In today’s digital age, businesses of all sizes are establishing a stronger online presence. This shift has intensified competition for top ranking positions on Google’s search results. The importance of ranking first on Google shouldn’t be overlooked – consider your own search behaviour. You would likely click on the first relevant result you see. To rank first and maintain this position on Google your website needs to be optimised. An SEO audit service can provide important insights that can enhance your site’s search engine performance and visibility.
What is a SEO audit? And why are they important for businesses?
A SEO audit is a systematic process that evaluates the performance of a website, and other platforms, such as social media and provides insights concerning areas for improvement. A website SEO audit examines factors that affects crawlability, ranking and potential conversions. Regular SEO audits for a website are crucial for maintaining and improving search engine performance in today’s competitive digital space.
What are the different types of SEO audits?
SEO audits come in various forms, with website SEO audits being just one type. Another type is a competitor SEO audit, which helps you benchmark your site against high-performing competitors targeting similar keywords. This process helps in identifying areas for improvement in your SEO strategy.
A social media SEO audit is important for businesses who are looking to maximise their online presence and user engagement. During a social media SEO audit, the social platform, content and user interactions are investigated to identify content gaps, opportunities to optimise posts and ensure that the profiles are optimised to help drive organic traffic to posts. When done right, it can improve brand awareness, increase the number of followers, drive organic traffic and improve conversions e.g. to affiliate links.
In this blog, we’ll specifically be focusing on how to carry out a SEO website audit.
What makes up a website SEO audit?
A SEO audit for a website has three main components that are investigated: on-page, off-page and technical. The common goal between these is to help improve rankings and increase conversions.
On-page SEO audits
As the name suggests on-page SEO refers to optimisation of elements that are directly on the page e.g. content, headlines, headers, image optimisation, structured data and more.
Content SEO audits
A content-focused SEO audit is a crucial component of a comprehensive SEO website audit. The resulting audit report provides valuable insights into various aspects of your site’s content strategy. When performing a SEO web audit, a content analysis will reveal keyword gaps and opportunities that businesses should target to improve their search performance. It can also indicate whether existing pages need optimisation to enhance rankings and organic traffic.
Furthermore, a thorough SEO audit for website content can uncover missed opportunities for incorporating E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content. These elements can significantly boost a site’s authority, potentially improving rankings in search results. By conducting regular SEO audits, businesses can ensure their websites remain competitive and aligned with current search engine optimisation best practices.
Internal linking SEO audit
A key aspect of what is a SEO audit involves analysing site structure, which is crucial for both search engines and users. An SEO audit report typically reveals how pages interconnect, focusing on topic clusters (main service pages) and pillar content (supporting materials like guides and reviews). A well-structured site ensures that topic clusters and pillar content are interlinked using optimised anchor text. However, these links must provide value, and should not be added into content when they serve no purpose. Conducting regular SEO site audits helps businesses optimise site structure, enhancing discoverability and potentially improve rankings.
Off-page SEO audits
A comprehensive SEO audit that examines off-page SEO examines aspects like link building that aren’t directly visible on the site, but they significantly impact search rankings and organic traffic.
Link building
Link building refers to a SEO technique that involves an external site linking back to your website. The number of links to a site affects its domain authority (DA). Although, it’s not as simple as the more links you have the higher the DA. In fact, if sites have brought links or have links to non-secure sites. Search engines like Google use domain authority to establish whether your site is trustworthy, and trustworthy sites are more likely to rank than sites with poor DA scores.
With an SEO audit report, you can identify yours and your competitors DA score, from this a link building strategy can be concluded. And you can identify toxic links, these harm your authority score and so should be eliminated once the SEO audit report identifies them.
Technical SEO audits
The final aspect is technical SEO, this aims to improve rankings by making the site more user friendly, e.g. by improving page speed, ensuring that the site is secure and making sure that the site is optimised with desktop and mobile devices in mind.
Crawlability
A technical SEO audit report should be carried out to identify whether a website is crawlable. Crawlability refers to search engine’s ability to be able to discover and crawl the content. Having a sitemap and indexing it on Google Search Console can help you identify if and what pages are indexed, or you can use tools such as Screaming frog. From an SEO audit report if you see that a page is non-indexable, this means it will not rank as it’s not accessible. The SEO audit will usually tell you what the reason is e.g. if it’s blocked by robots.txt. From here, you can adapt your SEO strategy to overcome these issues.
User experience
An SEO audit into user experience can be used to identify how you can improve user experience, with this it means that users are more likely to stay and interact on your site not only improving your sites engagement time but also more likely to increase the number of leads/ enquiries that you receive that turn into conversions. Aspects of user experience that can be evaluated during an SEO audit for a website includes page speed, whether your website is mobile and desktop friendly and whether your site is secure.
Summary
This blog post outlines what a SEO audit is and why it’s crucial for businesses in this digital age. SEO audits have many aspects of SEO optimisation that they evaluate, which sometimes can be tricky which is why it’s sometimes better to trust SEO experts who can guide you to help improve your websites performance. Discover more about the benefits and the cost of an SEO Audit when conducted by a specialised agency.
