A site audit is essential for finding where your website stands out among the millions of other websites. Through search engine optimization this can be accomplished in one of the most efficient methods. But before moving directly into the effective improvement of your website’s SEO, you must first do a comprehensive analysis of your website. However, what is a site audit and why is it so crucial? Let’s explore these issues and understand how a thorough website audit can enhance the way our website performs in search engine rankings.
Understanding Site Audits
A site audit is a thorough examination of each factor impacting a website’s search engine visibility. This thorough analysis helps in identifying a website’s strengths and weaknesses from an SEO perspective. Addressing key issues that are affecting organic search performance as much as possible is the main objective of a free website audit.Let’s understand site audit with an Example
Imagine you have your own house(website) and you lived in it for years and some changes may occur in your home. After making numerous renovations and changes in your home (website), you stay thinking about whether its condition is still in excellent condition. You decided to go for an inspection(site audit) with a home inspector( SEO professional). He comes in, takes a thorough look around and finds areas that need to be fixed. In the living room (homepage), He notices that the furniture (content) is outdated and not very comfortable (engaging) for visitors. The walls (meta tags) could use a fresh coat of paint ( optimization) and the windows (images) are a bit dirty (not optimized for search engines). Moving to the kitchen (website structure), he found that the pipes (URL structure) are a bit leaky (not organized) and the appliances (internal linking) are not working efficiently. The kitchen sink (website speed) is also clogged (slow loading times). Upstairs in the bedrooms (landing pages), He discovered that the mattresses (content quality) are a bit lumpy (not very useful) and the closets (meta descriptions) are cluttered (not very descriptive). In the basement (website technicalities), he found that the foundation (website architecture) is a bit shaky (not very secure) and the electrical wiring (SSL certificates) needs an upgrade. The inspector (SEO professional) will share a detailed report (site audit) mentioning all these areas for improvement. With this information, you can improve areas and tackle each issue as per your priority, to make your house (website) more attractive, welcoming, efficient, and secure for visitors (users) and search engines alike.Types of Site Audits
Site audits have many different types and each focuses on one particular aspect of your website:- Technical SEO audit: In this, we analyze the website’s technical components that affect its search engine ranking.
- Content audit: Inspection of the content published on your website has quality and relevancy for users or not.
- UX/UI audit: In this, we identify the website’s interface design and user experience.
- Competitive analysis: We conduct a competitor analysis to understand where we stand as compared to our competitors.
Tools and Resources Needed for Site Audit
You’ll need several kinds of SEO tools in order to carry out an efficient free site audit. Popular options that can assist you in gathering the required data are Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Seoptimer, SEMrush and Screaming Frog. These tools provide information regarding your backlink profile, traffic to your website, keyword rankings and all the on-page & off-page SEO-related issues.Setting Goals and Objectives
Defining your goals is essential before starting the site audit. Maybe you are trying to increase the conversion rate or boost the traffic of your website. Setting straightforward objectives will help you to make an audit strategy as per specific business requirements.Key Components of a Site Audit
Technical SEO
Technical SEO plays an important role because it impacts the fundamental framework upon which your site is built.- Site speed: A more quickly your website loads it improves user experience and is also ranks higher by search engines.
- Mobile responsiveness: The website has to be displayed properly on mobile devices because nowadays mobile is more reliable for people who use them to access the internet.
- URL structure: we should create permalinks simple and short because user-friendly URLs are more convenient for search engines to crawl and interpret.
- Accessibility and Crawlability: Make sure that search engines can easily navigate and index the content you submit.
- Secure connections (HTTPS): Security is a primary concern for search engines as well as users so in this we check website has SSL certification or not.
On-Page SEO
In the on-page audit, we focus on the factors of the website like Optimizing content and meta tags for relevant keywords and enhancing search visibility.- Keyword optimization: Using relevant keywords in your content can help your article rank higher.
- Meta tags and headings: These are useful for demonstrating to the search engines the purpose and intent of your pages.
- Image optimization: In this, we find the missing alt-text images and fix it because Google bots can not understand and read the images that don’t have alt text.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO focuses on factors that are not on your website yet impact your ranking and one of them is backlinks.- Backlinks: In this, we find out how many quality backlinks are linked on your website and how many of them are do-follow backlinks. Creating quality backlinks is one of the best practices for increasing domain authority and page authority.
- Social media engagement: To connect with consumers on a wide range of social media which gradually enhances the SEO and increases traffic too.
User Experience (UX) Evaluation
- Site navigation and architecture: For visitors to stay satisfied and engaged your website should be simple and easy to navigate from one page to another without any hustle.
- User engagement metrics: High bounce rates could be a sign that the visitors’ requirements are not being fulfilled by your website.
Common Issues and How to Address Them
- Broken links: Broken links can negatively impact your SEO so use tools to identify and fix them.
- Duplicate content: Ensure that all of your content is original because Google penalizes websites that have the same or copied content.
- Improving site speed: Reduce the size of your files and enhance server response times to speed up your website.