Business SEO

SEO Best Practices: 5 “Must Dos” for an SEO Audit

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With frequent Google algorithm changes and modifications in SEO best practices, it is important for website owners to periodically evaluate their site if adjustments need to be made. You need to make sure your website is properly optimized for search – otherwise you could be missing out on potential traffic. One way website owners can determine if their website is optimized for search is through an SEO audit.

What is an SEO audit?

The SEO audit gives you an overview of the current state of your website. It provides an insight into the negative and positive points of your website so that you can work on the former and maintain the latter.

By performing an audit, you will be able to properly analyze your website to strengthen it. The audit will help you identify the flaws that prevent your website from achieving success.

What are the benefits of an SEO audit?

With an SEO audit, you can get the following benefits:

1. Determine the weakness of your current SEO campaign

An SEO audit report will show you the strategies that are not performing well. This will help you uncover issues such as duplicate content, inappropriate meta descriptions or keywords, missing social media sharing buttons, or off-target keywords.

This component provides an overview of the quality of your referrals compared to your competitors.

From the audit report, you can also find that your website has slow speed and has poisonous inbound links. By uncovering these issues, you will be able to implement a successful SEO strategy.

 

2. Identify your competitors’ strengths.

In addition to your weaknesses, performing an SEO audit will help you discover the techniques your competitors are using well. For example, they may receive links from qualified and relevant websites. By discovering the strengths of your competitors, you will be able to improve the SEO performance of your own website.

 

3. Improve your SEO strategies

Once you have an idea of the weaknesses of your strategies, you can work on making the right adjustments to boost your SEO campaign. Some of the things you can do to improve SEO include using targeted keywords, removing duplicate content, increasing site speed, and adding social media buttons.

 

4. Increase your search engine ranking

When you have identified the areas that need to be worked on, the audit report will open up more opportunities to make your website attractive to search engines.

 

What to expect from an SEO audit

Impressed with the benefits of an SEO audit?
If you are considering performing an SEO audit on your website, you should be aware of the 8 components of a standard SEO audit report:
 
1.Competitive feedback analysis.
This component provides an overview of the quality of your referrals compared to your competitors.
 
2.Analysis of toxic relationships.

This helps to check for bad links to your website.

3. Keyword analysis for the content.

This is an estimate of how Google interprets your website based on its content.

4. Site speed analysis.

Your website speed is analyzed, as well as recommendations on how to improve it.

5.Analysis of duplicate content.

This component checks if there are multiple versions of your web page indexed by Google.

6. Content audit analysis.

It is an assessment of SEO components such as meta descriptions, meta keywords, title tags, SEO-friendly URLs and other website attributes.

7.Javascript analysis.

This is an estimate of whether your website content will continue to display when Javascript is disabled.

8. Analysis of the social sharing button.

This is an assessment of whether your website has social media sharing icons on your blogs and other website pages.

 

Strategies to create from an SEO audit

As a website owner, you should undertake the following SEO techniques at least once a year:

1. Check the SEO of the page

You can easily change your website’s SEO plan by making changes in place. It will take time to see SEO results, but it will only take a few hours to make changes to the site.

2. Check if your site can be indexed by search engines

What good will your SEO do if it’s not searchable to begin with? Make sure you resolve any issues that prevent search engine bots from indexing your website properly. Check for incorrectly installed codes or hacked content.

3. Check your link profile and compare it to your competitors

When you’re done optimizing a page, the next step is to analyze your website’s backlink profile. The number and quality of backlinks pointing to your website can have a huge impact on your site’s search engine results.

4. Look for broken links or dead pages

Your website may contain broken outbound links or dead pages. These bad links can hinder your site’s SEO, so be sure to identify and resolve any issues. If you use a content management system or e-commerce platform, there are many tools that can automatically check these links. For example, some WordPress plugins can notify you about broken links. Meanwhile, some online applications may run a free sitelink checker to help you identify and resolve any link issues.

5. Test your website speed

The average speed and page load time of your website can affect the amount of traffic on it. Visitors generally don’t spend much time on a website that loads pages slowly.

Site speed is an important ranking factor, so you should prioritize your website speed if you want to increase traffic and search engine rankings.

Let’s summarize

Having your website SEO audited can go a long way in improving overall performance. With fierce competition online, you need to make sure your website is generating enough traffic and ranking where you want it to. Otherwise, all your efforts will be in vain.

You can always take the help of an SEO agency to make your website SEO friendly and attractive to your potential customers. If you haven’t yet considered an audit report for your website, now is the perfect time to include it in your SEO strategy.