If there’s one thing that successful websites have in common, it’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s even more important if you want to increase the visits and conversion rates for your website. A lot of people are guilty of recognizing the importance of SEO months or years after the launching of the website. This is when an SEO audit steps in.

What Does An SEO Audit Do?

Identification of major factors that have an effect or influence on the organic search rankings is just one of the many things that an SEO audit is able to do. Aside from that, it can also do reports, analysis, and measurements to help boost the site’s rankings. This will zero in on issues, challenges, and areas that need to be improved.

How Does It Work?

●Website Crawl – this is where the process begins. A spider or an SEO crawler imitates Google and looks for the site to determine the current SEO setup and structure. This step is also needed to make sure that there is only one browseable version of the site.

Think of all the ways that a person can type the website’s address on the browser:

●http://domain.com
●http://www.domain.com
●https://domain.com
●https://www.domain.com

Only one of all these possibilities should be accessible. All the other domains should show a 301 that redirects the user to the browseable version.

●Check the Home Page SEO – right click on the website’s homepage to know the source. Is the title clickable? Does it conform to the SEO best practices? Is the meta description customized? Are there sub-headers? The tags and meta description should also be evaluated.

●Analyze the Report – the crawl report will show the issues that the website has. It’s important to read and analyze the report so that appropriate solutions and strategies will be implemented to improve the SEO.

●Inspect the Content – if there’s one thing that Google hates, it’s duplicate contents. Panda crushes sites that have too many duplicate contents. One way to avoid this is by signing up for an account at Copyscape.

●Run a Test on Google – This step helps you see where your site is positioned on Google, based on different combinations of keywords. If the site is not on the number one spot, there may be algorithmic issues that need to be resolved. Sites that are ranked at the top means that Google trusts them while those that are ranked at the bottom are risky.

●Observe the Search Traffic – It’s a known fact that the main goal of SEO is to boost the website’s traffic. That said, it only makes sense to look at how the website is performing by running a couple of reports through Google Analytics.

●Data Gathering – Are there any issues when it comes to site accessibility? Are there codes that need to be improved? What makes it difficult for people to access your website? Fix these problems and your traffic will increase in no time.

●Ensure Proper Formation of Content – When the data or content of a website is properly structured, it can boost the site’s visibility and improve the search rankings. Moreover, properly structured data makes it easier for Google to understand the content, so they can properly assess if the site is trustworthy or not.

●Check for Gaps in the Content – These content gaps are keywords that you might have missed out on but are doing a swell job at boosting your competitor’s rankings. This is something that you need to address immediately if you want to keep up with the competition.

●Run a Full Content SEO audit – This last step is a bit painful because it means removing a lot of pages from your site. These underperforming or low-quality pages are affecting the performance of the website. You’ll be surprised at the vast improvement of your search traffic once you get rid of them.

SEO audit allows you to uncover the road blocks in your site. The site’s issues are surfaced and you are given a chance to resolve them, which will eventually result in the improvement of your search rankings. If you’re already done with the audit but are itching to keep digging, you can go back to square one and start with the crawler so you can re-examine the internal linking, on-page factors, and structure of the website.