SEO | 5 minute read
A step-by-step guide on how to perform an SEO audit
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An SEO audit is a vital step in optimizing your website for better search engine rankings, organic traffic, and overall user experience. It helps you spot technical issues, improve content performance, and refine your overall strategy to attract the right audience. By identifying areas for improvement and addressing them systematically, an SEO audit ensures your website is performing at its best.
What is a SEO audit?
An SEO audit is an in-depth analysis of a website and its ranking in the SERPs. It allows you to identify where you can make improvements to enhance visibility and increase organic traffic. SEO audits evaluate site speed, content gaps, technical SEO issues, user experience, meta/title tags, and keyword opportunities. It also covers crawling and indexing issues, sitemaps, backlinks, duplicate content, keyword cannibalization, site architecture, compliance issues, and gives you the chance to do a competitor analysis.
Why is a SEO audit important?
An SEO audit is a crucial step in ensuring your website performs at its best in search engine rankings. It involves analyzing various aspects of your site, including technical structure, content quality, backlink profile, and user experience, to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. By making your website more visible to potential customers, you’re more likely to convert them into paying customers.
How to perform an SEO audit
Google has more than 200 different ranking factors. Figuring out where you’re going wrong can be tough. However, a comprehensive SEO site audit can uncover the cause and enable you to create an action plan to fix them. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to perform an SEO audit:
1. Crawlability
Your site’s crawlability determines how well search engine crawlers can browse your website. The easier it is to crawl, the quicker search engines will index your content and the more keywords you’ll rank for. You can check your site’s crawl stats using the Crawl Stats Report found on the “Settings” page in Google Search Console.
You’ll want to check for major spikes or drops in crawl requests, which could indicate an issue like a rogue robots.txt file. You can also use the grouped crawl data report to find issues like 404 and 500 errors.
2. Indexability
An indexation analysis helps you find which of your website pages the search engines are indexing. If the search engines aren’t indexing your pages, it means your pages won’t show up in search results and your ability to rank for certain keywords suffers.
You can track indexing using a tool like Google Search Console and view the ‘Index Coverage Report’. Indexing issues can occur when there are too many auto-generated URLs or when web pages have poor internal linking.
3. Sitemap
A sitemap is an XML file listing every page on your website. It helps search engine crawlers navigate your site and understand its structure and hierarchy. The good news is that most CMS and e-commerce platforms automatically generate an XML sitemap of your store. But you’ll still want to check it’s there and make sure it’s accurate. If you can’t find it, you’ll need to upload your sitemap to Google Search Console.
4. HTTPS
HTTPS is a security protocol that encrypts communication between a website and a user’s web browser, protecting sensitive information like passwords and credit card numbers. If you don’t have HTTPS, get an SSL certificate and install it on your server.
5. Core Web Vitals
A slow page can drag down the rest of your website and impact your ranking in search engines. Core Web Vitals are a set of performance metrics that Google uses to measure the speed and user experience of your website.
Checking your store’s Core Web Vitals is easy. Just head over to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and enter your domain. You’ll receive a color-coded assessment and a pass or fail. You can also see how your performance compares between mobile and desktops. Scroll down further, and Google provides tips for improving your site’s performance.
6. Mobile friendliness
If you want to rank well on search engines, you need a mobile-friendly website. Google predominantly uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking. If your mobile website is slow, unresponsive, and unoptimized, then you’re not going to rank.
The good news is that your site’s mobile-friendliness can be easily checked during your e-commerce SEO audit using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Keep your content, images, and coding lightweight to speed up loading times and test your site on different devices.
7. Broken links
Broken links can happen for a number of reasons, but it’s usually because the page that the link is pointing to gets moved or deleted. These broken links can provide a poor user experience when visitors don’t find the content they’re looking for. That can lead to dissatisfied customers, higher bounce rates, and lower conversions. Once you have identified all broken links, either redirect or update the link.
8. Internal links
An internal link is a hyperlink connecting two pages on the same website. Internal linking is important for two main reasons: It helps search engines understand your website structure and crawl your site more effectively and it can help increase the ranking of individual pages by spreading link equity (or ‘link juice’) around your site. As part of your SEO audit, be sure to check:
- All internal links are working correctly
- Your links are relevant to the page they’re on
- Use keyword-rich anchor text for your internal links
9. Backlinks
Every website needs quality backlinks from relevant websites. They are one of the most important ranking factors, and getting more backlinks can send your rankings soaring. If you think you have a low-quality link profile (or barely any links at all) you can analyze your existing backlinks, identify toxic links, and disavow harmful ones that could be hurting your rankings and connect with bloggers, journalists, and industry influencers to share your content, insights, or press releases.
10. Product pages
If you want your store to rank higher and get more organic traffic, then you must optimize your product pages for search engines and users. Start this part of the audit process by checking to see whether your product pages have lost or gained ranks. These pages are in a good spot to move up with some tweaks. Focus on optimizing these pages first, as small improvements could move them to the top positions.
11. Category pages
Category pages don’t often get the same level of attention as product pages, but they are incredibly important for helping search engine crawlers understand your site’s hierarchy. That’s why we recommend evaluating the structure of your category pages. Link strategically to and from category pages to strengthen your site’s structure and write titles and meta descriptions that accurately describe the products within the category.
12. Duplicated content
There are plenty of misunderstandings around duplicate content, so let’s clear one thing up: Google doesn’t ‘punish’ duplicates. However, if you’ve got an e-commerce store, you probably have multiple listings that are the same, like item descriptions or user guides. In this case, search engines won’t always know which page to index, and may index the wrong one.
Use ScreamingFrog to check for duplicate content. To fix duplicates, you can add canonical tags to indicate which page you want search engines to index.
13. Meta descriptions
Analyzing and optimizing title tags and meta descriptions are fundamental to any SEO audit. To increase click-through rates, your meta descriptions must be clear, concise, and relevant to what users are searching for. Title tags should also be accurate and descriptive.
You can find the page titles and meta descriptions for every page on your site in one go by running a Screaming Frog site audit.
14. Images
Search engines use alt text to understand what an image is about and if it’s relevant to the user’s query. If an image doesn’t have alt text, or if the alt text is not descriptive enough, it can hurt your website’s ranking and visibility. You can check the alt text of an image in Chrome by right-clicking on an image and selecting “Inspect”. If it is not there, or if it is not descriptive, then edit the code to add or improve it.
How often should you perform a SEO audit?
For best results, conduct a full SEO audit at least once a year. However, smaller audits should be done quarterly or whenever major changes are made to your website. To optimize your online results, you should do an audit regularly, say a couple of times a year, or quarterly. You’ll also want to perform an SEO audit when you’ve built a new website or after a website migration. This will help you spot SEO challenges early so you can take the appropriate action.
What's next?
An SEO audit is essential for maintaining and improving your website’s performance. By systematically analyzing technical, on-page, and off-page factors, you can identify issues, implement solutions, and stay ahead of the competition. SEO is an ongoing process, and the insights gained from regular audits will ensure your site continues to deliver optimal results for both search engines and users. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you improve your search strategy.
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