What you need to know about website audits to improve SEO

The best level of SEO audit for your needs depends on your goals, budget, and website complexity. Start with a basic audit if you’re just getting started or have limited resources. Gradually progress to higher levels as your site grows and your objectives become more ambitious. To perform an SEO audit, you can either use software tools or hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency. Of course, the results you get will vary based on which option you choose.

Check Your Organic Traffic

There, you’ll see a list of 404 error pages that indicate broken links. Rectify any errors by removing the links or setting up appropriate 301 redirects, then request confirmation from Google to validate and implement the solutions. With this free SEO audit tool, we can analyze your website uptime, user behavioral metrics, response time, loading speed, and dozens of other variables. Google Search Console is another tool offered by Google and designed to help web admins better understand their websites. It’s a great diagnostic tool that can tell us how your SEO efforts are working – and whether there are any immediate areas of concern. Google Analytics is a free tool that is one of the best available for tracking your website’s performance.

Monitor website for issues and opportunities

Understanding what the audit is for and even doing it is not the most important aspect, but rather the actionable results that are derived from the audit. In order to improve your website performance, an SEO audit is essential. Again, there are plenty of tools for completing a search engine optimization audit.

• Keep in mind that many of these tools have overlapping functionality.
• Structured data is an area where details matter – a small syntax error can mean Google ignores it.
• Understanding issues found within a technical audit allows you to analyze a site fully and come up with a comprehensive strategy.
• Look at the «Organic Search» data, which includes users, sessions, views, and more information.

SEO Performance Audit: Key Insights and Metrics

Now, as I complete the audit, I’ll know the answers to those questions — and I’ll have actionable steps to improve my website, thus making it more competitive. The public sitemap is one that users can access to review the pages of your site, like the index of a book. Within the robots.txt file, you can include sections for specific (or all) crawlers with instructions (“directives”) that let them know which parts should or should not be crawled. These elements also present problems from a usability perspective.

Using tools like Google Search Console and SEO analytics platforms, I identified pages with declining rankings and pinpointed the causes. The focus was on relevance, accuracy, and adherence to current SEO best practices. I’ve dealt with an SEO penalty before, and reassessing keyword targeting was one of the key strategies that helped me recover my rankings. In my case, I realized I had been unknowingly over-optimizing some pages with the same keywords, causing them to compete with each other.

It identifies issues that impact visibility, rankings, and user experience. An SEO audit examines technical factors, content quality, backlink health, and on-page and off-page factors. While the best SEO audit tool can provide valuable insights and recommendations to optimize your website, it’s essential to understand that no tool can guarantee improved rankings. Search engine rankings depend on various factors, including content quality, backlinks, user experience, and ongoing SEO efforts. An audit tool can guide you in the right direction, but consistent effort and strategy implementation are crucial for achieving and maintaining high rankings.

If you’ve never audited your website, chances are you should. Websites are complex beasts and issues arise all the time—and you won’t be aware of them unless you audit your site regularly. Easier reporting tool that enables us to brand and generate reports with actionable insights for SEO Anomaly our clients. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) are external services that allow a website to host files like videos, images, fonts, java scripts, and more on a separate server. There are advantages and disadvantages to handling image and content delivery regardless of which methods you choose.

It offers an opportunity to tell Google and the other search engines which pages on your site you want to be crawled and indexed. The robots meta tag lets you use a granular, page-specific approach to controlling how an individual page should be indexed and served to users in search results. You can use tools, like HubSpot’s Website Grader, to perform an audit on your competitor’s websites to gather more insights. You can learn how your competitors are attracting visitors and see how they’re garnering conversions. To start the audit, create a list of all your company’s social media accounts.