It’s essential to carry out a full or partial SEO audit of your website, if you want to achieve your SEO objectives. The SEO audit can be carried out at any time in the life of a website (creation, redesign, migration).
Whatever your motivation for auditing your site, our Getknown SEO experts will show you how to perform an SEO audit step by step. Before going into depth about auditing your site, it’s important to understand what an SEO audit is.
What is an SEO audit? Definition
TheSEO audit is an analysis of the obstacles to your website’s natural search engine ranking.The aim of the SEO audit is to identify areas for improvement and turn them into levers to boost your site’s organic ranking. This involves :
- Analyze your website in terms of natural referencing;
- highlight SEO errors;
- present referencing opportunities.
The SEO audit is therefore essential for building a tailor-made SEO strategy that guarantees profitable and lasting results.
The SEO audit is carried out on 3 levels (technical, semantic, netlinking). There are therefore 3 types of SEO audit:
- Technical audit: this analyzes your site’s operation to answer questions of accessibility and readability by search engine spiders.
- Semantic or “on page” audit: this audit takes stock of the quality of content and its interconnections.
- Netlinking or “off page” or “off site” audit: to analyze the relevance of your backlinking strategy and assess your site’s authority in relation to its organic competitors.
Here are the seo audit steps to analyze your entire website.
Step 1. Preparing for the SEO audit
Identifying SEO issues
It’s essential to identify the SEO issue that’s driving your need for an audit. For example:
- Website creation
- No organic traffic
- Incomprehensible drop in traffic
- Positioning fall
- Need for a redirection plan as part of a migration
- Change of SEO provider
- Strategic evolution.
Defining SEO objectives
Using your SEO KPIs, you can set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) objectives. Example:
- Generate 500 quality leads in the next 6 months.
- Increase your organic traffic by 40% over the year.
- Reach the first page of Google for your main keyword in 6 months.
- Maintain or even improve your search engine ranking after migrating your website .
- Optimization of 50 local pages in 6 months (if you want to do local SEO in a high-traffic area like Paris in France).
Collecting data
Use a website crawling tool like Screaming Frog to collect essential technical data for an SEO audit: URL structure, lack of titles, duplicate meta descriptions, multiple H1 tags, H2 tags, duplicate pages, redirects, error pages or robots.txt, etc.
Screaming Frog enables fast crawling and provides detailed reports on SEO errors, broken links, redirects… Its free version is quite comprehensive, although the paid version is more interesting.
Traffic analysis
By analyzing your site’s traffic, you’ll know :
- the source of your site’s traffic
- your visitors’ behavior
- number of clicks
- bounce rate
- conversion rate
- the time users spend on your site
Google analytics lets you track your site’s traffic, free of charge. It provides several reports and metrics to analyze your traffic.
Keyword analysis
Analyzing keywords means answering the following questions:
- How effective is your keyword strategy? Here, we’re talking about evaluating the positioning of your pages on your keywords. Semrush shows you the positions of your various keywords on the Google serps. Focus on keywords from the Top 5 to the Top 20.
- Are the keywords indexed relevant? This involves evaluating the organic traffic your keywords bring to the site. General keywords can bring you a lot of traffic (example: running shoes), while long-tail keywords will bring you less traffic but targeted traffic (example: NIKE running shoes). Semrush is a comprehensive tool for evaluating your organic keyword traffic.
“Good to know: You can easily integrate Google analytics and Google Search Console with other analytics tools, like Semrush for more relevant results.“
Step 2: Technical SEO audit
Now that you’ve defined your objectives and collected the essential data, it’s time to dive into the technical audit. Here are a few key points to consider:
Site structuring
The structure or architecture of your website is the way your content is put together. In other words, it’s how the interconnections between them are presented to search engines. Generally speaking, it’s a question of checking whether all your web pages are indexed, i.e. accessible to search engine spiders. Here are the structuring errors that could block indexing of your pages:
- internal meshing is not coherent
- a single internal link to several pages
- orphan pages
- the sitemap.xml file not specified in the robots.txt file
Tree
The tree structure, or site map, is the navigation menu you offer your readers. It’s all about making sure your site’s tree structure is simple and intuitive to facilitate navigation. A good tree structure should enable your visitors to easily access all the pages of your website in less than 03 clicks. A “bad” page in terms of tree structure is one that can be accessed in more than 04 clicks from the home page.
URLs
A URL is the address that appears in the browser bar when a visitor opens a page on your site. In SEO, URLs also have a role to play.
Search engines like Google appreciate user-friendly, descriptive addresses. During the audit, it’s important to ensure that the site’s links are short, comprehensive and contain the page’s keyword.
Examples of “bad” SEO URLs
- http://www.example.com/index.php?pageid=123 :This URL uses dynamic parameters instead of meaningful keywords.
- http://www.example.com/category/2023/post&%$5/: This URL contains unnecessary special characters such as “&” and “%$5”.
- http://www.example.com/page1: This URL is too generic and doesn’t describe the page content in a relevant way.
Examples of “good” SEO URLs
- http://www.example.com/blog/10-conseils-seo/: This URL is logically structured, with a “blog” directory for organizing articles, for example.
- http://www.example.com/categorie-produit/chaussures-de-course/: This URL uses a hierarchical structure with a “category-product” directory followed by the product name.
Loading speed
The loading speed of your site’s pages has a major impact on the user experience (LCP, OTC, CLS) and on your site’s SEO. Search engines appreciate sites with fast loading times.
During your site’s SEO audit, you’ll want to check the speed at which your pages are displayed. SEO audit tools such as Google’s Pagespeed are excellent for assessing your site’s loading speed. Do a Google mobile friendly check, as Google favors sites that work well on mobile.
As a reference, pages with a load score of less than 70% are not sufficiently optimized for search engines.
Image optimization
Image size is the number one factor in the weight of your pages. That’s why it’s so important to check that your images are properly optimized. During site analysis, you need to make sure that images are well compressed (less than 500KB on average) and that they have relevant ALT attributes. This contributes to loading speed and better image referencing. A relevant ALT attribute is a description of the image with the keyword or a synonym. Also check the image format, as some formats like Webp are more interesting than others (PNG, JPeg).
File compression
In addition to images, your site’s files are also a factor that slows down page loading. In this respect, it’s important to make sure that heavily-used files such as CSS and JS are compressed and minimized.
This speeds up page loading times and improves page ranking. As an example, your site’s pages should not require more than 10 style files to load.
Step 3: SEO content audit
After the technical analysis, it’s time for the SEO content audit. This analysis is essential to understand the quality and relevance of what you’re offering your audience. Very important for the positioning of your pages in the SERP of search engines. Let’s take a look at the points covered in this section.
Content quality
The Google Panda algorithm examines the content of every single page on your site, so content quality is crucial for good search engine visibility. It’s therefore important to assess the overall quality of content to ensure that it’s informative, relevant and useful to visitors. Identify pages that may be lacking in quality or relevance during this stage of the SEO audit. Also analyze the presence of duplicate content.
Keywords are the foundation of SEO ! Everything revolves around them. That’s why analysis at this level needs to be quite meticulous. It’s usually a question of examining how keywords are integrated into the content.
Keyword referencing
Check whether relevant keywords are being used appropriately. The aim is not yet to optimize, but to understand how keywords are managed. Many tools are dedicated to this, such as Google’s Keyword Planner.
Content structure
An SEO content audit also involves analyzing the structuring of page content. At this level, the aim is to check that titles are appropriate and logically organized for Google search and the reader. The aim is to determine whether the content is easy to read and understand. Texts must be organized in logical Hn.
Tag optimization (Title and Meta description)
In addition to the content that visitors see when they arrive on your website, there’s also content that ‘s primarily intended for display in the SERP. These include meta description, meta title, meta keyword…
These tags enable search engines to better understand your content and display it correctly. With a site based on the popular WordPress CMS, you can analyze these HTML tags with the Yoast SEO plugin.
Step 4: Netlinking SEO audit
The netlinking audit focuses on your site’s inbound and outbound links. Here are the important points to check during an SEO Netlinking audit.
Backlink quality
Backlinks are external links pointing to your website. They play a very important role in the ranking of your pages in the SERP of search engines. During the audit, it’s important to evaluate the quality and quantity of backlinks. Good” backlinks are those coming from sites with high authority and whose page content deals with a topic close to yours.
Spam links
These are low-quality backlinks pointing to your site. These are generally located in the comments section, in public forums or in directories that have nothing to do with your theme. You need to find them and make a list.
Dead links
The analysis of dead links is also important for your audit, as they negatively affect the user experience. At this level, it’s a matter of doing a full crawl of the site to find all broken links.
Diversity of sources
The diversity of backlink sources is important for increasing the authority of your website. As part of your netlinking audit, you need to check the origin of each link.
Competition analysis
In addition to analyzing inbound and outbound links, your audit should also look at your competitors’ strategies. This helps you understand how you stand in relation to others in your sector.
Step 5: SEO audit report and recommendations
The final stage of your SEO Audit is the writing of the report. This should contain all the useful information from your analyses and optimization recommendations for each point. In more detail, it should contain the following elements:
Summary of results
The results summary is nothing more than the results of the analyses. These should be categorized and fairly self-explanatory.
Optimization recommendations
For each of the above points, you need to propose an optimization approach. What actions need to be taken, and above all how, to improve the site’s performance in search results on Google and other search engines.
Priority actions
Also in your SEO audit report, you should identify which actions need to be prioritized. For example, if you detected any major problems during the audit, these should be at the top of the priority list.
Long-term action plan
It’s also up to you to draw up a long-term action plan covering the various stages required to improve your site. This plan should be based on future objectives.
Performing an SEO audit is an essential step in assessing the health of your website and identifying opportunities for improvement. It’s essential to note that the audit of your site focuses on analyzing the various aspects of its optimization.
It’s important to conclude your audit with a report offering general recommendations and priority actions. This serves as a basis for further optimization.
Doing an SEO audit therefore requires a great deal of time and a number of skills. If you don’t have the skills to carry out a seo audit, you can call on Getknown SEO experts to assist you.
