You need to have a website to have a successful business. You need to have a good and working SEO strategy for this website to be successful. Without SEO, it is almost impossible to succeed.
By making your website more valuable to users, SEO improvements will help your ranking on Google Search. Since Google is determined to make its search content helpful and reliable, search listings are free, and no one can pay for a higher ranking.
Most businesses already understand how crucial it is but do not want to invest enough. They rely on the simplest and most fundamental things that are not enough. You need to consider many factors for your SEO strategy to be successful, including your niche, competitors, the audience you wish to target, your blog, keywords, and so on. All this requires a lot of attention and time to study.
The first step in search engine optimization is always an audit. As soon as the specialists start working with a new client, they do an audit. It is crucial to understand in what condition is the website and what problems it has. This way, you will understand how to achieve the desired results.
In this blog post, you will find out all the most important things about SEO audit and what to include in it.
What is an SEO audit?
The audit will help you understand the condition of the site. It is a process that will show you how the site performs in search engines and how they are crawling it. It will show you what you need to change and what you need to improve. The purpose of an SEO audit is to help you optimize your website. That way, it can achieve a higher ranking in search engine results.
There are various tools you can use for such an audit. The practices are many and varied. The best options are to follow the step-by-step advice of specialists, such as those we will give you, or contact a specialist. If you do the audit yourself, you run the risk of making mistakes, but if you have little knowledge, free time, and desire, you will succeed – you just have to follow the advice we will give you and do not miss any of the essential components. We give you 8 good reasons to hire a digital agency.
If you hire a specialist, he will manually review your site and give you recommendations on what needs to be corrected and what needs to be improved. He will tell you what mistakes there are on your site and what to focus on. SEO audit will be of great help to you in achieving success. To improve the performance of your website in search engines, you need such an audit. If you are interested in our SEO services, you can view them here.
Why is SEO audit so important?
An audit is a crucial part of SEO strategy. To achieve good results, you need to do regular audits. Without them, you don’t know what you need to change, improve, and focus on.
Things are changing fast in this industry, and what works today may not work in 6 months. Google is known to make thousands of updates to its ranking algorithm each year. SEO audit will help you stay on top or climb to it. You will be up to date with new trends. It will keep your website in a very good position.
Due to new trends and updates, it is essential to conduct regular audits. It will help you be in a very good position and be popular and intriguing among users. It is crucial to do an audit at least twice a year. If you do it in a maximum of 6 months, you can be calm because your website will be up to date.
What an SEO audit should include
Error check
The first step is to check for errors. Specialists will scan your website and find how many and what warnings there are. They will then pass these errors to a web developer to fix these issues.
Well-structured and fast websites are more likely to appeal to users. It makes them stay longer on the page and therefore reduces the dropout rate and increases page views. Optimized sites load faster, are easier to use, and run in any browser.
All this will make it easier for users to trust you and come back to your website. All this will bring you more organic traffic and increase your profits.
Competitor analysis
It is the process of researching and analyzing the marketing strategies and business characteristics of your competitors. You can understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors with its help. It is crucial for you and your company because it will tell you what to focus on and how to be better. Once you understand their weaknesses and mistakes, you can use them against them and overcome them. And when you know what they’re focused on, you’ll know where to pay attention. These analyzes can help a lot in the development of any business. They are paramount if you want to beat the competitors.
These analyzes require a lot of time and patience. The steps you need to follow are:
- Identify your competitors
- Analyze products and their prices
- Understand their marketing strategies
- View their content
- What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- Which keywords do they rank for?
These are the basic steps you need to follow. This analysis will help you grow your business and achieve success. If you want to understand how to analyze the competitors, check out our blog article on the subject.
Keyword analysis
A keyword analysis is a crucial part of SEO. Start writing all the words that are related to your niche. It is essential to choose the right keywords to rank for. It will help you a lot for a better ranking. There are some tools you can use to find more keywords and analyze them. If you want to know what these tools are and find out more about keyword analysis, you can read our blog. The three most important things to look for when choosing keywords are relevance, reliability, and volume.
Crawling And Indexing
These components are the basis of a successful approach to SEO. Crawling is the way your site is read by Google. Indexing adds your web pages to Google search results.
Please refer to the Google Search Console to determine if a site is being crawled and indexed correctly. Look at the robots.txt file to see which resources are blocked by the robots. Then look at the sitemap to see that it meets all the correct protocols.
To crawl the site, you will need a tool to help you. An SEO crawler will spider the site like Google and give us some helpful information on the structure and current SEO setup. There are many tools you can use for example Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Beam Us Up.
Accessibility
Many things can prevent access to a website. There are a variety of errors that can cause problems for your website. Slow page load, 404 errors, or long server response times are the common accessibility issues found in an SEO audit.
You can check with Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see if your site has accessibility issues. The Google Search Console will help you determine if 404 errors need to be redirected to updated content. If you find accessibility issues, use Google resources or hire an expert to fix any errors on your website.
On-page optimization
On-Page SEO is the most crucial part of SEO audit. It includes many things:
Titles and meta descriptions
It is the information that appears in Google’s SERP. Yours should be unique and attract attention. It will increase organic traffic. Remember that meta description information is designed to give people a clear idea of the content you offer, thus encouraging them to click. Keep these descriptions short, clear, and intriguing. Also, make sure they are unique.
The titles are about 55-60 characters, and the meta descriptions are about 130-150 characters long. Stick to this length.
Text formatting
Make sure you don’t just have plain text on your pages.
Each text must be formatted properly using H1 (for the main title) and H2 (for the main subheadings). Use a bolt or italics for crucial parts and things that need more attention. It attracts and holds attention. Use lists where necessary and subpoints. Format the text so that it is understandable and intriguing to the user.
The content
The SEO audit will show you which content is quality and which is not. It will help you improve it. That will improve the overall quality of the website.
To rank higher in search engines, you need to have a lot of quality content. Search engines care about quality and crawl sites for just that. They want to provide the best for their users, so if the quality of your content is not good, you need to fix it.
The SEO audit will show you which content you need to change and improve. Stick to shorter texts on the pages, use short but eye-catching descriptions and phrases. Write longer texts on your blog.
In addition to quality, the content must be unique. Write unique content, not copy it from other sites because search engines don’t like that.
You should also check the content for spelling mistakes. Consumers don’t like these things, and they make a bad impression.
In addition, you need to upload new information. Do not upload old news that is not useful. Upload only secure and verified information that is up to date.
Internal link structure
There are some crucial things about internal links that you need to know and follow:
Pages that you want to rank better in search engines should have more internal links.
The pages you want to rank better in search are linked from your home page.
You should have between 2 – 10 internal links per page.
Internal links are very convenient and helpful for your users, and most of them use them. They are also helpful for better ranking.
Images
The images you use on your website must be of good quality. If an image is blurry, out of focus, or not of good quality, you better not use it.
The photos you use should be related to the text and other content. They help read the text and are liked by users if they are well chosen. Choose intriguing and quality images.
It is important to use photos. The problem is that they can slow down the loading of your website. It is what the audit will show you. If images make your site load slower, you need to fix that.
Damaged connections
Broken links are bad for the user experience. They are not good from an SEO point of view. You can find out about them while crawling the site. It is crucial to fix them and not have any damaged links. Fix them by replacing the link with a working one or removing it completely.
User-friendliness
This point is a little more subjective. You may think that your site is very convenient and easy to use, but the users may not think the same. The essential things to pay attention to here are the design, which should be clean and easy to understand, the speed of the site, whether it offers quality content, and the accessibility.
- Off-page optimization
Off-Page SEO refers to methods and techniques that you can use to promote your website on the Internet. It is also a crucial part of SEO.
Off-page optimization is essential, but if you’re not careful about what you do and if you don’t know what you’re allowed to do, it can be risky.
For this optimization, you need to do backlinks analysis and campaign. SEO audits include all your backlinks – where they are, whether they are enough, whether there are broken links, whether the sites they are on are good. These are all essential things to pay attention to. Then there’s a backlinks campaign to help you gather more. It will help drive traffic to your website and help you rank higher in search engines.
This type of campaign is time-consuming. It will take you a long time to put backlinks in many different places. First, you need to take the time to figure out where you can put them. Start thinking of sites that would put a link to your site or a particular service. Then start thinking about how to address them most appropriately. You can contact other companies with an offer to exchange backlinks or with a request to share your blog articles, for example. The options are many and varied.
These are the main things that are included in SEO audits. You need to pay attention to all of them to improve your website.
As you can see, search engine optimization is not an easy job. It is a long process. It takes a lot of time, work, and patience. But for your website to be successful, you must either invest a lot of time or look for a specialist to do it all for you. Read our blog post if you want to know the benefits of hiring a digital agency.
You may think that you do not need SEO, but this is not the case. Even if you are at the top of Google, someone might pass you at any time, and everything could change. It will take a long time to regain your position if you do not pay close attention to your SEO approach. If you are interested, read how to craft the perfect SEO strategy.
If you’re interested in our search engine optimization services, you can find them here. If you have additional questions, you can contact us or schedule a free strategy session. We at Dreamtech are always ready to help you.
