Are you looking to improve the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your website? A comprehensive SEO audit is a great place to start. By evaluating the performance and effectiveness of your website's SEO, a SEO audit can help you identify any issues that may be holding your site back and provide valuable insights and recommendations for improvement.
In this blog post, we'll outline the steps you can take to conduct a thorough SEO audit of your website.
Step 1: Collect data
Before you begin your audit, it's important to collect data on your website's performance, as well as data on your competitors. This will provide a baseline to measure against as you work through the audit process. Some key data points to collect include:
- Traffic: Use tools such as Google Analytics to track the number of visitors to your website, as well as the sources of that traffic (e.g. search engines, social media, referral sites).
- Search engine rankings: Use a tool such as Ahrefs to track the keywords for which your website is ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Competitor data: Use tools such as Ahrefs or to gather data on your competitors' websites, including their traffic, rankings, and backlinks.
Step 2: Analyze your website's technical SEO
The next step in your audit is to evaluate the technical SEO of your website. Technical SEO refers to the underlying factors that affect your website's ability to be found and crawled by search engines. Some key technical SEO factors to consider include:
- Crawl errors: Use tools such as Google Search Console to identify any crawl errors on your website. Crawl errors occur when search engines are unable to access certain pages on your site, which can negatively impact your rankings.
- Broken links: Check for broken links on your website, as these can prevent search engines from crawling your site effectively and negatively impact your user experience. Use a tool such as Screaming Frog to identify broken links.
- Page loading times: Ensure that your website loads quickly, as slow loading times can negatively impact your rankings and user experience. Use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to assess your website's loading times and identify any issues.
Step 3: Evaluate your on-page optimization
On-page optimisation refers to the content and structure of your website, and is an important factor in your search engine rankings. Some key on-page optimisation factors to consider include:
- Titles and headings: Make sure your titles and headings are optimised for search engines by including relevant keywords and using proper formatting (e.g. H1, H2 tags).
- Content: Ensure that your website content is high-quality, relevant, and valuable to your target audience. This includes analysing the length and depth of your content, as well as its readability and formatting.
- Metadata and tags: Review your website's metadata (e.g. meta titles and descriptions) and tags (e.g. alt tags) to ensure that they are optimised for search engines and accurately reflect the content on your pages.
Step 4: Assess your website's content quality and relevance
In addition to ensuring that your website's content is optimised for search engines, it's important to make sure that it is high-quality and relevant to your target audience. Some key factors to consider include:
- Quality: Is your content well-written and informative? Does it provide value to your audience?
- Relevance: Is your content relevant to your target audience and aligned with your business goals?
- Freshness: Is your content regularly updated to stay current and relevant?
If you would like more information how Socially Inspire can help with your websites SEO we currently offer a free SEO video audit service that you can contact us about.
