Sometimes even after doing everything right on your website, it might not rank! Maybe you have missed a couple of minor errors, or maybe you have major errors in your website you might not know about.
How will you fix something that you don’t even know? This is where a comprehensive in-depth website audit comes in. This will not only help you with what errors there are in your website but also helps you rank better.
Maybe you’ve never audited a website before, or you have made major changes in your site that may have caused some major errors or maybe you have created a top-notch website with visually appealing, user-friendly, unique content, but you are not getting the desired results?
You need to conduct a comprehensive SEO audit.
It is like discovering the layers of your website to reach the hidden opportunities or mistakes that might be hindering its potential to rank your website. Finding and fixing those issues using SEO Audit can boost your website ranking and can get you more organic traffic.
Auditing your website can determine whether or not the website is optimized to achieve the traffic goals and also give you a sense of how you can improve your website to reach those goals.
How to Do an SEO Audit for Your Website
1. Site-wide Audit with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb
Both of these tools are highly recommended for website crawler analysis and have their own unique strengths. Screaming Frog excels in its ability to easily crawl small and large websites, while SiteBulb prioritizes Technical SEO issues.
SiteBulb includes an interactive visual site audit that presents a clear and user-friendly representation of your website and their error. Screaming Frog has a built-in content audit feature and a comprehensive reporting feature to help you for a better view.
2. Search Console Errors
If the search console reports a server error, it means that Googlebot couldn’t access your URL. There are a variety of possible causes for this type of error, and you may need to address this issue and fix it as soon as possible.
Need to fix these errors:
- Ensure your site’s hosting server is working properly; it is not overloaded or misconfigured.
- Check that your site is not inadvertently blocking.
- Control search engine crawling and indexing wisely; if you can’t do it by yourself, consult a developer to see if your site is set up for optimal performance.
3. Speed Up Your Site
Google confirmed that your site’s loading speed is one of the ranking factors and over the year rolled out a new update that makes speed even More Important. Here is how you would get your site load speed Really faster.
- Clean your site’s HTML codes and you can easily find the PageSpeed Insights. But don’t just analyze the homepage. Make sure that you test all your popular web pages.
- Comprise your images as huge images can bring your site speed to a halt.
4. Find and Delete Zombie Pages
Type your site name of the Google search tab, it will show you how many pages google has indexed your site, and if the number of pages is more than you thought then you are not alone. In fact, 50- 75% more indexed pages are seen on many sites these pages are known as “Zombie page”. So deleting Zombie pages can get you a lot of more organic traffic…which will help you boost Google traffic by nearly 50%.
The most common types of Zombie Pages are:
- Archive Pages
- Category and Tab pages
- Search result pages
- Boilerplater content
- Old press release
5. Analyze Your Backlinks
Backlinks are really important according to our study more than 11.8 million search results found that backlinks correlate with ranking more than any other factors. You can use various tools to check out referring domains and domain authorities.
6. Check Your Organic Traffic
Head over to Google Analytics to see how organic traffic you’re getting on your website. You can see the number of people who visited your sites from the Search engines last month. You can also set the dates to the last 6-8 months.
If you have any issues and your organic traffic is declining, don’t worry. Once you are finished with the SEO audit things would start improving.
7. Flatten Your Website Architecture
Website Architecture is really important for Search Engine Optimization, and your site architecture should be simple. There are two reasons why website architecture is important first, it helps search engines find and index all your web pages and once it is done properly Google can easily find your entire site. And second it tells Google which page on your website is most important. So make sure that your website architecture is as simple as possible.
8. Check for Any Duplicates on Your Website
The audience should be able to access your website with one of your addresses, and if it is accessible at more than one of their non-secure counterpoints, you need to fix it. This is very important because Google also see these URLs as separate site versions, and having more than one accessible link can cause issues in indexing and crawling; it may negatively affect your ranking because of dilute link equity.
9. Diagnose and Find Indexability Issues.
An index is where Google search results come from, a database of billions of web pages. The Indexing issue can get complicated, as your page needs to be indexed to stand any chance of ranking. You can easily check for the basic issues in the INDEXABILITY report in your site audit for the “NOINDEX PAGE”.
Note: Google can not index the page with this warning, so it is worth checking that they are not the index page you want to index and if they are removed or edited the robots tags.
10. Ensure Your Website is Mobile Friendly
Since 2019, mobile friendliness has been one of the Google ranking factors, so it makes sense to check whether your website is mobile-friendly. Go to the Mobile Usability report in the Google search console, which will tell you whether any URL has errors that affect your mobile usability.
Find out how the design works for your audience so you can draw more attention know how the overall design and user experience impact your audience.
Here are some of the tips you need to know when it comes to website mobile-friendliness:
- Prioritize your website content and make sure it is readable on Mobile phones.
- Always test your website before launching it across different devices.
- Compress your images so they are mobile-friendly (Don’t scarifies Quality).
11. Reclaim Authority by Restoring Broken Pages
It is never good to have broken links; these pages have backlinks, but they point to be nothing. You can find the broken links, URLs with backlinks in Site Explore. Just add a plugin to your Domain, go to Best by Links reports, and add the “404 not found filter”; you will get the referring domain report.
12. Ensure Your Sitemap Doesn’t Have Any Issues
A sitemap list is a page you want search engines to index, so it is important to list down the things that shouldn’t be found, like redirecting, dead pages, non-canonical, or something that sends wrong signals to Google. You can monitor sitemap issues using Google Search Console and Clicking “Sitemaps”.
13. Ensure Your On-page Conforms to the Best SEO
Every indexable site page should have a title tag, meta description and H1, H2, and H3…. tags. These basic elements help Google to understand your website content and help you to rank and get more clicks. If you want to know more about On-page Optimization, refer this blog.
14. Find the Declining Content Hurdle in Your Ranking
You need to understand that ranking doesn’t last forever. As soon as the content becomes outdated in the search traffic, will the updates and changes in the guideline of Google, you will often see the Drop Off, so you need to check it; here is an easy way to find the reason for declining content in the Google search console.
- Go to Google search results reports.
- Set a date filter.
- Compare the result of the last 6 months with the previous period.
- Click the Page tab.
- Sort the table by Click Difference from low to high.
15. Find Out the Competitor’s Ranking Keywords.
The content gap occurs when your competitor’s website ranks for the keyword you don’t, and manually identifying those keywords takes a lot of time. So you can use different keyword research tools to get that keyword. You’ll see all the keywords your competitor’s domain rank for.
Benefits of a Comprehensive Site-wide SEO Audit
- Enable you to stay ahead of the competition.
- Improve your audience user experience.
- Help you to identify valuable SEO opportunities that can maximize your ROI.
- It allows you to refine your SEO strategy.
- Optimize conversion rates and website performance.
