What is SEO Audit? How to Audit Website to Increase Search Performance?

SEO Audit is a job that needs to be done regularly to bring the best organic search performance of the website. So what is SEO Audit ? When to perform a Website Audit? This article will give you the best SEO Audit tips. Read on!

What is SEO Audit?

SEO Audit is the process of checking and evaluating the current performance of the Website based on criteria such as Crawling, Indexing, Onpage, Offpage, Content,… SEO Audit is also an audit of tool optimization. search.

SEO Audit should be done regularly, it is called “periodic health check” for Website. The goal is to identify issues affecting your website’s organic search performance.

SEO Audit will reveal:

• Technical SEO issues
• Issues related to website structure
• Onpage SEO issues
• Potential problems off site
• Issues related to user experience on the website
• Content Gaps and Opportunities
• Competitors

When performing SEO Audit properly, you will have an overview of the problems that the website is facing. From there, plan a “cure” to improve the website’s organic search performance.

Learn SEO Audit Basics for Beginners

When to do an SEO Audit?

As an SEOer, you absolutely must not forget the 3 golden times to perform the SEO Audit below.

When starting a new project

When starting a new project, you need to devise a specific implementation strategy for that project. The overall website SEO audit will help you know the current status of the website. Thanks to that, you will have the right direction and success in the project.

First month of every quarter

When implementing an SEO project, do you usually give OKRS for each quarter? Right?

In addition, in the 3 months before the implementation, more or less problems will arise and inhibit the website’s natural search performance.

At this point, you need to perform an SEO Audit to evaluate the overall website and adjust OKRS in time to suit the current situation. From there, your website will rank top easily and quickly. Your plan will go more smoothly and smoothly.

When the website shows abnormal signs

SEO Audit can help you catch and promptly correct problems that arise on your website.

However, if your website is small, you should not abuse regular audits. Instead, you should focus on other more important items. You can extend the audit time, about every 4-6 months , and audit when the website shows signs of abnormalities .

If your website is medium to large size, then SEO Audit is very necessary. Especially, when you feel that natural traffic tends to decrease, you should audit to promptly detect and fix arising problems.

Categories SEO Audit website

When performing SEO Audit Website, you need to do it carefully and do not skip any of the items below.

Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO Audit is your checking to see if the website is working properly through accessibility and indexability.

Accessibility

Reachability is how Google and users can reach your website. If users don’t see your site, it won’t do you any good even if you create new content.

To check your website’s accessibility, go to the robots.txt file or the robots meta tags . Because sometimes some pages are blocked so Google can’t crawl without you even knowing.

>> Learn more: What is the robots.txt file? Instructions for creating and testing robots.txt . file

Sitemap website is also an important factor you need to keep in mind. As this is a crawler guide map. Therefore, the sitemap needs to be properly formatted and sent to the webmaster’s account.

>> See more: What is a sitemap ? How to check the correct website sitemap?

In addition, website structure is also a factor that determines whether your website is easy for users and Googlebot to reach or not.

Therefore, when SEO Audit Website , make sure that users only need a few clicks to move from the homepage to the remaining page. The fewer clicks, the easier it is for the crawler to get to the site.

Sometimes, redirects also cause some unexpected problems. It may cause crawlers to no longer be able to access that site. Because that page has been deleted or moved to another page.

Therefore, you need to create instructions so that Googlebot can reach the website you want.

Audit Technical SEO is very important for search engine crawlability. So, what about users?

Imagine, when a user accesses a website with extremely slow loading speed? Surely they will not wait patiently but exit immediately. Therefore, improving website speed is a very necessary thing .

Besides, an interface you find pleasing to the eye but not necessarily optimized for user experience . Only when finding information quickly and reliably will users stay longer and interact more with your website.

Currently, users use mobile phones to search more and more. Therefore, make sure your website is not only desktop-friendly, but also mobile-friendly . 

From there, you will not waste a large amount of traffic coming from mobile devices, increasing your chances of conversion and increasing revenue for your business.

>> Find out now: What is Google Pagespeed Insights ? How to optimize website speed with Pagespeed Insights

Index ability

Indexability and accessibility go hand in hand. If Google has access to your article, it will crawl and index that article. Your website is indexed which means it will show up on search engines.

Sometimes, Google has crawled your post but users can’t see it. Why?

First, check to see if it’s a Google penalty .

This is one of the reasons why your website is not showing. Because the crawler works on each website is different. So, if your website has a large scale with a lot of content, the landing pages are indexed immediately.

In addition, Bloggers occasionally post a few articles, the ability to index these articles is often slower.

You might worry that Google will impose a penalty when it detects accessibility and other issues. However, you don’t need to worry too much. If there is a penalty, Google will send a notification to the webmaster tools account.

In that case, you need to reconsider:

• What is the reason for the penalty?
• Troubleshoot
• Request a reconsideration

There are worst cases where you have to pay a fee to fix this problem.

>> Hint: What is Google Index ? Instructions on how to help Google Index quickly

SEO Onpage Audit

After the Technical audit is complete, your website has also entered a stable state, both robots and users can access the website. At this point, you need to conduct SEO Onpage Audit to promote SEO rankings.

General problems

All the content on your website is guaranteed to be useful to users and related to the overall theme of the website .

Many websites insert advertising content into the website in order to increase revenue. However, this is only beneficial for a short period of time. Later on, it will affect your SEO results.

In addition, your site can also have duplicate content and Keyword Cannibalization (keyword cannibalization) between pages.

This happens because you produce too much content for the same topic. This can be good for increasing website traffic. But it leads to duplicate content.

These sites can inhibit each other’s ability to get to the top. Because you are confusing Google. Google may be indexing more pages, but it doesn’t know which of those duplicate pages to rank for.

Same goes for Keyword Cannibalization .

So, SEO Onpage Audit helps improve the ranking of a keyword that appears in many different pages. Because Google will recognize a good page and rank for that page content. Pages that are not beneficial to SEO will not be accessed by Google anymore.

Problems of each page

In fact, content is an important factor determining website rankings. However, you also need to make sure the article is well-structured and goal-oriented.

Important criteria to pay attention to:

• The URL is short, easy to understand, correctly describes the content and contains the main keyword.
• Use hyphens (-) to separate words in URLs.
• The content of each page must be at least 500 words.
• Content provides unique, useful value to the reader.
• Content with correct spelling, grammar, contains LSI keywords.
• Optimize images in articles.
• Set an attractive, attractive title and meta with a call to action.
• Go Internal to related pages.

SEO Offpage Audit

Offpage SEO is a perfect factor for high ranking ranking. However, you need to make sure that your website is accessed by users from a reputable, trustworthy source.

First, check what websites your website is pointing to. Is it a reputable website? Or the dark web (sex sites, betting, …)?

If your website is pointed to from reputable sources, then congratulations, you will have the opportunity to rank high on Google.

However, if the websites are not reputable, have depraved content, you should disavow these backlinks immediately. Because pages like this will make your website lose value in the eyes of Google.

In addition, the content of the article is friendly and brings value to the reader is a factor you need to pay attention to. Website with good content, more links pointing to the website, the website traffic increases and the bounce rate decreases.

Keyword and industry competitor analysis

In SEO, keyword analysis is the smallest unit of measurement. Keyword analysis is also competitor analysis.

Basically, keyword analysis is difficulty and traffic analysis. Keyword difficulty shows how well that keyword ranks. The more difficult the keyword, the harder it is to rank.

Therefore, you should choose keywords with medium difficulty and medium traffic for SEO first. However, if you want to quickly increase traffic and beat your competitors then choose medium difficulty, high traffic keywords or low difficulty, medium traffic keywords. jar.

In particular, you need to look carefully to select potential keywords and publish valuable content for those keywords. From there, your website will achieve the desired results.

The best keyword analysis tools you should refer to are Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs .

Notes when performing SEO Audit of the website

SEO Audit is a necessary and important job. Therefore, when auditing your website, you need to keep in mind a few principles to bring the best audit results.

Things to do when SEO Audit 

First of all, you need to do a comprehensive SEO Audit . Including both structural and content components that affect SEO visibility.

It will provide an overview of the current state of your website. If any part is missing, it will affect the analysis results.

SEO Audit must be easy to understand . As a business owner, you can connect how SEO issues are affecting your business goals or revenue. From there, give a solution for each specific problem.

Finally, SEO Audit proposals must have a clear, workable remediation plan . The important goal of SEO Audit is to find out the bad problems of the website and provide solutions.

Things not to do when SEO Audit

Do not rush to perform SEO Audit . You need time to find the root cause of the problems affecting your website. Depending on the size of your site, an audit can take anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks to complete.

Accountability is required when making major changes to any website. SEO professionals must conduct thorough investigations to come up with accurate, impactful recommendations.

You should not apply one standard SEO Audit to all websites. Because not every website has to have all of those categories. Depending on the type and size of the website, there is an appropriate SEO Audit strategy.

Overall SEO Audit Checklist

Depending on the status of each website, different SEO Audit methods will be applied. Please refer to some reference SEO Audit checklist to apply to your website.

Technical 

• Is your website running fast and smooth?
• Is the website mobile friendly – user-friendly?
• Is there an https setting?
• Www redirect with no www?
• Http has redirect with https yes?
• Does robots.txt block googlebot?
• Website with sitemap?
• The site has fixed all 404 pages?
• Does the website have the same heading 1 and heading 2 tags?
• Does the website have the same meta description tag?
• Image already has ALT tag?

User experience

• Website does not have a bounce rate above 90%?
• Time on-site at least one minute?
• Registered and optimized Google my business?
• The article was shared on social networks naturally?

Content

• Content unique?
• Better content than the competition?
• Content correct spelling, grammar?
• Is the content on the website valuable?

Onpage

• Keyword in title?
• Attractive meta description, containing keywords?
• Keywords contained in the first 150 words of the article?
• The url contains keywords and is short?
• H1, url and title are related keywords?
• Image already has ALT tag?
• Links to related pages?

Backlinks

• Do the majority of backlinks come from related websites?
• Website received links from reputable sites?
• Diverse link profiles?
• Is the ratio of Anchor Text types appropriate?

Guide to SEO Audit Website Effectively

Tools to support SEO Audit

There are many SEO tools to make SEO Audit easy. Here are 5 tools you should refer to:

1. Semrush Site Audit Tool: Provides a comprehensive, top-down view of your site’s performance.
2. Google Analytics: Provides metrics and data about your site’s performance in search engines.
3. Google Search Console:   Allows you to see if your site is correctly indexed and how it appears in the SERPs.
4. Google PageSpeed ​​Insights : Measure page performance on your site for both mobile and desktop platforms
5. Google Schema Markup Testing Tool : A tool that allows you to test and verify that your schema is error free

What problems will happen during and after SEO Audit

As I mentioned above, SEO Audit can take 2 – 6 weeks. During this time, you need to analyze and find the errors on your website. However, every 1 or 2 weeks you need to report the progress of completing the Audit items for your team to capture.

During any SEO audit, you will find a few problems. Therefore, when you detect unusual problems, you need to handle them immediately to make the process of detecting other errors easier.

After completing the audit items, you need to report the problems that arise and fix them to the website owner. On the other hand, it is also a way to help you have a better overview of the current status of the website.

Frequently asked questions about SEO Audit

What are the benefits of an SEO Audit?

• Improve website performance
• Content Optimization
• Increase user satisfaction on the site
• Better site positioning on search engines
• Increase website traffic

How long does an SEO Audit take?

A thorough and thorough SEO Audit time depends on the size of your website. However, on average, it takes about 2-6 weeks to complete the website audit items.

What are the signs of a website that needs an SEO Audit?

• Organic traffic and conversion rates drop
• Websites with high bounce rate
• Keyword ranking drops for no reason

Conclusion

Hope the article will help you better understand what SEO Audit is and its importance. An SEO audit can help you put in place a solid strategy when starting a new project and is an essential part of ongoing success.

Detecting issues as quickly as possible allows you to fix issues that keep your site from reaching its full potential.