and local audit.  

• SEO Content Audit: Here, you’ll know how to identify the quality of your content. It’ll help in making your content more accurate for your website visitors. 

• On-Page Audit: The on-page audit would include the backend elements of your website page. Here, the website crawlers would look for meta descriptions, titles, alt text for images, and compressions. 

• Off-Page Audit: Off-page audit would require you to look at other pages. You may also look for domain links from other pages. 

• Technical Audit: This audit allows you to fix, eliminate, and recognize codes on your website. Technical audit lets the website owners prevent any type of spam on their website and its pages. Through this audit, you may switch from HTTP to HTTPS. 

How To Do An Seo Audit? 

If you want to do a successful audit, then there are some steps that you’ll have to follow. These steps would help you in resolving any issues that you may be having with your website and its content. 

• Do website crawl: You may do some manual checks on your website. Meanwhile, you can also do website crawling in the background. The crawler would work on the whole site, inspecting each element inside it. Once it’s done, it would tell you how to improve your website structure and the SEO setup. 

• Fix indexation issues: You may use Google to fix your indexation issues. If your website isn’t being indexed, it means that there’ll be no rankings for it. Here, you have to use proper tools that’ll inform you on your website index. 

• Do on-page SEO checks: Doing on-page SEO checks for your website’s SEO audit is really easy. You may begin by checking if your post has a clickable tag. Next, you have to see whether there’s a meta description for that post. At last, you should check if all the headings like H1, H2, H3 are being used correctly or not. 

• Check for structured data: For checking your website’s structured data, you’ve to know what it is. You may go through Google’s guidelines on structured data to know more about it. Mainly, this element covers that your website should have standardized information that provides information about a webpage’s content. 

• Check for organic traffic: No matter which SEO audit you’re conducting, there’ll be a check for ways to increase your website’s traffic. You may use Google Analytics or other tools that’ll let you know about the organic traffic to your website. It’ll also suggest improvements. 

The Best SEO Audit Tools

Here are some of the best SEO audit tools: 

• SEMrush: Everyone is well aware of the name SEMrush. This marketing tool helps brands in many ways. You may use this tool to do your SEO audit. This tool is favoured by many brands and marketers. It’s a tool that provides you with solutions for many digital marketing problems. You may conduct free audits using this tool for at least 100 pages. 

• SpyFU: SpyFU also offers many digital marketing solutions for your brand. This tool is helpful in doing your audits and carrying out SEO keyword research. It highlights all the bad keywords and helps you eliminate those. One of the best features of this tool is that it tracks your domain’s SEO performance for the last 15 years. This tool has different pricing plans that range between $33 to 299/month. 

• Google Search Console: This tool was earlier known as the Google Webmaster tool. Google Search Console helps you know more about your website’s structured data. You may use this tool to identify the SEO issues that your website has been having for the past 16 months. The Google Search Console is free to use for all website owners. 

• GTMetrix: GTMetrix is a tool that tests your website’s performance. It helps you by providing some technical insights into your site. The test happens quickly and it lets you know about page loading time and page size. It examines your page performance from 22 different locations and 44 servers. You can do 50 weekly tests using this tool. 

• Deep Crawl: Deep Crawl is a website crawler that informs you about the technical issues with your website. The tool is also useful to know about your competitors. The tool reviews your content quality, meta description, page titles and meta headers. 

The Best SEO Audit Examples 

There can be some confusion when you’re doing an audit. You don’t know what all is there that has to be checked. There are times when you end up forgetting one of the main elements during these audits. 

For having a perfect SEO audit report, you’ve to checklist some items. Make sure that you’re mentioning all clear and true results in your report. Falling short of some elements would end up badly for your website and eventually it may affect your business too. 

Mentioned below are some pointers to have in your audit report. 

• Complete summary: When you’re making your audit report, the first page would include your entire summary. This page would give summarizations about all other elements of your website and its web presence. 

• SEO insights: This is the part of the report that would give insights about the on-page SEO on your website. It includes components like header, body, links, and indexing. Check the character length of your title and meta description. In the content body, check the use of H1, H2, H3, and so on. Know how many backlinks you’ve used on that website page. 

• Website usability: You want to check your website’s usability on other devices like mobile or an iPad. You should check if the website navigation is easy on these devices or not. Check how well your website appears on these devices. 

• Website performance: Here, you must check the speed of your website. Check for the website server’s response time, loading time, and page script load time. You may also break down the website’s content into JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. 

• Site Security: You should run a malware check on your website. Make sure that emails written on the website aren’t in plain text. Also, check the website’s SSL and HTTPS redirects. 

Tips and Best Practices

For doing your SEO audit, you’d need some helpful tips. The process of auditing may become tricky if you don’t know what has to be fixed. Many brands can’t recognize these issues for a long time. Then by the time they notice it, the harm’s already done. 

Hence, to stay away from such harmful situations, you should use some best practices when doing your audit. 

• Check for duplicate versions of the website: You must check that Google is only indexing one version of your website. Search engines usually have different versions of websites on them. However, there needs to be only one version that’s properly indexed. 

• Check website’s speed: Your website’s speed isn’t something you should ignore. If your website is slow, then it’d show badly in your SEO audit report. Plus, if your website is slow, you’d find that your bounce rates would be higher. Your website should be fast from both SEO and UX perspectives. 

• Check for mobile compatibility:  Mobile-friendliness has also been a ranking factor for websites for a long time now. There are chances that many of your website visitors visit your website through their mobiles. So there’s no debate here, you’ve to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.

• Fix the internal links: If you’ve broken internal links on your website, it’ll lead to a bad user experience. Search engines take it negatively when many of your links show an error on opening. You may fix these broken links by updating their URLs. 

• Fix the duplicate content: Many website owners face this issue of duplicate content on their web pages. This becomes an issue because the search engine can’t decide which web page should rank higher. If there’s a slight issue with duplication, then you may use a rephrase tool on one of the contents. 

In Conclusion

In simple terms, an SEO audit is done to test the website. The website is tested for many elements including links, headlines, meta descriptions, HTTPS, and so on. These audits let the website owners where their websites are lacking in terms of SEO. 

If your website is SEO friendly, it’ll naturally rank better on a search engine’s page ranking. That’s the reason website owners should do these audits regularly. When you conduct them regularly, you’ll know where your website is lacking. 

Not only that, but you’ll also get to know about what you’re doing well. The audit report would highlight the bad as well as the good elements of the websites. After knowing these insights, you’ve to make sure that you remain consistent on the good parts. Whereas, for the bad elements, you’d have to make necessary changes.

To make these changes, you may use auditing or crawling tools. These tools offer many features that’ll help you have a better report for your website’s SEO audit. When using these tools, know what you’re looking for. Therefore, this means that you should decide what you want to check. 

In a good report, you’ve to get the SEO results and insights about your website security and usability too.

What tools do you use to get your SEO audit report? What best practices do you follow? Tell us in the comments below!