SEO audits reveal opportunities to optimize website content and technical elements, resulting in improved organic search visibility. They also help you stay competitive online and attract qualified traffic.
Conducting an SEO audit proactively is a great way to catch algorithm changes, new issues, and fresh opportunities before they impact your website. Discover more at SEOAudit.Me.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most important steps in defining SEO goals and establishing content strategy. It also helps ensure that website content accurately reflects user inquiries and outranks competitors for relevant searches.
By vetting search terms with digital marketing tools that offer key data insights, you can select the best keywords to target and expand for your content strategy. These tools can verify whether a keyword idea is actually being searched (search volume) and determine the likelihood that you will rank for it (difficulty score).
Competitor Analysis
We all know the idiom “Know your enemy.” SEO competitor analysis is an important step in understanding your industry’s landscape online and finding ways to outrank competitors.
You can discover new optimization opportunities through SEO auditing by identifying what your competitors are doing right (and wrong). Performing this analysis regularly keeps you ahead of the competition.
Remember, though, that not all of your competitors are direct commercial rivals for the same keyword searches. Often, indirect competitors such as Wikipedia, trade association websites, and directories will also rank high for certain keywords.
On-Page Analysis
An on-page analysis is the next step in an SEO audit. It examines the content on your website for keyword placement, readability, and other factors that can impact search engine optimization.
Title tags and meta descriptions are important elements of on-page analysis. They provide search engines and users with a clear overview of the page’s content.
Image captions provide supplementary information for images, aiding search engine crawlers and users alike. Including them in your SEO audit can improve your search engine rankings.
Analyzing the gathered data enables you to identify high-impact issues that limit results and new SEO opportunities. Creating an action plan and optimizing your website for these issues will lead to measurable, long-term results.
Off-Page Analysis
Many SEO audit tools allow for a deep dive into the content of a website to find new keyword opportunities, identify content that isn’t generating traffic, and optimize pages to match user search intent. This helps your website to rank higher in SERPs and drives more organic traffic.
Having an effective SEO strategy requires consistent maintenance. Conducting an SEO audit is a great way to get started, but it’s also important to perform regular audits to identify issues and uncover new optimization tactics.
Content Analysis
A content analysis provides a foundation for SEO improvement. Following tried-and-true best practices, it ensures that existing content is optimized to drive visibility and traffic. It also identifies areas that are missing or need further optimization for improved SEO performance.
Analyzing search intent helps create content that delivers the most relevant answer to a query while also maximizing readability. This is critical for attracting visitors while improving organic rankings. Additionally, evaluating image file names during the audit ensures that they are descriptive and relevant, enhancing image search results.
Site Architecture Analysis
Site structure is important for search engine optimization, as it can impact how easily users find the information they’re looking for. Sites that require too many clicks to get to the relevant content often have a high bounce rate, which is bad news from a SEO perspective.
Tools like GTmetrix can be used to check for page loading speed and URL structure. A good audit should also cover the use of noindex tags and redirect chains, as well as pagination and JavaScript rendering. A thorough audit also includes checking for links with attributes such as “noreferrer,” “noopener” and “nofollow” to ensure that they comply with search engine guidelines.
Link Building
During this audit, internal and external links are examined. Internal links help to create an information hierarchy on the website, and help search engine crawlers discover new pages. External links are a ranking factor, and help to demonstrate the relevancy of your content to search engines.
Securing valuable, authoritative links is a long-term process that requires significant time and effort. It involves reaching out to industry websites, community events, partnerships, and associations in order to secure links. It also involves analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles and identifying opportunities for your own website.