Although Digital Marketing is a broad term and many tools and techniques are employed to make your online presence impactful, what tops the priority list is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. It is one of the leading trends and most effective tools in the world of advertising and online marketing. Developing SEO-friendly content can make a huge difference when compared to regular blogs or content pieces.
Well, Search Engine Optimization is a miracle generating machine but this machine needs a periodic check and that is what SEO audit comes in handy for. An SEO audit is a process through which you analyze your website from a marketing perspective. It mostly involves taking an insight into the effectiveness of keywords, the technical aspects of the website, lead conversion rate, competitor strength, etc. Frequent SEO audits help to enhance the relevancy of your content to the target audience. Ideally, SEO audits must be conducted every month to every few months depending upon the expanse of your website.
It is a simple process wherein a qualified auditor can check through various aspects of your website like indexing, hosting, keywords, metadata, references, competitions, etc to provide a clear cut about what areas need improvement.
Here are some easy steps that you can follow to carry out an SEO audit for your website:
1. Check if your website is Mobile Adaptive
With the rapid advancement in technologies, mobile devices are more popular than desktops and laptops today. A major chunk of the online search is carried out on mobile devices, hence it is essential to have a smooth mobile version of your website. You can check this by using tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool.
2. Use crawling to find out the SEO issues
Crawling is often used for checking out problems like low word count, duplicated content, excessive redirects, or unlinked pages. You must also keep an eye that only one version of your website is being listed on the browsers. Crawling ensures high site speed, optimized site experience, and efficient sitemaps. Crawl efficiency is an index that evaluates the overall experience of the bots on your website.
3. On-page Optimization
To generate and track organic traffic, on-page optimization is a must. The ranking of keywords and headlines plays a major role. Detailed analysis must be carried out to ensure that the content on your website is SEO friendly and pushing your website higher on search results. Retargeting campaigns are also an extended arm of this process. Broken or empty links must be detected and fixed. Your customers should keep coming back to your website and thus, work closely around making the user experience on your site hassle-free and easy.
4. Off-Page Analysis and Backlink Check
Backlinks are the most important part of off-page SEO activities. Including trustworthy backlinks that are popular will eventually make your website rank higher on the results. The search engine algorithms are designed to push the website with relevant backlinks and anchor texts. Running a quick check on other sources that you use to promote your websites like Guest Blogging or Social Media Marketing is also counted under Off-Page SEO analysis and must not be ignored.
5. Competitor Analysis
Competitor Analysis helps you understand your business in a way nothing else can. Looking at the competitor’s website can give you an idea about what lacks in there and what other improvements can you bring about in your website. You can run keyword research with the help of your competitor’s website and look for the backlinks they use. Compare them with yours and outcast them with better optimization.
Although carrying out the audit manually would sound like a good way to do things but, thankfully there is an array of SEO auditing tools available online that can make your job easy. Here are a few of them which are popular among users: Semrush, SEOptimer, Raventools, Woorank, etc. You can try them out next time you plan to conduct an SEO audit for your business website.
