An SEO audit is a process that evaluates your website’s performance and identifies opportunities for improvement. It covers basic on-page elements, site speed, content, and backlinks.
There are hundreds of ranking signals that search engines consider when determining where your site should rank for a given query. A website audit is the best way to keep up with these changing factors and optimize your site for maximum visibility. Find out more at SEOAudit.me.
Page speed
Page speed is one of the most important factors that affects SEO. It has a direct impact on user experience and conversion rates, and it also helps improve search engine rankings. Performing regular page speed audits and implementing necessary optimizations is crucial to achieving SEO goals.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is a great place to start when evaluating your website’s performance. This free online tool reveals how long it takes for the main content on a web page to load, as well as other important metrics such as TTFB and LCP.
You can also use tools like seoClarity to see how your website is performing based on Lighthouse data. These tools provide a wealth of insights that can help you make the most of your website’s performance. They can help you prioritize issues based on the number of affected URLs, and you can also sort by a specific issue, such as Largest Contentful Paint or Cumulative Layout Shift.
Mobile-friendliness
A mobile-friendly audit is an essential part of any SEO strategy. With more searches being conducted on mobile devices than desktop computers, non-mobile-friendly websites lose search visibility. As Google representative John Mueller points out, sites that prioritize mobile optimization are more likely to rank higher in organic searches.
A comprehensive mobile-friendly audit should analyze several factors, including responsive web design, page speed, and text readability on smaller screens. This is important because users may abandon a website that is too slow to load or unnecessarily difficult to navigate on their phones.
A site that is designed with mobile-friendliness in mind is also more likely to keep visitors on the site longer and explore its entirety than a website that is not. This is because a website that displays clarity on a small screen will make it easier for users to browse and buy products. To run a mobile-friendly audit, you can use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool or the Website Grader from HubSpot.
Backlinks
The quality of your backlinks is one of the most important factors in SEO. They provide a “vote of confidence” that helps search engines find and rank your site. However, not all backlinks are created equal. Some may be toxic and can negatively impact your SEO. For this reason, it’s a good idea to check your backlinks regularly.
You can use tools such as Ahrefs’ Site Audit or Prowly to check your backlinks for broken URLs. These are pages that point to a non-existent page on your website or are simply dead links (404 error). Having these types of backlinks can damage your SEO and negatively affect user experience.
It’s also a good idea to perform an SEO audit after a website redesign or migration. This will help you uncover any unintended SEO issues that could occur during the process, such as 301 redirects and changes in the rel=canonical attribute. This way, you can fix them before they hurt your ranking.
Content
When it comes to assessing content, marketers and SEO professionals often size up the performance of a piece of content by looking at a number of metrics. These include social media shares, comments, backlinks, and traffic. However, looking at multiple metrics can be confusing and may result in inaccurate evaluations.
A quality SEO audit takes into account the entire website and assesses its performance. It also identifies technical issues like broken links and duplicate content, which are factors that affect page rank.
It’s also a great opportunity to see what keywords competitors are targeting and whether you can capitalize on them. In addition, an audit can help you identify the best pages to optimize for particular keywords, including their title tags, URLs, and meta descriptions. It is important to note that an SEO audit should be a continuous process. As search engines update their algorithms, your site should be regularly assessed and optimized for best results.