What should be included in an SEO audit?

            What should be included in an SEO audit?

The 15-Step SEO Audit Guide

• Review (and Optimize) Meta Descriptions and Meta Titles. ...
• Improve User Experience (UX) ...
• Check for Keyword Cannibalization. ...
• Fix Indexing Issues. ...
• Optimize Content With Keywords. ...
• Check for Duplicate Content. ...
• Check Loading Times. ...
• Analyze Organic Traffic.

An SEO audit is the process of analyzing how well your web presence relates to best practices – it is the first step to creating an implementation plan that will have measurable results.

The purpose of the audit is to identify as many foundational issues affecting organic search performance as possible. The SEO audit will reveal:

• Technical SEO issues
• Website structure issues
• On-page SEO issues
• Potential off-site problems
• User experience issues
• Content gaps and opportunities
• Competitive marketplace insights

What Is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is the process of identifying problems or errors that can prevent your site from ranking on Google and other search engines. Multiple parts make up an SEO audit, including: 

·         Making sure your site is being correctly crawled, indexed, and rendered by Google

·         Checking your website for on-page SEO problems

·         Examining your off-page SEO for potential issues on others’ sites that relate/link back to your site

·         Verifying that your site has a good user experience (for both mobile and desktop users)

·         Keyword-optimizing your content 

·         Combing your website for duplicate or thin content 

·         Setting up and maintaining comprehensive reporting to track your website’s performance 

Why Are SEO Audits Important?

SEO audits are crucial to help your site and business avoid: 

·         Losing out on organic traffic due to site health issues 

·         Losing out on sales opportunities or losing the competitive edge to other brands

·         Having your site improperly indexed (meaning searchers won’t be able to find it) 

·         Facing penalties from Google for toxic backlinks

In short, auditing your site can reveal problems that may be costing you traffic and sales.

SEO audit part one: On-page SEO

Your on-page SEO audit consists of site elements you can control and optimize, and a large portion of that is the content. In other words, an on-page SEO audit focuses on optimizing elements within your website that impact your site’s SERP rankings. 

Keyword research

What better to get your content ranking than keywords? Before you create content with keywords, you need to understand what content is currently ranking and what people really mean when they’re searching for a keyword.  Go through your competitors’ websites that are ranking well on Google and see what they’re focusing on with their content. Is there anything that they rank for that you don’t?  Make sure your content is meeting the users’ search intent, as well.

Search for your keyword in Google and see what comes up. What are other top-ranking sites doing that is making people click? Sometimes, a keyword can start with “what is,” but the searcher is actually looking for a “how to.” You’ll discover these subtle but important nuances with some research that will help you rank!

Keyword usage

So, you understand why users are typing a certain keyword. Now you have to use it in your content if you aren’t already. You should be using keywords in you’re: headers, body content, title tag, and Meta description.

I’ll break it down.  You should start by using keywords in your headers where they fit naturally.  So say you want to tell people why they should use your affordable home improvement services. You might want to start that section of your website with a bold header that tells them “why you should use our affordable home improvement services.” Then, you’ll want to use “affordable home improvement services” and other similar variations of this keyword where it makes sense throughout the body of your content. Don’t stuff your keyword everywhere…

That can actually hurt your SEO. Be sure it makes sense if you read it out loud. You can use related keywords in your content to help give search engines the context of your page.

Tools like Keywords FX, LSI graph, or even related searches and Google autosuggest are great for helping you come up with related keywords.