What is an SEO Audit?

SEO audit is crucial to look at your site's technical foundation and the elements that appear on and off the page to improve Search Engine visibility, usability, and conversion. SEO audits must be conducted regularly to ensure long-term success for your site's performance. SEO audits are an essential element of keeping your SEO strategy up-to-date. If your site isn't optimized for search engines, you may not get a substantial volume of traffic and consideration from potential customers.

Definition of an SEO Audit

SEO audit aims to analyse the factors that influence a website's online visibility and presence in search engine results. It allows you to assess the health of your site to prevent spam and to see suggestions for optimizing your site. SEO audits are essential for various reasons, with one of the most apparent being that Google frequently adjusts its algorithm to adapt to new technologies and search trends.

Every successful audit begins with a thorough website search. By doing this, you can evaluate the state of your website and spot any issues with your site. The objective of the SEO audit is to concentrate on your priorities and efforts in those areas. For a successful SEO audit, you require an SEO digital marketing agency that can distinguish between medium, low, and high-priority regions to increase your business's visibility online.

What elements should be considered when conducting an SEO audit?

First, the audit must be thorough. It should include all those factors that can affect the quality of your website visibility. It should give a full view of what's happening in the current state of your site. Conducting an extensive SEO audit is a crucial beginning point for any digital marketing agency, whether they are doing it internally or outsourcing the job. Listed below are the elements that are analysed in SEO audit process.

• Site Content Structure.

• Page Copy Theme Analysis.

• Keyword optimization.

• Meta Data Analysis (Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions)

• identify broken links

• Analyse Schema.

• User Experience.

• Internal linking structure

• Images & Video.

• XML web sitemap

• website's page speed

• Website's URL

• Identify duplicate content.

• Analyse organic search traffic

Read more: SEO Techniques to drive Organic Traffic in 2022

This is because you can examine your current SEO efforts, whether practical or ineffective and then take action, based on the information you've gathered.

5 top valuable tools you need to conduct an SEO audit

SEMrush 

SEMrush has an array of services and instruments that SEO professionals should know, and the platform requires user training. SEMrush platform provides a comprehensive online help centre, including webinars, podcasts, eBooks, and articles. SEMrush is a powerful and well-known tool for auditing your website that could reveal any issues in your website. There's even a dashboard for social media monitoring that evaluates the marketing activity across social media platforms.

Key Features:

• Displays SEO audit results via graphs.

• Finds pages, audit results and other information

• SEO-related issues are classified into three main groups: Errors, Warnings, and Notifications.

• Analyses crawl to compare the outcomes of various SEO reviews.

• Integration with Google Analytics.

• Provides actionable insights.

Ahrefs

The Ahrefs website audit tool automatically detects the technical and on-page SEO issues that can negatively affect your SERP rankings. The best part is that these issues are categorized by type and then compiled into a report that includes colour charts to discuss with your team or give to your customers. The categories used here are the performance of HTML tags, social media content quality, outbound and inbound links, and broken links or images. It offers a reliable backlink-checking tool which provides an extensive backlink profile of any URL or website.

Key Features:

• Shows you a real-time crawl log.

• Analyse inbound/outbound links, pagination and duplicates.

• Offers practical suggestions for fixing SEO problems.

• Crawls different device versions of your website.

• Automates daily, weekly and monthly website crawls.

• Allows custom filters using several elements.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is also an SEO audit tool with powerful monitoring features that aid you in tracking broken links, page speed, structured data, content quality and much more. It also offers information direct from Google search results, which means that the crawl reports and link information can provide problems that Google detects. With professional SEO services, you can learn more about your website's sources of traffic, patterns, and user behaviour. You can keep track of the performance of your site's pages and session metrics.

Key Features:

• Lists down all the pages that are Indexed to Google.

• Covers user experience issues.

• Monitors and tracks your pages that use AMP.

• It confirms crawl statistics direct by importing Googlebot.

• Gives an understanding of the keyword's effectiveness

• Generates customized audit reports.

• Sends out email alerts instantly if Google finds a problem on your website.

Screaming Frog

Screaming frog is a relatively new tool and has proven itself to be an effective one for SEO audits in the industry. The organic SEO company can use it to improve the online website's visibility since its use has increased in recent years because of people's increased use of search engines. SEO digital marketing agency has the expertise in using Screaming Frog to analyse duplicate content, H1/H2 tags, metadata, alt text images, broken links, and much more.

Key Features:

• Discovers permanent and temporary redirects

• Evaluate internal/external linking

• considers meta titles and meta descriptions.

• Integration with Google Search Console and Google Analytics

• Identifies duplicated content and elements.

• Sets up Image XML Sitemaps.

• Extracts information from any HTML page using CSS Path, XPath, and regex.

• Finds broken links (404s) and server errors.

SpyFu

SpyFu is a software tool that enables users to check on their competitors' online strategies and competitor's keywords to determine what they are ranking for and how to improve upon that. SpyFu provides users with data that they can use to improve their online marketing efforts. In addition, SpyFu can be used to perform an SEO audit. This tool gives users in-depth insights into their website's ranking, organic keywords, and paid keywords. SpyFu also allows users to track their website's progress over time, analyse their optimizing strategies, and measure their effectiveness against their competitors.

Key Features:

• Discovers possible ranking opportunities.

• Finds flaws that Google updates have exposed.

• It highlights unnecessary keywords that you don't require.

• Analyse backlinks to remove unneeded hyperlinks.

• Displays the unique keywords that can be used for ranking

• It tracks the SEO performance of your domain

Conclusion 

Conclusively, we've explained every aspect of an SEO audit, the essentials and the elements you should consider for conducting your SEO audit. SEO audits are more crucial when you're not receiving any traffic or rankings. It can also help identify mistakes on your website and help you determine what you need to fix on your website to improve the search engine's visibility. If you are facing any errors, it is time to speak to an SEO consultant of Cynosure Designs, immediately to help identify and fix the issues.

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