Are you investing time and money in SEO for your website, but not getting the results you expect?

After you’ve defined your SEO goals and completed a keyword study,

Here is today’s schedule:

  • SEO audit: definition
  • Why do an SEO audit?
  • Step 1: Resume your SEO goals
  • Step 2: Analyze Your Keyword Strategy
  • Step 3: Technical SEO audit
  • Step 4: Perform the SEO audit of your content (on-site)
  • Step 5: Analyze Your Offsite SEO
  • Step 6: Analyze Your User Experience (UX)

SEO Audit: Definition

An SEO audit is an inventory of the general SEO performance of your website. The objective of an SEO audit is to highlight the elements to be optimized to improve your visibility on search engines. SEO company in Pakistan  can also help you for a SEO audit. You can also take suggestions from them.

Why do an SEO Audit?

The efficiency of your website can be affected by many factors. Some are very visible, like your content or user experience, and others like your code or the indexing of your pages, are less so.

The SEO technical audit allows you to identify all of these elements and adjust them when they do not meet the performance, quality, or reliability criteria demanded by search engines.

In summary, the SEO audit allows you to identify the current strengths of your website and, above all, its areas for improvement. This assessment is also essential to organize your SEO strategy around the priority actions and strong potential.

Step 1: Resume Your SEO Goals

The first question to ask yourself during your SEO audit relates to your strategic objectives. As with any other acquisition channel for your web strategy, your SEO strategy must be based on clear, specific, attainable, and measurable goals over time. Otherwise, you’ll not be able to know whether your results are satisfactory or not.

Step 2: Analyze Your Keyword Strategy

This section is covered in depth in the second exercise of our challenge, the Keyword Study Guide.

In summary, if you are selling red running shoes, you will prefer to target “Nike red running shoes” even though this keyword is searched 30 times per month, rather than focusing “shoes,” examined thousands of times per month. You would have better odds of getting there the top positions, and the traffic you will capture will be highly qualified. This strategic thinking should be part of your SEO audit.

Step 3: Technical SEO Audit

This part is the most important. Here are the points you will need to cover during your SEO audit:

1. Start by crawling your website

Download and use Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) to extract content from your website.

Enter your website URL and press start:

You now have a full list of all your web pages as well as an inventory of their main characteristics, such as titles, subtitles, meta descriptions, URLs, or statuses (redirects, 404 pages).

You can then use the “HTML” filter and navigate through the different elements using the horizontal menu.

In this first step, you can already make sure that there are no 404 pages present on your website, an essential element for SEO.

2. Check the indexing of your pages and your robots.txt

If your website is not “accessible” to Google, it will not be able to rank in search results pages, and your web traffic will take a hit. During your SEO audit, you need to make sure that Google has access to all of your pages.

Next, search your file robots.txt. In the “index” menu in your Search Console, go to the ” Cover ” category

3. Check for the presence of a sitemap

To help Google index your site, you need to provide it with a sitemap.

Check its presence in your Search Console, in the Sitemaps section

This plan is automatically generated if you use the Yoast plugin. Otherwise, you can use XML Sitemap.

To check if it works well, also search “site: yourwebsite.ca” in Google and observe the result.

If you see many pages appear that match what your site contains, then there shouldn’t be a problem.

4. Check the architecture of your website

To be optimal for search engine crawlers as well as your users, your website should be built in a structured way. It is essential to check this point in your SEO audit.

For example, you can verify that your menus and different subcategories are organized hierarchically and logically, as in the illustration above.

5. Check the speed and mobile adaptability of your site

With the constant increase in the use of mobiles, loading speed, and mobile versatility are today essential criteria for Google’s natural referencing. These aspects of your website must imperatively be part of your SEO audit.

To analyze the loading speed of your website and its mobile adaptability, you can use these SEO audit tools:

  • Google’s PageSpeed ​​Insights
  • GTMetrix

Such methods include a snapshot of the loading speed of your pages according to the type of device and will offer you recommendations to improve it.

6. Check your log files

Analyzing your website’s log files allows you to obtain reliable and concrete data on how search engines index your site.

This file is located on your server. You can use the Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer to get more streamlined data for all existing search engines.

This will allow you to check that your site is “crawled” regularly and that there are no technical bugs preventing search engines from doing their indexing job properly.

Step 4: Perform the SEO Audit of Your Content (on-site)

This move will take time because you need to do it manually, but it is essential—the quality and optimization of your content act as a decisive differentiator for your SEO.

This step of your SEO audit will allow you to answer questions such as:

  • Do my titles respect the recommended length (≃65 char.)? Yes / No
  • Do my titles contain the main keyword of the page? Yes / No >
  • Do my titles contain a click -call element? Yes / No
  • Are my meta descriptions within the recommended length (≃155 char.)? Yes / No
  • Do my meta descriptions contain a primary and secondary keyword? Yes / No
  • Do all my pages have internal links? Yes / No
  • Is the length of my content aligned with that of the best content of my competitors? Yes / No

To perform a complete audit of your content, you can use our guide to SEO content auditing.

Step 5: Analyze Your Offsite SEO

This step consists of doing the SEO audit of your backlinks, or inbound links. The links from other points to your website websites are a determining factor for your natural referencing. They prove to Google that the content on your site is reliable and strengthens your domain authority. Domain authority represents the reputation of your website in the eyes of Google.

Step 6: Analyze Your User Experience (UX)

This step of your SEO audit allows you to understand if certain aspects of your UX affect the navigation of Internet users and, therefore, the performance of your website.