How To Perform A complete SEO Audit For Your Clients?

Are you an aspiring SEO professional? Do you want to work in the world of digital marketing? If yes, then among the top technical SEO facts for beginners, you must pay special attention to SEO audits—the first step in the journey of optimizations. Once you sign a new client or work in-house at a new company, you must first conduct an in-depth SEO audit.

An SEO audit is a roadmap that will guide you to move forward to achieve your goals. The primary question is how to proceed with conducting thorough and complete SEO audits. With RankJacker to your rescue, you have nothing to worry about. Get higher rankings, more traffic, and quicker conversions by knowing all about conducting SEO audits now.

What Is An SEO Audit?

Before learning how to conduct a website audit, let us first clear the basics. If you are wondering what is an SEO audit, then this is for you. An SEO audit is a process of reviewing your online assets to ensure that your website is performing well. This process of evaluating whether your site is optimized for search engines is crucial as it identifies errors that might be preventing your website from ranking well.

A complete SEO audit helps you know about:

• Strengths and successes
• Mistakes that you must fix
• What is not working for your website
• Areas that need improvement

Unlike the many SEO myths, an effective website audit is based on hard data about traffic, backlink profile, technicalities, and so on of your website. In short, an SEO audit is like a health check of a website which is essential for good digital health.

10-Step SEO Audit Checklist

There are numerous facets to an SEO audit—so indeed, it can become overwhelming pretty fast, especially for beginners. Hence, we have tried our best to simplify the site audit process. Have a look at the various steps of the Ultimate SEO Audit Checklist with RankJacker below.

Step 1: Check For Link Building Opportunities

Link building is one of the most crucial steps in improving website authority. There are many SEO link-building strategies. An SEO audit is incomplete without working on building site-specific internal and external links.

How To Build Internal Links

Internal links help in passing equity within your website pages and hence play a significant role in building hierarchies within your site. The most simple way of building internal links is to

• When creating any new piece of content, run a site search for older-related content which has already built up some equity.
• Then find an anchor text within the old content to link to the new content that you have created.
• Your priority should be to link the top pages on your site related to that keyword.

How To Build External Links

External links are important for enhancing the domain authority of your website. One of the best ways to move forward with creating external links is to search for resource lists that could feature your content and link to you. Another easy way of building external links to yield higher returns is by searching for unlinked mentions. If it looks too hard, you can take help from the various link-building packages too.

Step 2: Check For Site Structure Improvements

The way information is structured or ordered on your website is significant too. If your site structure is messed up, you can improve it during the site audit by:

• Increasing the number of blog posts per page to bring the older content pieces closer to the home page.
• Checking for overlapping links under sections like “related posts” and “popular posts” on your blog. Replace duplicate links with other post links so that you can pass equity to the maximum pages of your website.
• Working closely with the designers and developers to improve page authority by finding user-friendly solutions that do not compromise user experience.

Step 3: Spot And Fix Thin Content

The term “thin content” is used to refer to weak content which doesn’t meet user needs. If your content is thin, it won’t get any respect in the SERP. Wondering how to make your content win? Look for pages that have dropped in terms of performance and rank. Export your top pages by traffic and ensure that each one is efficient in every respect. Furthermore, you can take help from SEO software tools to get a broad report on your content quality and length.

Step 4: Identify And Eradicate Duplicate Content

Google is smart enough to know whether you are maliciously duplicating content on your website to clog the SERP. Hence, duplicate content can lead to incurring potential site penalties too. If duplicate content is happening unintentionally, it may be because your CMS is generating new pages with a similar appearance. No matter whether intentional or unintentional, anything that makes Google’s crawlers do more thinking can hinder your SEO. So, carry out a complete website audit and avoid duplicate content as much as possible.

Step 5: Work For Optimizing Keywords

Optimizing your content pieces for target and ancillary keywords is as important as beefing up thin content in a complete website audit. You may wish to rank some specific keywords but they may not be suitable for your homepage. Those keywords are best reserved for blog posts. Hence, make sure that wherever possible, all of your pages are optimally optimized for keywords as it will help them show up in organic search. Do proper keyword research and analysis to find the best keywords for your website.

Step 6: Optimize Your Meta Tags

Meta tags comprise a meta title and description. Their optimization is essential as they help Google to determine the content of the page it is crawling. When ranking pages, meta tags are the biggest factor Google considers. Write or rewrite your meta tags by optimizing them with keywords that will help them show up in the top search slots. Make sure to keep your tags within the specified word limit. Don’t stuff meta tags with keywords just for the sake of it. Keyword stuffing is a big no when optimizing meta tags.

Step 7: Look For Page Updating Opportunities

When doing an SEO audit, make sure to identify any page updating opportunity. Making even small yet regular updates will keep your pages fresh and relevant. It will signal Google to crawl your page. You can update your pages by:

• Adding new information
• Optimizing keywords
• Compress images or fix broken links
• Deindex pages with 0 or close to 0 organic visits

You may be unable to update all pages regularly but make sure to update your top pages and opportunity pages (pages which if moved up even slightly on SERP would lead to a dramatic increase in traffic).

Step 8: Pay Attention To Page Speed Analytics

Google keeps bringing in new updates and algorithms to enrich the user experience. With its speed update, page speed optimization has become more significant than ever. A slow-loading site will not perform well for mobile users. In short, the faster your site, the more likely you are to get strong organic Google rankings. You can easily speed up your site by compressing your images, implementing lazy loading, and so on.

Step 9: Run A Scan For Site Errors And Broken Links

Ever clicked on a link and instead of your desired content, you see a 404 error page? It is a setback that you wouldn’t want your client to experience. 404 is a “page not found” error that is caused because of broken links and images on your site. Though broken links don’t cause site penalties, they can lead to less traffic as it becomes difficult for users who are trying to navigate from one page to another. Hence, when doing an SEO audit make sure to identify broken links and fix the important ones first for a smooth user experience.

Step 10: Opt For HTTPS Instead Of HTTP

In today’s fast-paced digital world, having a fast and secure website is a must. Hence, replace HTTP with HTTPS as it is one of Google’s ranking signals. So, when running a site audit, make sure to check whether your site is running on HTTPS. You can easily do that by manually entering some of the non-HTTPS iterations of your site and ensuring that all of them have been 301 redirected to the HTTPS iteration.

Conclusion

Many SEO trends come and go but some basics remain the same. For instance, to form an efficient and successful digital marketing strategy, you first need to know where you are and what you want to achieve with your campaign. It is at this point, website audits come into play.

Being aware of your products, services, or places, where people are searching for you, are important factors to formulate the right SEO campaigns. There is no prescribed recipe for a successful site audit as Google changes its algorithms pretty frequently. However, the 10-step SEO audit checklist has got you covered. Don’t forget to check out other RankJacker products and services for a smooth and hassle-free SEO journey.