An in-depth technical SEO audit is necessary for your website, as you can analyze the technical features of your website’s SEO. This technical audit is always suggested as my first step while taking on a new SEO project. It enables us to identify any on-site or off-site issues which are limiting the site to rise to the top of Google’s search rankings. With this information readily available, a plan is produced on how to address them.
What is the purpose of an SEO audit?
The universal purpose of an SEO audit is to improve a site’s rankings in Google and other search engines. The review outlines multiple aspects of your website and helps you understand which aspects of your site are working well and which need updating. It covers structural and content elements affecting your SEO visibility. The SEO audit can be comprehensive or focused on a singular area of concern as per your business. For instance, you may be encountering problems with speed or low click through rates. The outcomes of the audit will allow you to identify any issues and work to resolve them.
What does the audit cover?
For your SEO audit, I’ll perform the following:
- Technical analysis
- On-Page analysis
- Off-Page analysis
- Competitive report and keyword research
There are numerous items to look as they in some way or another will affect your search ranking if not worked on correctly. The audit is exceptionally comprehensive and ensures that no stone is left unturned.
Technical analysis
This is the first step to be performed, and it checks the site for accessibility and any issues related to this indexability. It makes sure that the site is accessible by users and Google crawlers. I will perform a thorough checkup of your robots.txt file, sitemaps and Meta tags etc. The next thing will be to test your website for responsiveness and user-friendliness.
On-Page Analysis
For the SEO audit, I look at on-page components. Here I distinguish both general content issues and on-page specific issues which involves the likes of HTML improvements, URL structure, title tags and H1/H2 tags. Google prefers websites that have good site architecture and are structured and classified correctly.
If your site has pages with less and thin content, then they will be waved up too as Google likes content heavy pages. Duplicate content-related issues are examined, and your website will be checked for broken links. This is to guarantee your search ranking is not negatively influenced by them.
Moreover, as part of the on-page analysis in the SEO audit, I also look at your structured data to see if you’re taking advantage of abundant bits in the search engine results.
Off-Page Analysis
In simple terms, the off-page analysis evaluates your incoming links and identifies toxic and damaged links.
In this segment of the audit, I analyze your link profile and make sure that it’s not adversely affecting your SEO strategy. I check for link relevancy, heterogeneity and authority, and examine the anchor text that is used to link to your site.
I’ll inspect whether the links back to your website are principally from reliable, reputable sites. Several industry sources are being used for this purpose.
If you’ve obtained backlinks from dishonest dealers, then it may well be that they are on sites that you don’t want your brand to be correlated. Alternatively, they may be moderate quality, spam-filled links that are doing damage to your site.
Competitor Analysis
The final part of the SEO audit looks at what your top competitors are doing for SEO and how your SEO activities compare to theirs. It helps you to learn about your competition and how to stay ahead of them.
Here I look at your competitor’s domain rating, which determines how strong their domain is, and how robust their backlink profile is. I also identify the number of referring domains (a high number of referring domains can also indicate an active site—provided that those links ‘aren’t low‐quality).
The final part of the audit, and potentially the most important, identifies the organic traffic and keywords that your competitor’s site is achieving in organic search.
If you’d like me to conduct a technical SEO audit or you’d like to discuss things further, then please get in touch.