When we hear the words SEO Audit, many of us might run for the hills and pretend that we’ve emigrated to somewhere new. The term sounds horrific, and often the way it is explained to us can make the whole process seem incredibly overwhelming. But the important thing to remember is that you can run an audit yourself at home or in the office with these simple steps.
1. Perform a Website Crawl
The first step to your SEO audit is running a website crawl on your site. This involves a site crawler software reading your website’s code and determining things such as your Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords, h1, website titles and tags along with all other information you may need later on for analysis. You’ll be able to run this process in the background on a software such as Screaming Frog as you complete the other aspects of the audit.
2. Make sure only 1 version of your site is accessible by browser
It might sound a bit confusing, but it simply means that your website name can come in a few different forms:
http://yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com
When you search any of these in the browser, you should oly be directed to one version. For example, you may type in www. And then you’ll be redirected to the http:// only version. Any version of your site which isn’t the true URL should have a 301 code beside it which means that when it is clicked it redirects to the correct one.
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If you want to boost your rankings even further, you may want to consider getting yourself a https:// URL. This will show users that your website is trustworthy and secure- and will draw more people in to see your website.
3. Check Your Homepage
Now we will go to your homepage and view the source by right clicking and selecting the option. Viewing the website’s source will allow you to see your title, meta description and your h1, h2 and h3s.
Check The Home Page Title Tag
The title tag is the most important on-page SEO factor for your website, and it must contain keywords which can increase your ranking on Google. You may notice if you search your site in google that they will often use your title tag as the snippet of information underneath the search result. If your title is too long you will need to shorten it and add more keywords to optimise it for searching.
Check Meta Description
Although it does not directly affect your ranking in the search engine, if you have a well-written description it can help you get more clicks to the website. If you are an ecommerce site for example, you can use the meta description to say that you offer free delivery or that you offer low prices etc.
4. Look at your crawl report
A good SEO agency won’t just analyze your onsite SEO and backlink profile. They will also dig deep into your meta data to see how search engine bots are interacting with your site. Once your website crawl is done, you can start to look into any on-page issues with the site. A common issue with sites on WordPress is having duplicate title tags. This is caused by the fact that the blog pages are indexable and will have exactly the same title. You can use YOAST to sort out this issue with ease.
5. Make Sure Your Content Is Unique
If you have a lot of duplicate or plagiarised content on your website, Google will not like it and you will be ranked low on the search engine. If you are going to be making a blog site or providing information to your audience- take the time to make sure that it is unique. If any is flagged up with URLs, input them into CopyScape to check for plagiarism. It will also be if you have a lot of information duplicated within your website. Check for which URLs flag up with a risk and see what it is that has been duplicated.
Run Tests on Google
Search for your brand. It should rank highly if not at the top of the search results. If it does not, you may have some complex issues with the coding of the website to sort out. It may just be because Google doesn’t trust your brand yet- so you can combat this by adding some highly branded link, building business directories and making sure that you have a social media presence too.
Analyze Search Traffic
The main aim of an SEO audit is to increase traffic, so you can analyze your traffic on Google Analytics. Check whether you have any referral traffic and where it is coming from, how much organic traffic you have and how many unique users. It is the aim that you have unique visitors and plenty of traffic every day.