The proper audit is the ground for successful website promotion. The basic tasks facing an SEO specialist are a complete audit of the content, structure, and technical features, detection of weaknesses, planning, and implementation of the required enhancements, taking into consideration all the peculiarities of search engines. And most importantly, such analysis and optimization should be done on a frequent basis cause search algorithms are always being changed, and numerous SEO tactics become outdated and no longer work.

Of course, it’s best to entrust SEO optimization to professionals. The modern market offers a huge number of outsourcing opportunities, and it’s not hard to hire an experienced team such as Mellow Promo SEO agency. The main thing is to choose a proven contractor with whom you can entrust your company promotion on the web.

In this article, we will briefly tell you how to perform an SEO audit. This information will be useful for beginners in SEO and business owners who want to understand the topic before hiring a contracting agency. Let’s go!

What Is an SEO Website Audit?

An SEO audit is an examination of a website’s quality according to certain criteria. By examining the website, you may establish whether it complies with search engine standards, which impact the resource’s quality. All of this will help you determine exactly what you need to do to raise your page’s ranking and engage as many visitors as you can.

An SEO audit enables you to determine how search engines “like” your website and which flaws you should fix. Thus, you may assess the chances of your project and identify the most important modifications.

What Is a Good Site in Terms of SEO?

Here are the main criteria that a quality website meets:

  • website pages load quickly and without errors; 
  • pages contain unique content that meets users’ expectations;
  • your website is adapted for mobile devices and has a convenient structure;
  • you have backlinks from various authoritative resources;
  • users spend a sufficient amount of time on the website.

All of the above criteria are of equal importance for promotion. After all, high-quality articles won’t be beneficial if visitors have to wait some time for them to load. And a good backlink profile and link building won’t help a resource that posts useless information.  

How to Perform an SEO Audit?

There isn’t a general template or checklist that can be used for any website. But there are some standards for doing site analysis.

Step 1. Index

Indexing a site is a process during which search engines obtain information about the pages of a resource. The resulting data is stored in a database called a search index. Indexing is needed so that users can find your resource.

For instance, Google sends robots to the site. They read the code and regularly visit the resource pages. The frequency depends on how often the content changes, the number of pages, and the amount of traffic. To check whether search robots are indexing the resource correctly, you must first go to search engine services such as Google Search Console

Step 2. Traffic analysis

If you are auditing not just a newly created site but a resource that has been functioning for a long time, it’s crucial to determine the current situation with traffic from organic search. In Google Analytics, you can get all information about traffic — the total number of visitors, popular queries, and devices from which most often visit the site. The main task is to understand whether the flow of visitors is stable and which pages are the most popular among users.

Step 3. URLs

A good page URL is between 100 and 120 characters long and is primarily made up of words and keywords that characterize the page. Avoid using complicated URLs. Give preference to static links. Separate words in the URL with hyphens or underscores — such spelling is better perceived by site visitors.

Step 4. Website loading speed

People are impatient and quickly close slow websites. Moreover, search algorithms have a certain time limit for processing each resource, so fast sites are indexed better and in a shorter period.

Step 5. Backlink profile

The quantity of backlinks to your website from other domains is one of the markers of resource quality for search engines. This is a very important factor in ranking the website. Some robots — Ahrefs, Serpstat, Majestic, and Megaindex — gather link data. Since robots can’t generally analyze the full Internet, none of these services have all the information available.

Try to avoid spammy anchors, for which you can get filters like Google Penguin. They limit site rankings for a period from one to several months, which can lead to a significant loss of traffic from searches.

Conclusion

Of course, SEO audit isn’t limited to the above point. It also includes content analysis, site structure, keywords, mobile-friendliness, images, and more. Remember that the main goal of such an audit is to identify the most affordable ways to increase website traffic in general and certain pages in particular. After that, it’s necessary to draw up a detailed action plan that will have the biggest impact on the smallest investment.