What is an SEO Audit?
SEO audits are of primary importance to find out why you’re not getting SEO results. An SEO audit explores ways to help you improve your SEO campaigns with the goal of identifying weak points in your campaign that are pulling down your performance. SEO audit is an indispensable process in any SEO exercise and all professional SEO Companies do SEO audit before undertaking the SEO task.
Points to remember before starting an SEO Audit:
- The amount of time investment for any audit will depend on the size of your website.
- A good SEO audit is all about asking the right questions.
Before beginning, consider all the following…
- What is the history of your website?
- Has work been completed previously?
- Have any new strategies been applied?
- Have a minimum of 30-50 keywords to track.
- Do you have the time to commit to an audit?
SEO checklist with SEO audit points and how they should be performed.
Step 1: What Are Your Strategic Objectives?
The aim is to determine what your long-term goals are for your SEO campaign and business. Your Strategic Objectives should be what your business is trying to achieve through SEO. Clear Strategic Objectives ensure your campaign is focused and helps you achieve your goals.
Your Strategic Objective should be a mix of SEO KPIs and business KPIs.
Step 2: Keyword Analysis
The goal is to find out whether you are using the right keywords in the right places? And, to find untapped keywords that could lead to “easy” wins.
Every keyword that you decide to target is a goal you want to achieve for your SEO campaign. That means you need to use the S.M.A.R.T. principle.
Be Specific
You need to choose a specific set (10, 20, or 100 keywords) depending your budget and resources.
Measurable
You must measure the performance of your keywords. Tracking your core keywords is a good way to see how Google is valuing your website. It’s also a way to measure the impact of your link acquisition.
Attainable
Do not target keywords that are beyond what your website is capable of. If your site is new, then you should target long-tail keywords.
Relevant
Your keyword should be relevant to what your business does.
Time-Bound
Your goal is to improve your site’s performance for a keyword, and you should try to achieve that goal as fast as possible.
This method is only the first step to validating your current keyword set.
Step 3: Competition Analysis
The goal is to validate your keywords and find missed link opportunities.
Objectives for analysing your competitors:
- To see whether a keyword is too competitive.
- To find new keyword opportunities.
- To see what types of content are performing well
- To find link opportunities.
Step 4: Site Architecture
The goal is to ensure visitors and Google, both have all they need to navigate and crawl.
Step 5: Technical Inspection.
The goal is to identify hidden technical issues that are affecting user experience and your search engine performance.
With tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider you can identify many of the prevalent issues.
Step 6: Images Analysis
The goal is to ensure your images are working for you, not against you.
Step 7: Mobile Checks
Mobile SEO has become increasingly more important because 60% of Google searches are from mobile devices. Google has recently started using their Mobile-First Algorithm. This means that Google now uses the mobile version of your site for mobile and desktop searches.
Step 8: Page Level & Element Checks
The goal is to ensure that each keyword-targeted landing page is optimized effectively.
It is important for every audit to examine the quality of content and the optimization of each page. You need both strong content and effective optimization to drive search engine traffic.
Step 9: Content Analysis
The goal is to analyse whether your content is unique & fixating? To rank in 2019, your content needs to be gluing.
Step 10: User Experience (UX)
RankBrain is Google’s new AI algorithm which measures how users interact with your site. In other words, your content needs to make users happy.
Step 11: Link Analysis
The goal is to identify strengths and weaknesses in your link profile. Are you being held back by bad back links?
Backlinks can make or break an SEO campaign, so a large portion of an audit should be spent analysing the client’s link profile.
These are checks and results from these checks should form part of an ongoing strategy.
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DigitalTokri Pune is an accomplished SEO Company in Pune with proven track record. Call us for all your SEO needs.
