What is SEO audit? Why it’s important for a Website?

Most of the people from the field of Digital Marketing are familiar with the terms of “SEO Audit”, but maybe they don’t have the proper and brief ideas about this technique. For better ranking in the SERP, website analysis is very much important to know the performance and user thought for the website. Without collecting the data, and not having enough idea on website engagement, ranking and performance will be affected and will not get satisfactory and quick results. In this article readers will get to know the SEO audit for a website and why it is important for the website.

What is SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a technique or process to analyze the website data. The data is very helpful to make the proper planning for the SEO to increase the performance graph of the website.
SEO Audit acts like a doctor for human beings. A doctor checks up the human beings if they are facing health problems and prescribes the medicine to maintain a healthy lifestyle. This is the same for websites, but the approach has other great impacts too. Website analytics helps you to know the weakness, strong point, engagement, loading time, page view, and other informatic things. This audited data is very much important to the improvement of the site.
SEO Audit is to understand the current state of the website and this will reflect the future performance in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Types of SEO Audit:

SEO Audit has different types and approaches. It varies with the websites. Here some different types of audit techniques have been discussed briefly.

On-Page Audit: On-Page SEO audit is the most important part of all. This type includes content and Keyword Optimization of each web page. Writing relevant content with proper keywords is very much important for ranking in the SERP. Before choosing a topic or content, analyzing the On-Page site helps to understand the engagement of website viewers and which is the next content should select to engage the most users. Thereafter comes Keyword Optimization for increasing the chance of high ranking.
Competitor’s Website Audit: Great analyzing technique to compare with the competitor’s website and get an idea of where to change the website to get a better rank in SERP. This technique includes competitor’s content, images, the structure of the web design. Analyzing competitors’ data helps to understand the major issues of the website as well as very small mistakes which are playing a critical role in ranking.
Technical Audit: Technical Audit makes more stable the website and increases the chances of rank high in SERP. Search Engine prefers technically perfect websites to serve the audiences. This includes Indexing, mobile-friendliness, Loading speed, site architecture, sitemap creating and submission, crawlability, internal security. This analysis improves user experience and increases the traffic to the website.
Off-Page Audit: This type is a backlink Audit. This will help to know the quality backlink and where the traffics are generated the most to the website. This type helps to know the high quality and low quality backlinking, spam index, and other sites where the website link is used for references. This type gives a great idea of how to get more traffic and quality backlinks to grow the reputation of the website.
Social Media Audit: Social Media posts have the great impact to generate the traffic and it will convert to lead sometimes because of direct interaction to the user and their activities. Social Media Audit is important to analyze which post, the image can engage the more users helps to identify the user attribute. When running a campaign through social media this attribute helps to increase the targeted conversion at a low cost.
Site Health Audit: This is important to prevent a decrease in the ranking of the website or SEO point. Ranking of website and SEO points occasionally decreases. This audit approach helps to find the site error, that is Title tag, slug, rich snippet, unorganized H1, H2 tag, and bad keyword optimization, and other web pages issues. Restoring the previous position can be very much helpful by using a site health audit.

Key Factors of SEO Audit:

SEO Audit makes a great impact on website ranking. Several key factors are present to make this technique so important. Below are key factors that will be discussed with a brief description to easily understand.

Title tag and Meta Description: Keep the title tag relevant to the blog or web page content so the audience can understand it to see the title in SERP. The meta description is one of the important factors. Keep Meta Description small and unique with relevance, so the audience can understand what is inside the web page and how much relevant to their queries. Analyze the title and meta description before publishing the content.
Header Tag, Content, and Keyword Optimization: Header Tag (H1, H2, H3) makes a great impact on SEO. The header Tag should have a proper key phrase and it should be relevant to the content. Before writing content or blog, first, analyze the topic and search queries about it with keyword optimization. Thereafter choose a keyword with volume and competition analysis.
Indexing and Sitemap submission: Without an index in the search engine, the website is never visible to the audience or SERP. It is important to check if every web page is indexed properly or not. Sitemap creation and submitting it to the webmaster is a very great idea for manual indexing. After submitting a sitemap, the webmaster will provide the report of the website and that report helps and identify the issues of the website structure. It includes the mobile version of the website, page error, search queries, traffic index.
Website load speed and Image Optimization: The loading time of a website is important for the engaging audience. If the loading time increases, audience engagement decreases. Analyzing the loading time is important and it includes image optimization, graphical representation, and other parts. Image size compression is one of the techniques to reduce the web page loading time. Also using relevant ALT Text is important while uploading the image to the website, This will increase the visibility in search engines.
URL Structure: A descriptive and short URL is great for the audience that they will get a brief understanding of the web page or website. Canonicalization (rel=” canonical”) is important for the e-commerce website.
Contact and Social Media Connection: Use proper contact that includes contact person, phone no., business mail, Address, and also a brief description of company core members. This will help to increase rank in local SEO. Google my business has a great impact on it. Social Media connection is great for connecting more users directly. Update of the product or company description, blog, visibility very much reflects in social media.

Tools to use for SEO Audit:

SEO Audit requires an Auditing tool to analyze the website and give the report on it. Varieties of Auditing tools are available in the market. That’s paid and non-paid. Readers will get to know paid and non-paid SEO Audit tools below.

Google Search Console: It is a free tool for analyzing the website. For initial use, It is very much effective. This tool is Google webmaster. A website sitemap is submitted here and it tells google bot to crawl the website and index it. This tool provides Website traffic reports, site error, Page error, mobile-friendliness, search queries. For initial use, it is the best for SEO Audit.
Google Analytics: A best free tool for analyzing the website. This tool provides almost everything that a website needs initially for better performance free. It includes website traffic reports with time, Visitor’s demographic, system (desktop, mobile), OS (android, IOS), Social Media traffic, Page views, and engagement. This Auditing tool provides a wide range of ideas about the performance of the website.
WooRank: One of the great Auditing tools. It is a paid tool with 14 days free trial. This will provide a great analysis report of the website. It also analyzes social media engagement i.e like, share, comment and it provides chrome extension for better use.
Ahrefs Site Audit: This is an important tool for SEO Audit. This tool can find the very small error of the website. If the website is facing SEO related problems, This tool can find the site’s health, loading time, and all the errors and give a perfect report which will help to know the issue of the website to fix that.
Alexa Site Audit: This is one of the popular SEO Audit tools. This will provide On-Page and Off-Page site reports and mention the error of the web page. The generated report is easy to read and helps to understand the site performance.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test: This audit tool is free and analyzes the mobile-friendliness of the website. This will mention the error of the responsive website and identify where to fix that error.

How to perform SEO Audit step by step:

The above discussion was for the idea of SEO Audit. Now an example is required for understanding how to perform SEO Audits step by step. So readers will get to know that below.

Selection of SEO Audit tool: this is the priority to select the site analyzing tool to act. It is not possible without any tool. Follow the above discussion to select an SEO audit tool. Initially, sitemap submission, indexing, crawling, and trafficking report Google Analytics and Google Search Console are the best and those tools are free to use. The paid version of other Audit tools is great to use and several options are available there.
Check Indexing and URL: Check the web page or website is indexing or not, write it on google’s site: domain name or site: URL. If the site is not showing then that is not indexed, the best way to use the webmaster tool (Google Search Console) to manually index. Before manual index, need to generate the sitemap and submit it to the webmaster.
Check the URL to see if it starts with HTTP/www or not. Because it is important to know the URL, that google is indexing.
Check Mobile-Friendliness: Use the Google Mobile-Friendliness test to know whether the website is mobile-friendly or not. If there is an error, the report will be generated.
Check Off-Page: Use the Site Audit tool to know the backlinking quality. Which backlink generates more traffic, Which site increases spam score, Backlink quality, Do-Follow and No-Follow link, Domain Authority, and Page Authority, Link style. This analysis helps to understand the performance of the Off-Page and where to improve.
Check On-Page: Check content and images, reduce image size for better loading time, check keyword optimization in the content, use keyword research tool for keyword volume, content plagiarism, Relevant title, Meta Description, Properly use a slug, Header Tag, Analyze competitor website. These analyzes help to build a great On-Page score.
Trafficking and Social Media Connection: Use an Audit tool to know the traffic’s demographic, page view, engagement time, System (PC, Mobile), OS. Google Analytics provides the report of social media traffic, organic, in-organic traffic. This report helps to understand where to focus and the performance of the current state. Also, social media data helps paid campaigns in social media.
Technical Part: Use robot.txt to block or unblock the web pages, Use the page loading tool to know the loading time of the website, Identify and fix the broken link. Check the structure of the website data, Update the sitemap. This analysis is great for the performance of the website in SERP.

Importance of SEO Audit:

SEO Audit makes a great impact on the performance of the website in SERP. Site analysis helps to know the idea of the current state of the website, the performance in the SERP, Ranking factor. This data helps to make the roadmap for the SEO strategies. Below readers will get to know what SEO Audit is required for the website:

Competitive Digital Marketing: Nowadays a business without a digital presence cannot increase its business growth. SEO, SMO, and other digital marketing techniques help to grow business in the online platform. SEO Audit helps to identify the error, mistake, performance of the website in the SERP so there is a chance to fix those and move forward.
Online Presence: Site analysis helps to make your online presence great. This will help to identify the performance of online presence and where to make a change to perform well to make online presence great.
Local SEO: Local SEO helps to rank high locally and make visible for the local audience. Site Analyze can identify the demographic engagement that includes local or foreign. So easily understand the website performance on local SEO.
Paid Campaign: SEO Audit helps to get the traffic data that is demographic, system, OS, and social media traffic. These data help to identify the user attribute when running a paid campaign in social media and this will help a cost-effective campaign.

Only doing SEO is incomplete without an SEO Audit. Every work or project needs analysis to know the performance graph. Without Analysis errors, the mistake cannot be identified and those errors affect the entire project. So the above discussion on SEO Audit is very simple and understandable for every reader. Every point has been discussed briefly and readers will get to know all the queries about the analysis of their website.