Audits don’t need to be hundreds of pages long, nor should they only be accessible and understood by the most technical of people. A great SEO audit should effectively communicate a prioritized list of actions and justifications that clearly lays out the steps that need to take to improve organic search performance
Starting your SEO audit
Run a site crawl with the SEMrush Site Audit tool
- Click ‘New Site Audit’
- Enter your domain name and project name
- You shouldn’t need to edit any settings except the limit of checked pages
- Start your site audit and let the crawler run
Check For Toxic Links
If Google considers a link to be an attempt to manipulate your search rankings, it violates their Webmaster Guidelines.
What Are the Next Steps After an SEO Audit?
Once you have completed your SEO audit and have identified issues that could be holding your site back, it is time to jump straight into fixing these.
- Prioritize tasks based on the severity of the issue and the resources and effort required to fix it.
Fix Broken Internal Links
If a user clicks a link on your site, they expect to be taken to the page, not served a 404 error.
Audit Your On-Page SEO
On-page SEO relates to things like optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, image alt tags, creating optimized content, internal linking, etc.
- Use the SEMrush SEO Checker tool to quickly find actions that you can take to improve your site’s SEO.
Benchmark Your Rankings and Understand Your Competitors
The more you know about what other players in the same space are doing, the better your chance of success.
- Set up position tracking for your site
- Run your domain through the Domain Overview tool to see a clear visualization of a competitive positioning map
Identify Thin Content Pages
Thin content is typically of little value to both users and search engines, yet spreads your site’s authority thinly
- Put in place a solution to resolve these issues
- This is usually either improving these pages by creating great, unique content or preventing the pages from being indexed by adding a noindex attribute.
Check For Duplicate Versions of Your Site in Google’s Index
Ensure that Google is indexing only one version of your site.
- Your site should only have a single version indexed, and you need to check for duplicates by running a site:domain.com search.
Confirm That Your Site Uses HTTPS
If your site is not using HTTPS, it should be
Why should you audit your site?
You just landed a new SEO client and are putting together a growth strategy
Compare Your Content To Top Ranking Pages & Analyze Searcher Intent
Google has gotten good at understanding the intent of a searcher’s query and pages that rank typically address this
- Spend time analyzing the top-ranking pages for the search terms that you are targeting
What is an SEO Audit, and Why is it so Important?
An SEO audit is the process of identifying issues that could prevent your site from ranking on Google and other search engines.
- If there are issues that mean that your site cannot be properly crawled and indexed, your content doesn’t stand up against your competitors, or you have toxic links (just a few common issues that an audit could highlight), you will be missing out on organic traffic.
Clean Up Your Site Sitemap
Prioritize removing any incorrect pages from your sitemap as a quick fix action.
- In your Site Audit report, you will see issues relating to incorrect URLs in your sitemap presented as errors. Fix them before they become a 404 error.
Find and Fix Duplicate Content Issues
Duplicate content on your site can cause issues that prevent you from ranking as highly as you could
Check For Mobile-Friendliness Issues
If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, there is a very good chance that you are not properly putting your user’s experience first
- Mobile-friendliness has been a ranking factor since 2015
- Check for issues in the Mobile Usability section of the Enhancements tab on Search Console
Analyze Your Site’s Speed
It is more important than ever that your site is fast, both from SEO and UX perspectives.
- Head to your SEMrush Site Audit report and within the issues tab, you will see slow pages highlighted on the list of errors, including load time statistics.
Analyze and Resolve Further Indexation Issues
Stay in Google Search Console and head to the Coverage page in the Index tab.
- If you see errors here, it means that there are issues that could be preventing your site from being crawled and indexed correctly – you need to address these issues ASAP.
Running a Backlink Audit
SEO audits should always be carried out as part of an SEO audit
Fix Issues With Orphan Pages
Orphan pages are those that exist on your site but are not linked to from any other page.
- The quickest fix here is to either add key pages to your site’s navigation or add at least one internal link from within relevant content.
Understand Your Site’s Page Experience
User experience is finally being introduced as a ranking factor in Google’s upcoming Search Engine Optimization (SEO) update.
- It is something that you need to be monitoring and acting upon, and should be included in your SEO audits.
Core Web Vitals
The initiative launched by Google in May 2020 is intended to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web
- They will soon become a ranking factor
- Audit your search engine’s ‘enhancements’ tab to see reports on poor URLs
Check Your Redirects
If redirects are implemented incorrectly, this can cause crawl issues
- In almost all instances, you should be using 301 redirects rather than 302s.
- Check the Site Audit report for temporary redirects and if these are intended to be permanent redirects, update these to 301 instead than 302.
Check Your Site’s Indexed URLs
Is the number of indexed results what you would expect? If not, you might be facing an issue with duplicate or thin content pages that needs to be addressed
- If the result is lower than expected, you may find that your site isn’t being crawled or indexed as it should be
Check For Manual Actions
If your site is deemed to be in violation of Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines, they can (and occasionally do) issue a manual action
- This used to be referred to as a manual penalty.
- It means that your site’s rankings will drop and that you won’t be able to rank as highly as you previously were until the action is revoked.
