An SEO audit assesses how effectively your website is search engine optimized. It finds mistakes that might hinder your website’s search engine ranking and opportunities to increase your online presence.

Typically, an SEO audit looks at things like:

• Crawlability and indexing
• User encounter
• Website design
• Benchmarking against competitors
• research on keywords
• Within the page, SEO
• profile of backlinks

It functions as a website’s general “health check.”

Tools for SEO Audit

Hard data on your website’s traffic, backlink profile, and technical health (as well as those of your rivals) is the foundation of any successful SEO website audit.

The most crucial resource that might assist you is;

Google Search Conss a collection of dashboards and reports that let you keep an eye on and fix any problems with your website showing up on Google.

In the following sections, we’ll examine how to use these tools to conduct an SEO audit in more detail.

How to Conduct An Audit for SEO?

1. Look for Problems with Indexing

Google’s database does not contain pages that are not indexed. Google does not rank them.

Use Google Search Console to immediately check for problems and determine if your pages have been indexed.

Navigate to the “Pages” report in the “Index” part of the menu on the left. This is a graph showing every page according to its indexing status.

As an alternative, you may simply copy and paste a specific URL into the Google Search Console dashboard’s top search field.

See the status of the URL. By selecting the “Request Indexing” link, you may also ask Google to index the URL.

You can resubmit the request for indexing if the page has undergone significant alteration. in spite of the page’s prior indexing.

Search through your website and select the “Issues” option.

These are all the mistakes, alerts, and notices impeding the SEO performance of your website.

Now, to view just indexing concerns, choose “Indexability” from the “Category” dropdown menu.

2. Examine Your Website for Duplicate Versions

Ensuring that Google only indexes one version of your website is crucial.

Depending on whether HTTPS is used by your website and if the domain contains WWW, several URL variants may be used for it.

These are all distinct versions of the website to a search engine:

/[www.yoursite.com]

/* yoursite.com

/[www.yoursite.com/]

/*yoursite.com

Multiple URL variations for your website might lead to various problems with crawling, indexing, and ranking. In particular, Google will consider them to be duplicates.

Additionally, having several versions of your website might lower PageRank, which can hurt your search engine results.

This is fairly simple to verify: Simply load your website in all of its versions into a web browser.

The desired version should be immediately forwarded to you.

For instance, if you type any other version of the URL into your browser and your preferred version is https://yoursite.com, you should be forwarded to it.

If your website is available in more than one version, utilize a 301 redirect for those versions.

Read More: How To Do SEO Link Building & What Factors Are Important?

3. Conduct a Site Crawl

A crawl-based SEO assessment performs well. This implies that you ought to be able to mimic how Google scans your web pages. And view every problem associated with those sites as if they were seen by Google.

You’ll need a website SEO auditing tool like Site Audit to do that. You will first organize the audit and establish a project.

The Site Health score is the primary measure that warrants your attention. It is a general measure of your website’s SEO health based on the quantity and severity of problems discovered.

However, the Site Audit tool’s primary goal is to assist you in seeing all of the problems in one location.

Here are a few instances of potential problems:

• Crawlability problems: certain sites returned a 5xx status code, for example.
• Issues with redirects: for example, some of your redirects are looped
• Problems with your sitemap: for example, some inaccurate pages were discovered there.
• Problems with HTTPS: For instance, HTTPS pages connect to HTTP pages.
• Internal link problems: for example, you have non-functional or broken internal links.
• Regarding page SEO problems, some of your pages lack title tags, for example.
• Markup problems: for example, certain structured data markup deviates from Google’s standards.
• Performance problems, such as sluggish page loads

Fixing some of these problems is not too difficult. Some could call for a more intricate fix.

As an aside, you may utilize Site evaluation immediately after your last SEO evaluation. To monitor your progress and find any new issues that may have emerged after the last crawl, run the Site Audit tool frequently.

Using the Site Audit Tool, locate and resolve website issues.

4. Look for Handwritten Instructions

Your website can be subject to manual action by Google if it breaches its spam standards.

When Google takes a manual action, your site’s rankings will suffer until the action is reversed. This might apply to the entire website or just certain pages.

You could have gotten a manual action for a number of reasons, such as:

• Stuffing keywords
• Links that aren’t natural (from and to your site)
• Different types of spam
• thin material with minimal or no value addition

For further information, see Google’s Manual Actions guide.

For instance, if purchasing backlinks results in a manual action (“Unnatural links to your site”), you will need to remove those backlinks by disavowing them or contacting webmasters.

Read More: How To Expand Your Business With Marketing Tools?

5. Look for Issues with Mobile-Friendliness

Since 2015, it has been a component in rankings. This implies that it may have a direct impact on how well you rank in search results.

The Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report allows you to look for any problems. Simply select “Mobile Usability” from the menu on the left under “Experience.”

This is a brief summary of how usable your pages are over time:

The report will also provide a list of all the problems with mobile friendliness.

6. Examine the Speed of Your Site

Now more than ever, it is critical that your website loads quickly. For a very long time, page speed has also been a ranking component. Consequently, it may raise your Google ranking.

Furthermore, it is a crucial component of the user experience. Based on user behavior, evidence indicates that a slower-loading page increases the likelihood that a user will leave the website.

Go to the “Site Performance” report from your Site Audit dashboard to see how quickly your site loads.

Take care of as many problems as you can. Additionally, your website’s speed and ranks ought to increase.

7. Examine the Key Web Elements

Google released three new measures pertaining to page performance and user experience in 2020.

They’re referred to as Core Web Vitals together.

Examining these metrics for your important pages should undoubtedly be a part of any SEO site audit, as Core Web Vitals are a ranking consideration.

Once more, Google Search Console has proven to be helpful.

Navigate to the “Experience” area on the left menu and select the “Core Web Vitals” report.

Reports labelled “Desktop” and “Mobile” will appear, outlining every problem along with the sites that are impacted.

You’ll get thorough insights into any Core Web Vitals problems your website could be experiencing with these reports.

The program distinguishes between pages that require minor adjustments and those with serious problems (also known as “poor URLs”).

Examine the problems and adhere to the recommendations for resolving them.

Additionally, the Site Audit includes a specific Core Web Vitals analysis.

Simply select the “Core Web Vitals” dashboard widget. You will find a table titled “Analysed Pages” if you scroll below.

Take a look at all of the stats at the single-page level and monitor your development over time.

You may manually choose ten URLs to have Core Web Vitals concerns checked. Simply select “Edit list” from the menu.

8. Examine Your Internal Connections

For three reasons, internal links are an essential component of SEO.

They facilitate web page crawling by search engines, facilitate users’ navigation of your website.

They assist you in directing “authority” or “link juice,” also known as link equity, to the most crucial pages.

Site Audit has a report specifically on problems with internal linking. Select “Internal Linking” from the “Thematic Reports” list:

You’ll receive a list of problems with internal links along with instructions on how to resolve them.

A helpful summary of your pages based on Internal LinkRank (ILR), a statistic that assesses how well a page is connected, will also be provided by the report.

By going over each category, you’ll be able to distinguish between two kinds of pages:

Not many internal links point to important pages; thus, you should point additional internal connections to them.

Good internal linking reciprocity (ILR) pages (so you may use them to spread link equity to other pages)

9. Examine Your Natural Traffic

Go to Google Search Console and select the “Search results” report from the “Performance” section of the menu to view your organic traffic.

The report has four primary metrics.

In this case, “Total clicks”—the number of times a person clicks through to your website during the allotted time—will be the most interesting measure.

To view the data you want, you may configure the report in a variety of ways.

As an illustration, results may be seen by devices, nations, pages, and queries:

You may learn a great deal about the organic traffic to your website from these statistics. And assist you in setting goals and monitoring your development.

10. Compare Yourself to Your Rivals

An effective SEO audit ought to assist you in assessing your position in relation to your rivals.

Pay attention to the following parameters for the best overview:

Authority Score: a measurement of the domain’s general quality ranging from 1 to 100 (based on search traffic, backlinks, and other variables)

Organic Traffic: The volume of organic traffic that the website gets

Organic Keywords: indicates the number of keywords the domain ranks for; Referring Domains: indicates the number of distinct domains that connect to the examined domain (offering a more useful comparison than the total number of backlinks).

We’ll look at ways to advance competitor research in the next two phases. Additionally, make the most of the backlink data and keywords of your rivals.

11. Locate Lost Backlink Possibilities

You may use the Backlink Gap tool from SEMrush to uncover backlink chances in a similar way to how you would use the Keyword Gap tool to find amazing keyword prospects.

Simply insert the domains of up to four rivals together with your own. Next, choose “Find prospects.”

A list of domains that connect to your rivals but not to you will be displayed by the tool:

Since these domains already connect to related websites (your rivals), there is a significantly higher chance that they will link to your website.

Select the arrow adjacent to the figure that represents the number of backlinks originating from a specific domain.

By doing this, the view is expanded to include certain pages that connect to your rivals, In addition to the target URLs and anchor text.

You can now attempt to duplicate these backlinks by selecting the ones that are pertinent to your website and clicking the “Start Outreach” button in the upper-right corner.

This will direct the chosen prospects to the Link Building tool, where you can create a new project for your domain.

It’s not necessary for you to review every page. Rather, pay attention to those who:

• Generate the greatest number of conversions
• Concentrate on the terms that are most crucial to your company.

The tool will assess your data against those of your top-ranking rivals and offer helpful advice on how to raise your ranks in a number of on-page SEO audit categories.

To view the suggestions for a given page, select the “Optimisation Ideas” tab. Choose the green button next to the page’s URL that displays the number of ideas:

12. Keep an eye on your rankings

One of the greatest methods to continually monitor how well your website is performing in organic search results is to use a rank-tracking tool.

• Monitor the positions of your website for important keywords.
• Examine the variations in search engine results page (SERP) ranks across different regions.
• Compare your position to that of your rivals.
• Receive notifications of any significant changes to your website’s rankings.
• Open Semrush’s Position Tracking tool and enter your domain to begin rank tracking.

You may configure the search engine, device, and location parameters for your tracking under the basic settings. Then be asked to input the terms that you wish to monitor.

You have three options: apply Semrush’s suggestions, import data from an external file, or enter data yourself. Keep an eye on all of the changes to your ranks in one location with your newly formed position tracking project.

HA-technologies provide free services of site auditing as well you can have a consultation call with our SEO experts to understand your site issue hindering your rankings.