Sharing! SEO auditing is a basic practice that must be performed before you start working on a new website strategy or once it is implemented, because it will allow you to find the best SEO methods your website needs.
Doing a good SEO audit will let you know the strengths of the project and the mistakes that need to be corrected to achieve an excellent website.
If you want to know more about how to perform a SEO Auditing step-by-step, continue reading this article. We’ll show you how to audit your website and the various SEO tools.
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How is the SEO audit performed?
Although there is no strict arrangement whereby this type of SEO analysis is performed, the somewhat accurate way to do this in order to maintain demand during this process is usually to perform the following steps:
1. Crawling and indexing the site
When SEO auditing begins, the main thing is to crawl and index the site, and to check if the content is properly indexed or if there is an error crawling the pages.
To index, you essentially have to evaluate the website content that really adds value to your users when searching on Google.
One of the easiest ways to do this SEO audit is to use the command’s website: Google’s web name.
Tracking time should be optimized
You should also try to improve your website crawl time as much as possible using some tools like Screaming Frog or Search Console.
To do this, you must choose the pages you want to place on Google, as this will prevent the bots or bots from wasting time crawling non-valuable content to the users.
For this, you should check the “robots.txt” file to verify that some website directories or URLs are not blocked, making sure that they are configured correctly so that they do not affect positioning.
Likewise, it is necessary to verify that sitemaps.xml was sent correctly, since these files are responsible for helping to understand the internal structure of a web page, while this process culminates in the discovery of potential HTTP errors (code status) that the web can contain such 3xx, 4 xxx, and 5 xxx.
This is vital in SEO web checking, because it can affect user experience and result in Google’s crawling waste, i.e. website tracking budget, skipping some important URLs. Tools like Search Console, SEMRush Site Audit or Screaming Frog can be used for this task, which is usually very fast and provides very useful information.
2. Site structure
This is another step that requires a lot of attention, because when a website has a poor information structure, this negatively affects many positioning factors.
To carry out this procedure, it is necessary to control the assemblies, the structure and the depth of the gate, as well as its internal connection.
In this way, to perform an analysis of the web page structure in SEO auditing, it must start from its internal structure, which confirms that it has aggregated thematic or aggregate information, which will help improve portability and tracking.
Click levels are another factor that should be evaluated during the SEO audit process. This is done by calculating the different depth levels required to access a specific content, taking HOME as the starting point, which will be the level 0.
Depending on the number of clicks that are made when browsing the structure of the website, the level of clicks on the website will be determined. Keep in mind that at a lower level of depth (fewer clicks) it will be easier for the user to access the URL, which will positively affect the website’s page. For these reasons, try to reduce the number of levels in your website’s structure.
Tools like Sitebulb, Screaming Frog, OnCrawl, SEMRush, DinoRank, Ahrefs, etc. can be used to do these tasks.
The structure of the site must be analyzed
Another aspect that should be analyzed regarding website structure when performing an SEO audit is the internal link, as this can affect the information hierarchy and website authority.
We must ensure that all relevant content on a website is linked to each other in a strategic way through the information hierarchy. This is another way to guide the Google crawler within the web page structure and improve internal page rankings.
You should check web page interaction and speed
The speed and interaction of the web is another technical aspect that must be investigated in SEO auditing to help users feel that they have the ability to search more easily.
For these reasons, you should ensure that they can be more fluent when browsing, which will positively impact the user experience and Google’s crawling budget.
3. Ease of use and site performance
At this point in the analysis, it must be verified that the web structure is clear and easy to understand when navigating the webpage. For this, you should have a good internal link and verify that everything works the same way on the mobile site as it does on the computer, because otherwise it can affect positioning on the web.
You should also work based on whether the website has the ability to view from different types of operating systems, mobile and desktop systems. It is convenient to test how the website is displayed on an Android phone or IPhone and some browsers such as Firefox or Chrome.
At the same time, you should also consider your website’s usability when performing an SEO audit to improve your website, and evaluate that it is easy to understand and that you can quickly find what you are looking for.
For website usability analysis, a restart session can be used, which is a free tool from Yandex Metrica web analysis service. This allows monitoring how users navigate the website.
4. Quality content
This is usually one of the most complex and comprehensive aspects of SEO auditing, and it is important to evaluate some factors that should be analyzed specifically during this stage of the study.
First, it is necessary to check if there is duplicate content within the website, also noting if there is no duplicate title, H1, or a meta description in different URLs.
This copy is primarily based on the presence of copy or similar content on the Website. We must also take care that SEO fragmentation, which is generated when one or more URL addresses are used with the same search intent or when the response provides content that was previously on the website, does not occur.
Determine if thin content is present
Thin content, which is of little or no value to the user, should be avoided, as it reduces the quality of the website and causes a loss of crawl budget.
This type of content is not responding to the user’s intent. It also consists of articles poorly translated from other languages, stolen or thorny.
Check out the titles and meta descriptions of the content
On the other hand, the headlines and meta descriptions of the content should also be evaluated, as they allow the attention of users in the SERPs, as well as the use of keywords in the texts.
To perform this procedure, special criteria must be observed, such as keyword density, the intention of a user to search for a term, or whether the content responds to the search goal, among other things.
Images affect positioning on the web
During this stage of SEO auditing, web images must also be validated and analyzed, properly uploaded and have the “alt” and “title” attributes.
It is convenient that to improve the situation with images, they do not have much weight and are fully loaded in the shortest possible time.
5. Organic visibility of the site in search engines
In this part of the SEO audit, you should search for sanctions notifications through Search Console, and check if there are potential penalties from Google. The main thing is to determine the algorithm that the punishment was and what are the best measures to remove it.
Likewise, you should check out Keyword Keyword Lookup and perform keyword research to find organic growth opportunities using SEO auditing tools like SE SEing, Ahrefs, or SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool.
Studying key competitors is another aspect where you should focus on this stage of SEO auditing and the keyword analysis they use to position themselves.
6. Popular and web authority
In this part of the study, off-page related aspects of the project will be analyzed, which is vital to check backlinks and if there is any toxic link that could lead to penalties and negatively affect the positioning. The link building strategies applied to the site must be evaluated.
7. Web traffic and transfers
This stage of SEO auditing should focus primarily on everything related to website traffic, focusing on factors such as visited URLs, traffic sources, residence time, bounce rate, and vanishing points. Among other things.
With Google Analytics, you can check where traffic is generated to a website, which are the URLs with the most traffic, and which pages bring the most traffic to your website.
It is also necessary to analyze where users go and why they do this, as well as the percentage of conversion that a website or e-commerce has, and evaluate the role of organic traffic in obtaining site goals to truly analyze the quality of traffic and its impact.
We hope this post has given you a clearer idea of SEO auditing and the importance it places on improving SEO for your store or website.
If you have any questions, leave me a comment below, I will be glad to solve.
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