If you want to achieve your SEO objectives, it’s essential to carry out a full or partial SEO audit of your website. The SEO audit can be carried out at any time in the life of a website (creation, redesign, migration).
Whatever your reasons for auditing your site, Getknown’s SEO experts will show you how to perform an SEO audit step by step. Before going into detail about auditing your site, it’s essential to understand what an SEO audit is.
What is an SEO audit? Definition
TheSEO audit is an analysis of the parameters linked to the natural referencing of your website in search engines.The aim of the SEO audit is to identify areas for improvement, and to transform them into levers for boosting your site’s organic ranking. This involves :
- Analyze your website in terms of natural referencing;
- Highlighting SEO errors;
- Present SEO improvement opportunities.
An SEO audit is essential for building a tailor-made SEO strategy that guarantees profitable, lasting results.
The SEO audit covers 3 levels (technical, semantic, netlinking). There are therefore 3 types of SEO audit:
- Technical audit: analyze your site’s functioning to answer questions of accessibility and readability by the robots that index your pages on search engines.
- Semantic audit or “on page”: take stock of the quality of your content and its interconnections.
- Netlinking audit or “off page” or “off site”: analyze the relevance of your backlinking strategy and assess your site’s authority in relation to its organic competitors.
These are the main stages of the SEO audit, which enables us 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. Examples:
- Website creation
- No organic traffic
- Incomprehensible drop in traffic
- Drop in positioning
- 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. Examples:
- Generate 500 quality leads in the next 6 months.
- Increase your organic traffic by 40% over the year.
- Reach the first Google page for your main keyword within 6 months.
- Maintain or improve search engine rankings after website migration .
- Optimize 50 local pages in 6 months (if you want to do local SEO in a high-traffic area like Paris).
Collect data
Use a website crawling tool like Screaming Frog to collect technical data essential 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 allows you to crawl quickly to obtain reports detailing SEO errors, broken links, redirects… The free version is quite comprehensive, but the paid version is (of course) even more so.
Traffic analysis
An analysis of your site’s traffic will tell you :
- where your site traffic comes from
- visitor 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 for analyzing traffic.
Keyword analysis
Keyword analysis means answering the following questions:
- Is the keyword strategy performing well? It’s a question of 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 indexed keywords relevant? This involves evaluating the organic traffic your keywords bring to your site. General keywords can bring you a lot of traffic (e.g. running shoes), while long-tail keywords bring less traffic, but more qualified, more targeted traffic (e.g. NIKE running shoes). Semrush is one of the best tools for evaluating your organic keyword traffic.
“Good to know: you can easily integrate Google analytics and Google Search Console with other analysis tools like Semrush to get more relevant and visual 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 structure
The structure or architecture of your website is the way in which your content is assembled. In other words, it’s the way in which interconnected pages 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 can prevent your pages from being indexed:
- inconsistent internal linking
- a single internal link to several pages
- orphan pages
- sitemap.xml file not specified in robots.txt file
Tree
The tree structure or site map is the navigation menu you offer your visitors. Your site’s tree structure should be simple and intuitive to facilitate navigation. A good tree structure should enable visitors to easily access all the pages of your website in less than 3 clicks.
URLs
A URL is the address displayed in the browser bar. 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, understandable and contain the page’s keyword.
Examples of “” 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 to organize articles.
- http://www.example.com/categorie-produit/chaussures-de-course/: this URL uses a hierarchical structure with a “product-category” 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 need to check the speed at which your pages are displayed. To assess your site’s loading speed, you can use SEO audit tools such as Google’s Pagespeed. Don’t forget to do a Google mobile friendly check, as Google favors sites that work well on mobile.
As a reference, pages with a load score below 70% are not sufficiently optimized for search engines.
Image optimization
Image size is the number one factor in page weight. That’s why it’s so important to ensure that images are properly optimized.
During site analysis, you need to make sure that images are compressed (less than 500 Kb on average) and that they have relevant ALT attributes. This contributes to faster loading 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 can also slow down page loading. It’s therefore essential to ensure that heavily-used files such as CSS and JS are compressed and minimized.
This speeds up page loading times and improves page ranking. By way of 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. It’s very important for the positioning of your pages in search engine SERPs. Here are the main points to watch out for.
Content strategy
The Google Panda algorithm examines the content of every page on your site. Content quality is crucial for good search engine visibility. It’s 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 look for the presence of any duplicate content, which is highly penalizing.
Keywords are the foundation of SEO ! Everything revolves around them. Keyword analysis and research (examining how keywords are integrated into content) must be meticulous.
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
Performing an SEO content audit also means analyzing the structuring of page content. This means checking whether titles are appropriate and logically organized for Google Search and the reader. The aim is to determine whether content is easy to read and understand. Texts must be organized in logical Hn.
Optimizing tags (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 built on a popular CMS like WordPress, 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 from high-authority sites whose page content is related to your own.
Spammy 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. You can perform a full site crawl to find all broken links.
Diversity of sources
Diverse sources of backlinks are important for increasing your website’s authority. During yournetlinking audit, you should check the source of each link.
Competition analysis
As part of the analysis of inbound and outbound links, your audit should also include a study of your competitors’ strategies, so as to situate you in relation to other players 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 SEO audit results
The results summary is nothing more than the results of the analysis. These should be categorized and made explicit.
Recommendations for optimization
For each of the above points, you should 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
Again in your SEO audit report, you should identify the actions to be taken as a matter of priority. For example, if you detected major technical 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 the 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 is important to conclude your audit with a report that proposes general recommendations and priority actions.
Carrying out an SEO audit requires a great deal of time and a number of skills. If you don’t have the time or skills to carry out a seo audit, don’t hesitate to call on Getknown’s SEO experts!
