The world of SEO is always changing and this means that specific strategies no longer work and there are always new ones. As a result, it is extremely important that you do an SEO audit on all of your sites, on a regular basis. This will ensure that they are properly optimized for the current search engine landscape.
Also, by regularly auditing your sites, you will ensure they remain healthy and keep on getting organic traffic.
So, with that said, we’ll now get started on how to do a site audit.
The first thing you should do is a site crawl and it should take a couple of minutes for the crawl to finish. There are many tools that you can use for this such as Screaming Frog, Semrush, Ahrefs, DeepCrawl, etc.
These crawlers will crawl through your entire site and find problems such as page title issues, bad keywords, broken links, duplicate content, images that haven’t been compressed, bad redirects and much more. Once you have identified all of the issues, then you can start working on them.
After they’ve all been fixed, you can do the crawl again to make sure there aren’t any other issues you may have missed.
Next, you will need to check your on-page SEO.
You should look at all the pages and posts on your site and check all of the URLs, page titles and headers. This is done to check for any duplications which may cause keyword cannibalization.
If you notice that you have more than one page dedicated to a specific topic or keyword, then you should combine the information into one page and delete the other one.
Of course, you should delete the one that is not ranking or is ranking lower. Also, make sure you remember to put a 301 redirect in place so that anyone visiting the old URL will get automatically forwarded to the new one.
Additionally, you should take some time to go through your entire keyword blueprint and ensure that your pages are ranking for their correct keywords. You should also check to see if there are any keywords that you’re ranking for that you didn’t specify in your keyword blueprint. This can be easily done on Ahrefs or Semrush where you simply enter the page URL and look for the organic keywords it is ranking for. You may find lots of long-tail keywords that you’re on the second or third page for that you didn’t optimize the page for. As a result, you can easily improve your rankings by including those keywords on your page and building a few links with those keyword specific anchors. This will help you to get more organic traffic with relatively little work.
Another important aspect of any SEO audit is checking the speed of the site and its overall uptime. There are many site monitoring tools you can use for this.
In particular, when looking at site speed, you should strive to speed up the site as much as possible. This is necessary since site speed is a Google ranking factor and the faster your site is, the higher Google will rank it. Also, website users are much smarter than they were before and if your site is slow, they will simply go back and click on another website. This will lead to lower traffic numbers, conversion rates, and sales.
Next, you will need to do an audit on your backlinks. This is extremely important since you will not only get the backlinks that you build yourself but ones that were gained organically.
Also, you will probably get a lot of spam or even malicious backlinks and you need to identify these and disavow them. These can easily be identified if they are on “bad” sites, foreign language sites or where you see over-optimized anchor texts done through a negative SEO link building campaign.
Once you have disavowed the bad backlinks, you should look carefully at the ratio of your own backlinks. If there are too many target anchors or too many strong sites, you should aim to create more pillow links to ensure your backlink profile remains healthy and natural looking.
To wrap things up, we have just covered how you can perform an SEO site audit. It is best to schedule a site audit at least once every 3 months so that you can continuously maintain the health of your site and ensure that you remain in Google’s good graces.
