Simple Steps to Performing an SEO Audit

An SEO audit is a way to check how your website is performing and prevent spam. It’s important to do SEO audits often, as Google changes their algorithm frequently. By auditing your site, you can make sure that you’re following the best and latest practices for SEO.

You can conduct an SEO audit on your own or outsource the task. It’s up to you and how much time and money you have set aside for these tasks. Costs depend on the size of your website, the software you use and the company you hire. Ideally, you should be running SEO audits at least once a year.

Below are the steps to an SEO audit.

Site Crawl

The first step is to crawl your website to assess its current performance and identify potential areas of concern like broken links and duplicate content. Here are a few of the things we recommend focusing on:

• URL structure. Are your URLs clean, simple and direct?
• Content. Is your content well-written, informative and relative? It should also be unique and at least 300 words in length.
• Meta descriptions. Are your meta descriptions informative? They should be no longer than 160 characters.
• Links. Your website should include both inbound and outbound links. Do they all work? Do they point to relevant, trusted websites?
• Images. Are the images optimized? Are the descriptions using SEO?
• Website structure. Is your website easy to navigate? Clear and concise?

Page Speed

Page speed is another important element of SEO. A fast website promotes a positive user experience because people are able to accomplish their goals and enjoy your site. If your pages are slow to load, people are more likely to bounce off and not return.

Start with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to determine the speed of your website. This tool will also let you know which areas need your attention. Once you fix them, you can speed up your site and improve SEO.

Site Architecture

Having a solid structure is another critical part of SEO. The better the architecture, the better the user experience for both humans and bots. Have a logical and organized structure reflected in your sitemap. A strong URL is also important, as is your navigation.

Make sure that all of your main web pages are listed in the top navigation menu of your website so that visitors can find the information they need quickly. For the same reason, you should also include internal links to take visitors to where they need to go.

Web Content

You can’t test SEO without analyzing your content. Web content is a fundamental on-page SEO factor that influences your website. Google prefers to see content that is unique and readily updated. Your prospects and customers do, too.

You may need to create new, fresh content to meet your SEO goals. Be sure to write for humans while also optimizing for the search engines. It’s a hard balance, but you can accomplish this without being spammy!

Check Tags and Backlinks

Finally, check your tags and backlinks. Title tags should be concise and descriptive, helping humans and the search bots understand what your content is about. Your backlinks should also link to reputable, high quality sites that people know and trust. And, always focus on quality over quantity.

If you are interested in having WSI Star Web Solutions run an SEO audit for you, contact our team today for a consultation!