A website’s performance and visibility can make or break its success. Enter the powerful tool of website SEO audits. These audits, whether conducted by SEO agencies or the website owners themselves, play a crucial role in evaluating a website’s health and identifying areas for improvement. By thoroughly reviewing a website’s performance in search engines, crawl budget, indexing rate, and more, an SEO audit unveils valuable insights that help create effective strategies for enhancement. From on-page optimization to keyword research, website SEO audits provide a comprehensive analysis of a site’s strengths and weaknesses.
In this article, we delve into the significance of SEO audits, exploring their benefits and highlighting various types of audits, from the blog and technical SEO audits to local, enterprise, e-commerce, and Shopify SEO audits. So, fasten your seatbelts as we embark on a journey to unlock the true potential of your website through the power of an in-depth SEO audit.
When do You Need Them?
You never know what you might find. Therefore, SEO Audits should be performed before any changes are made to your website. Here are some common scenarios when you should perform an audit:
- After launching your website or before making any major changes (such as adding content or making structural changes)
- After implementing new features on your sites, such as e-commerce, blog posts, or widgets
- When starting an SEO campaign with an agency or after hiring someone new to manage your accounts
Website SEO Audit Benefits
Website SEO audits are important for several reasons.
They can help you determine where your website needs the most work, so you can focus on those areas. For example, if you find that your site isn’t indexing properly or that it’s not mobile-friendly, then you can use an SEO audit tool along with manual methods to find out what needs to be done.
They can also help with keyword research and determining which keywords to target. If your site isn’t ranking well for certain terms, then you’ll want to take note of that and see how you can improve your rankings.
A blog SEO audit and a website SEO audit are different from one another. A blog SEO audit is usually completed by looking at individual posts, while a website SEO audit is completed by looking at all of the pages on your website.
Bonus What is an SEO Audit
According to Neil Patel
“An SEO audit is a comprehensive analysis of a website and its search engine ranking (SERPs), including where improvements can be made.”
SEO audits help you leverage multiple opportunities like:
- site speed
- content gaps
- technical SEO issues that reduce traffic
- where competitors are outranking you
- ways to improve UX
Technical SEO Audit
Technical SEO is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization and the foundation for everything that follows. It’s also something that many businesses can overlook, but it shouldn’t be.
Technical SEO Audit: What Is It?
A technical SEO audit reviews your website’s code, links, and structure to ensure that it’s optimized for search engines. In other words, it’s a way to ensure everything on your site works as intended and gives you the best possible chance at ranking well in search results.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
Technical SEO is essential to any successful SEO strategy because it ensures that search engines can easily crawl your pages and index them accurately. Without this step, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to rank well in Google (or Bing).
If a page isn’t optimized properly, even with great content and links, it won’t rank as well as it could because search engines won’t be able to access all its content.
Corey Patterson, Editor for MarTech and Search Engine Land, reveals four essential technical tasks that help boost organic visibility:
- Optimizing your website’s architecture.
Architecture = your foundational stage
- Ensure your pages are crawlable.
- Check which pages allow indexing.
- Improve page experience.
These tips were shared by ShacharRadinShomrat, CMO of Deepcrawl.
Bonus Blog SEO Audit – Blog Checklist
The main goal of a blog SEO audit is to find out how well your blog is currently performing. It’s a good way to see which areas need improvement and how much work you can expect before seeing results.
Here are some key points to consider when conducting a blog SEO audit:
Keywords:
Check which keywords you’re using in the title tag, meta description, and body text of each post. Are they relevant? Do they accurately describe the content? If not, you may want to change them. Also, be sure you’re using one primary keyword and a few other secondary key terms per post.
On-Page Optimization:
Ensure every blog post features engaging headlines, relevant visuals, and interactive elements such as a table of contents and social sharing buttons.
Internal Links:
Do your internal links point to relevant pages that are already ranking well for their target keyword(s)? Are there any broken or outdated links that should be fixed? If so, make sure that you update these as soon as possible!
According to Ben Rea at Nomadicsoftware.com:
“Adding fresh content regularly to your blog is great and should always be in your wheelhouse. But not everyone realizes SEO success may be right in front of them already.
If you have preexisting blog content on your site, it’s a great idea to look at the data for those articles and assess how they could be improved or repurposed.
Often times you’ll find opportunities to gain new traffic to your site or improve rankings.
This checklist will help you review and audit your work to ensure it’s up to par.
Added to this list is a set of questions presented by Google themselves that will give you insight into how their algorithm works and what they’re looking for in quality content.”
Local SEO Audit
A local SEO audit assesses how your web page ranks in search engine results and how you can improve its ranking to generate more revenue and conversions. The audit diagnoses your website’s strengths and weaknesses, so you can make effective adjustments to attract more visitors.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO (also known as geo-targeting) is a specific type of search engine optimization that helps businesses rank higher in local search results. Local SEO campaigns are designed to target relevant keywords, including the names of nearby cities, towns, or counties.
Bonus Why Should I Invest in a Local SEO Audit?
A local SEO audit can help improve your visibility online by better positioning you for organic searches conducted by prospective customers searching for goods and services in your area. By identifying areas where there are gaps in your current marketing strategy, you’ll be able to make changes that will result in increased traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.
Enterprise SEO Audit
An SEO audit on a big company’s website is usually pretty comprehensive. These sites have hundreds or thousands of pages and rank well for many keywords across multiple countries or cities.
Enterprise SEO is more complicated than regular SEO. It comes with specific challenges typical of large businesses and sites.
Here are some of the challenges:
- Crawling and Indexing.
- Integration among Team Members.
- Too many Locations, Subdomains, or Websites.
- No Quick Fixes.
- Traditional Methods of Fixing Issues may not Work.
- Delay in Approvals.
An enterprise SEO audit looks at all aspects of a website’s performance.
This includes:
- Site architecture
- Content creation
- Technical implementation
- On-page AND off-page factors
Ecommerce SEO Audit
An e-commerce SEO audit is a process of analyzing your e-commerce site’s on-page and off-page SEO. This audit aims to determine the present state of your e-commerce site, optimize it for better performance and increase sales.
Having an e-commerce SEO audit done by a professional can help you identify the areas you need to focus on to achieve better results from your online store. The audit will also provide recommendations on how to improve the site’s performance through various search engine optimization techniques.
Paul Klebanov, the Marketing Educator at SEMrush, wrote a 15-point e-commerce SEO checklist to help you dissect your SEO strategy and identify the opportunities to impact organic traffic significantly;
You should consider these points when doing an SEO audit for an e-commerce site; Paul asks 15 key questions and delves into more details in his full-blown post:
- Did you set up tracking and measurement tools?
- Have you selected keywords?
- Does each page have a unique title?
- Does each page have a unique meta description?
- Are you blocking unnecessary pages from being crawled?
- Do your subpages contain breadcrumb navigation?
- Does your site have enough content?
- How are you handling out-of-stock product pages?
- Are you creating content for informational keywords?
- Do your URLs contain relevant keywords?
- Do you have reviews on product pages?
- How speedy is your site?
- Is your site mobile-friendly?
- How are customers using your internal site search?
- Have you added canonical tags for filtered pageviews?
Shopify SEO Audit
You should consider conducting an SEO audit for your Shopify store or hire a specialist if you answered ‘yes’ to most of the following questions:
- Online sales have been lower than normal lately, right?
- Is your store suffering from low conversion rates?
- Are you sick & tired of customers abandoning carts and checkout?
- Are you losing sales due to slower site load speed?
- Do you want to increase your average order value?
Yuliya Nastić, e-commerce Specialist at Mementia, writes:
“Shopify website audit is a process that helps to analyze the entire Shopify ecosystem in order to determine what kind of malfunctions the platform has and how to improve them to get the best performance and results.”
Here’s a quick Shopify website SEO audit checklist
(for detailed how-to tips, we recommend you read Yuliya’s entire article)
- Detect any Shopify SEO issues.
- Check duplicate content.
- Check Shopify page speed.
- Detect Shopify malware.
- Check Shopify security certificate.
- Check all backlinks.
- Assess overall website usability.
Best SEO Audit Tools
What is the Best Tool for Conducting SEO Audits?
According to Jamil Ali Ahmed, Manager SEO & Organic Growth@Cloudways, there are 20+ SEO audit tools for effective website analysis, and Ahrefs is the first one featured in his post;
“Ahrefs Site Audit is like a mini lab to examine your site’s health. You will quickly find and fix whatever there is to harm your website’s rankings (broken links, redirects, images or entire CSS and JavaScript files). The system can recognize 110+ technical issues, from critical errors to less-pressing matters.
When you see a totally unclear issue, there’s no need to Google it. You can check Ahrefs’ dashboard to understand what’s wrong and how to make it right. Quite convenient!
What also makes Site Audit convenient is that there’s no clunky software to install; this is a cloud-based tool.
It all depends on your website size, but in total website, scanning goes quite fast. Since Ahrefs can crawl JavaScript pages besides HTML, no page will remain unchecked, and you’ll get a full picture of your site’s health.”
Closing Thoughts
In the ever-evolving world of the internet, website SEO audits stand tall as an essential practice for optimizing and maximizing a website’s potential. By undertaking these audits before making any significant changes, such as launching a new website, implementing new features, or initiating an SEO campaign, you set the stage for success by ensuring a solid foundation.
SEO audits not only highlight areas that require attention and improvement but also guide you toward effective strategies to boost your website’s rankings and user experience. Whether you’re a blogger, an e-commerce entrepreneur, a local business owner, or a large enterprise, the specific types of SEO audits tailored to your needs provide invaluable insights and recommendations for enhancing your online presence and driving organic traffic. So, embrace the power of website SEO audits and unlock the doors to your website’s success.
Remember, the journey to digital triumph begins with a comprehensive SEO audit.
Ready to unlock the full potential of your website? Contact Flying V Group today and let our expert team conduct a comprehensive SEO audit tailored to your specific needs. Maximize your online visibility, improve user experience, and boost your website’s rankings. Don’t miss out on valuable opportunities for growth. Take the first step towards digital success and schedule your SEO audit with Flying V Group now!
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