What is an SEO Audit ? and How it Helps Improve Rankings

SEO Audit – An Overview 

An SEO audit is nothing but the timely inspection on your website, to ensure its functioning and performance. A comprehensive evaluation is done to see how well the website is optimized for search engines like Google and others. When the audit is done, you can easily figure out what enhancements the website really needs, by finding out content voids, technical breaches, and optimization breakthroughs. 

Process Overview

SEO audit simply means a regular health check up on your website’s ability to perform well in search results. It involves analyzing both technical and content-related factors that leverage visibility, user experience, and search engine rankings.

The process begins by crawling the website to detect errors such as broken links, slow pages, or duplicate content. Checking indexability to ensure search engines can properly access and list important pages and working on reviews on-page elements like titles, headings, and meta descriptions for optimization, followed by an evaluation of content quality, keyword usage, and relevance.

An audit also evaluates off-page factors such as backlinks and domain authority, along with user experience aspects like site speed and mobile friendliness. For local businesses, it includes a local SEO review, focusing on Google Business Profile, NAP consistency, and customer reviews.

How SEO Audits Help Businesses: 

The real purpose of SEO audit is helping out the businesses by uncovering unseen issues that stop your websites from ranking well in search engines like Google.  It identifies problems like loading speed, linking problems, poor keyword optimization, and bad or weak banklinkings. In which as a result site visibility and user experience are affected. By addressing these issues, businesses can improve their search rankings, attract more traffic organically, and reach their target audience without depending on heavily paid advertisements. 

As a takeaway, an SEO audit ensures a website is technically sound, user-friendly, and optimized right, leading to higher visibility, credibility, and ultimately, more leads and sales.

Key Components of an SEO Audit: Technical Issues, Content Gaps, Backlinks: 

Technical SEO Audit:

Technical SEO focused on crawlability and indexability, site speed, web vitals, mobile friendliness, user responsiveness, HTTPS site security, canonical tags and URL structure
All these are done to ensure the website is technically sound, healthy and search-engine friendly.

On-Page & Off-Page SEO Audit: 

On page SEO audit focuses on titles, meta tags, meta descriptions, header tags, keyword density and placements, content strategies, readability and relevancy, internal linking structure and multimedia usage. While off-page SEO audit focuses on backlink profile, anchor text distribution, domain authority and brand mentions. Both of these SEO audits ensure improved page wise optimization for search engines and users, while enhancing your website’s credibility online. 

Content Audit: 

A good content is what drives good traffic and brings in leads. Content audit includes the process of evaluating the content relevancy, quality and performance on your website. By constantly working on the removal of thin / duplicate content, outdated underperforming pages etc… 

How to Conduct a Comprehensive SEO Audit:

Here’s a step by step guide on how to check your websites health by SEO audit; 

An SEO Audit includes several processes and they are as follows;

Website Crawling – the ultimate goal of crawling is to identify overall website health and technical problems, such as broken links, finding fake pages, missed meta tags and identifying redirecting issues ect… 

Note : Research by trustworthy sources have revealed that proper SEO audit has helped over 95% of sites overcome the redirection issues. 

Indexability and Accessibility – this process involves whether the search engines can identify and index your page. This move helps to ensure that important pages on the site are indexed and properly and crawlability is super enhanced. 

Assessing Technical SEO – this process includes identifying the technical components of your website. Evaluating page speed, mobile friendliness, HTTPS security verification. Just to ensure your website is speedy, secure and user friendly. 

On – Page SEO Review – this step helps find if each page on the site is well optimized for search engines with right keywords, along with the assessment of meta tags, descriptions, headers, content operations & appropriateness, right internal linking structure, and unique keywords are being targeted for each page. Likewise the other official research says that about 50.8% of the websites had missing, outdated, irrelevant or even empty meta tags and descriptions. 

Estimating Content Quality – this process ensures there is no, thin, outdated and duplicate content is present on the website, your content is well brought up to answer the users queries and ensure there is proper maintenance of keyword density, multimedia usage and unforced flow. 

Analyse Off-Page SEO – assessing domain authority, profile backlinking evaluation, bringing in high quality backlinks and removing dangerous / toxic ones. Comparing between competitor’s backlinking strategies. 

Local SEO Credibility – this process is mainly done for local businesses ensuring their Google Business Profile is properly built , local citations and NAP details are verified and consistent, pages are optimized with local and ‘near me’ keywords, reviews and ratings are correctly put. 

Ensuring User Experience – this process includes analysing the relationship between the users and your website and how well the interactions are being done, evaluating metrics on engagement such as; time on site, bounce rate, call to actions, speed of the site. 

Performance Tracking – one of the main purposes of SEO audit is analytics and performance tracking of traffic and user behaviour, performance dominant keywords and pages, and analyse click through rates and conversion degrees. 

SEO Audit Report and Remedies – the final and important step of SEO audit is creating a report on the findings and work on fixing them. Once the listing is done, suggesting the solutions is the next step. And prioritizing tasks based on their impact levels from high, medium and lower. 

Tools and Software Used for SEO Audits

SEO Audits can be easily done with the help of the following SEO tools and software, these professionals recommended tools and software are available both of no cost and paid versions; here’s the list;

1.Google Search Console 

GSC is an official free tool from Google itself. This tool shows how exactly Google sees your website. This baseline tool helps you understand problems that Google has with your website. 

2.Screaming Frog SEO Spider

This is a freemium tool, that users can use the base variant for free, and use the premium version to use more advanced features on the tool. This tool is great for technical audits especially for midsize to large sites, in cases where many pages are needed to be mapped. 

3.SEMrush

This paid tool comes as an all-in-one suite for SEO, along with a strong module especially developed for audits. And best for detecting crawlability issues, on-page SEO and site performance. With this tool you can cover multiple audit elements and many more features. 

4.Ahrefs 

This paid tool is well known for its backlinking database and advanced technical audit features, helps detect multiple issues like link issues, outdated or fake content etc… This tool is perfect if you are looking for a strong backlinking purpose and competitor analysis. 

5.Google PageSpeed Insights 

This tool is free, that audits page performance, mobile friendliness, general SEO elements and accessibility features. This tool reveals performance issues with the website that are overlooked often. 

Conducting an effective SEO audit is like a health check up you do to your website and find where it lags and work on the findings.  SEO Audit is the bedrock of a strong digital presence. With it, identifying what’s working and what’s not becomes easy and manageable, and your website can improve to achieve higher visibility, better user experience, and boosted traffic. An SEO audit gives you a clear roadmap to strengthen your site’s overall search performance. 

The real purpose of SEO audit is not about just finding the issues with the website, instead unveiling the full power and potential of your website. 

A fruitful SEO audit may sound long and feel like a lot. But , you don’t have to stress about it, when there is a capable SEO agency in Chennai – Webboombaa, around. 

With a magnificent experience of over 10 years in digital marketing, and the reason behind most businesses’ successful and unbeatable online presence, Webboombaa stands out as the top and best digital marketing agency in Chennai. 

If you are thinking about giving your website an SEO audit, our expert SEO professionals at Webboombaa are here with advanced techniques and proven strategies.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)