SEO Audit: Unlock Maximum Organic Traffic For Your Website

SEO is an important makeup of an all-rounded digital marketing strategy and SEO audits are essential for any website owner who wants to make sure their website is optimized for search engines. Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, an SEO audit is a valuable process for understanding where your website stands in organic search engine rankings. By understanding where your issues lie, it’s easier to fix them to propel your website up the organic search results. Most SEO issues or errors can easily be fixed without technical skills. In this guide, we will be sharing with you the different types of SEO audits, how to perform them, how to fix them as well as the software required.

What Is an SEO Audit?

In digital marketing, search engine optimization is the process of adapting your website to be friendly to search engines crawlers to understand what your website is about, as well as favoring it higher up in the search engines results page. By doing a comprehensive SEO audit, your website can identify any issues and determine the best course of action to fix them. Contrary to what most people think of an SEO audit, it actually comprises more than just clicking a start button on your favourite SEO software to start performing an audit. There are many more aspects to SEO than just what site audit tool do, and we will explore them deeply as you read further.

Types of SEO Audits

Most SEO tools auditing feature only audit the technical and on-page aspects of SEO. A better SEO audit tool might also audit certain areas of SEO content, but off-page and local SEO auditing often requires a manual process.

Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO audit starts with the website architecture. What content management system(CMS) is it using? Is it best suited for SEO? Many CMS or in layman’s term, a website builder, do not actually have features to allow your website to be optimized for SEO. WordPress is the number one choice for most webmasters who are particular about search engine optimization and organic traffic giving you the most control over your technical SEO settings. Shopify, Wix and Weebly, most of these platforms do not have the best reputation for SEO, but they have been improving over the years.

Website structure is an important aspect of technical SEO to tell search engines such as Google what are the important pages on your website and the hierarchy. Unfortunately, most technical SEO software do not audit website structure, and this will require you to manually navigate the website to do this. URL structures such as subdomains and subpages are also very important in planning how to build your website in accordance with the webhost performance as well as SEO aspect.

Making sure your website loads and crawlable by is also important to technical SEO, also known as website availability. 4xx and 5xx errors as well as any pages unindexed due to robots.txt, SEO settings or canonical reasons are serious technical SEO issues.

One critical aspect to SEO is retaining your organic website visitors. To ensure that the user experience is good, your page speed is of the utmost importance. Selecting the right web hosting servers, the right themes, plugins or apps, 3rd party scripts, caching, CDNs etc. are all part of technical SEO that have direct improvements to your web page speed. Google Analytics can assist you in diagnosing website loading speed issues especially when you have high bounce rates.

And lastly, with most people browsing the web on their mobile phones and tablets, making sure your website is either designed for desktop and mobile or at least mobile friendly is one of the most critical technical SEO factors in Google’s eyes.

To learn more, check out my comprehensive guide on how to perform a technical SEO audit.

On-Page SEO Audit

On-Page SEO is the optimization of your meta tag such as meta title, meta description, URL strings, assess broken links, broken media content such as images, videos, embed files like slides or PDFs.

While meta titles and meta descriptions seems to have a diminished direct impact on SEO, they are still equally important to be optimized for higher clickthrough rates to improve your organic rankings. A quick and effective method is to make use of an AI writing assistant or a language model chatbot like InstructBot to generate several ideas for you at once.

Optimizing your URL strings is one of the more impactful activities to improve your SEO and broken links, broken media can improve the user experience and reduce load time.

To learn more, here’s my guide on how to perform an on-page SEO site audit and how to fix the different on-page SEO issues.

SEO Content Audit

SEO content audit is the process ensuring the content is most optimized to bring in organic traffic.

The process starts from keyword research. With a proper keyword research process, you can make a list of important search-worthy keywords to be included in the article or blog post to index them for the same keywords in the search engines.

Next, check if there are any pages in Google Search Console that have the issues “Discovered – currently not indexed” and “Crawled – currently not indexed”. These pages are not indexed mainly because they are not optimized for Google NLP which Google uses to tell if the web page is relevant for a certain topic.

Because of how Google is reducing content on their search engine, you should always try to run your content through a content SEO tool such as Scalenut, Neuronwriter or Marketmuse to index your content.

Lastly, be sure to also monitor pages with low time on page using Google Analytics. Short time on page can indicate thin content which can result in the page not being indexed or lower ranked in the search result pages.

To learn more, I have a guide on how to perform a complete SEO content audit for your website.

Off-Page SEO Audit

Possibly one of the more important audits to be doing for your website as off-page SEO impacts your search result significantly. Off-Page site audit involved the auditing of backlinks.

When it comes to backlinks, we want to look at the anchor text distribution, keywords and your competitors’ backlinks. While domain authority information is no longer publicly shared, it is still an active metric that Google uses. Factors like relevancy and domain authority are important considerations when pursuing backlinks.

Anchor text distribution is highly important to not get penalised while building backlinks. By spreading out your anchor text, instead of solely targeting the main keyword you’re trying to rank for, makes it more natural. It is a good practice to have a list of keywords you wish to rank for and rotate them around, including simply anchoring your site’s URL as well as business name.

When you are auditing a site, the keywords you are targeting, you would want to prioritise them. Personally, I would prioritise keywords that are in the middle of the first page to get them up on top, and keywords that are in the top of the 2nd page of the search engines, to move them onto the first page, as they would gain a massive boost to the clickthrough rate or impressions.

Theoretically, if you have all the same backlinks as your competitors, and more, you should be ranking above them. Knowing your competitors’ backlinks gives you ideas on how you can acquire them, if not acquire the links that are linking to the site linking to your competitor. Off-page SEO audit is a good step to give you an idea on how to formulate your digital marketing and SEO strategy.

Local SEO Audit

Local SEO audit involves NAP(Name, Address & Phone Number) consistency, geotargeting, Google Business Profile optimization, location-based keywords and social media profiles.

Ensuring citations and NAP are consistent throughout the web, such as directories you submit to and not just on your website. Conflicting information can cause Google to be unsure of your business information and then not showing your listing or having it considered as the best result for the query.

Geotargeting is an option for certain TLD(Top Level Domains) such as .com and .net to allow Google to show your website higher in the search results to the country you are targeting. Otherwise, ccTLDs(Country Code Top Level Domains) perform the same function when targeting a country.

Google Business Profile is a huge gateway for local leads, as people within your vicinity can see your business appearing more often in the Google search engines and Google Maps.

Providing accurate information as well as your important social media networks can improve your Local Pack listing card.

Targeting location-based keywords for the service or product you provide can help you to reach more local searchers. You want to ensure you are indexed for these keywords as well as building backlinks to them.

SEO Audit Tool

While many of the different audit checks can be done manually, some cannot be done without a help of a software, or would be time-consuming to do it manually. Thanks to growth in the SaaS sector, there has now been more options with SEO software to choose from with different features, different data accuracy as well as pricing. Based on the features we require in an SEO tool for an audit, we look at some of the options that are available.

Website Auditor

A website auditor helps us save time by doing most of the website audit checks for us such as technical SEO, on-page SEO and more.

My favourite seo site checkup software is Labrika. Labrika does website availability tests for multiple locations, 4xx & 5xx errors, broken links, broken images, videos and other media, large pages, multiple redirect checks, robots.txt validator, Google Pagespeed Insights, checks your meta descriptions and titles for duplication, over-optimization, thin content pages and more. Factors like redirection can unnecessarily increase your page speed. All these indepth SEO error checks makes Labrika a powerful SEO audit tool.

I also make use of Brandoverflow(Use Code BRANDOVERFLOW10 for 10% off) and SE Ranking mostly because of the wide range of features they have, such as keyword research, backlink research and more which makes it more conveniently. However, when I need indepth audits, Labrika is my go-to SEO software.

Rank Tracking

Search engine rankings for a website are constantly changing over time as search engines update their algorithms. Ranking tracking tools help search engine optimization (SEO) specialists track the progress of a website’s search engines rankings over time. These tools allow users to see how their website’s search engines rank changed over a specific period of time and identify any issues that may be causing issues with its visibility.

While although rank tracking tools are technically used for rank tracking, I actually use them for checking indexation of keywords. Most people make use of SERP checkers for checking indexation, however, when you have a large list, it is not very feasible. Instead rank tracking is a more efficient way to do so.

There are multiple rank tracking tools I use. First off is Serpwatch. This piece of software only does rank tracking. Rather than a fixed number of keywords for rank tracking, Serpwatch limits you based on the number of checks per month. This way, if you have less important sites that you do not need to monitor on a daily basis, Serpwatch is a more affordable solution for tracking large number of keywords.

The best rank tracking tool(or should I say organic brand reach tracking tool) is Nozzle.io. Nozzle.io does not work like a conventional rank tracking tool. It allows you to insert other domains or pages as assets to your brand to be tracked, such as your social media pages, Amazon/eBay/Qoo10/Lazada/Shopee store and product listing pages, your Youtube channel and videos, articles on other websites mentioning your brand and more. It also measures how much visibility you are occupying on the SERPs.

SE Ranking is simply very convenient. But of course, to use it for rank tracking can be very costly. I use SE Ranking for important sites that I monitor very often as I would often need to make use of the backlink checker and keyword research features.

I also make use of Ranktracker because of the high rate of rank tracking(approximately 4-5 times a day) for much more accurate rankings as well as other nifty features. Google Search Console is also a great tool for checking your average rankings of keywords you have impressions for.

Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools

Google Search Console is a free tool that allows you to monitor and manage your website’s search engine optimization efforts. It is the most important software that every webmaster should be making use of. Google Search Console gives you data on your website’s impressions and clicks on Google, where they are coming from, to which pages, which pages are not meeting the Core Web Vitals or Mobile Friendliness requirements from Google Chrome, pages that are indexed and not indexed and more.

Mastering Google Search Console is the first step to performing a website SEO audit.

While Google is still the largest search engine around, we should definitely not miss out on Bing with their Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing does not have the most traffic around but their traffic are usually highly converting. And of course if you are marketing to the China and Russia audience, you should be well verse with Baidu and Yandex.

Content SEO

Many webmasters are focused on writing content, but what they miss out on, is actually ensuring that the content is optimized for search engine. While we don’t want to write for search engines but for humans, search engines like Google, have algorithms like Natural Language Processing(NLP) which determines what kind of keywords should be present in a piece of content to be related to a certain topic, which then determines whether it will be indexed or not.

The best content SEO software in my experience is Marketmuse. While most content SEO tools use the top 30 results of the SERPs to determine the NLP terms, MarketMuse uses a wider data set, often giving you more relevant key terms to be optimizing for.

Neuronwriter is the next in line, due to the ability to pick your competitors in the SERPs to be optimized against, making your optimization towards the key terms much more relevant. Neuronwriter also assess internal link opportunities in your website.

If you fancy AI text generators, then be sure to pick Scalenut instead. It comes with state of the art AI writing along with content SEO features. While Neuronwriter also comes with AI writing, it is far from what Scalenut is able to produce. Cruise mode is a guided blog post generator. They are also releasing an upgraded Cruise Mode which uses the SERP Ideas feature that uses the SERP results as input for the AI as part of the new Cruise Mode, which will make the article generated even more relevant.

SEO WordPress Plugins

There are supporter camps of different SEO WordPress plugins. For me, I use SquirrlySEO because of their cloud-based features. You can do rank tracking, perform keyword research, save keywords, do simple site audits and follow a simple guided checklist to optimize your webpages. You can also connect with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, bringing in all the data you need to access in one place. They are introducing a 404 monitoring feature as well as a 301 redirection manager very soon as well.

Conclusion

To put it simply, an audit is a systematic search of your website through various search engine optimization (SEO) tools to analyze your on-page and off-page performance. It’s a way for webmasters to assess their websites’ technical SEO performance, external rankings, internal links, and keyword optimization efforts against competitor websites. The results of an audit help webmasters identify areas for optimization and focus on optimization efforts that yield the best results. In addition, rankings are often determined based on factors other than technical quality of content such as user experience, keyword density, and back-link profile.

If you are looking to better your knowledge of SEO, check out my SEO course here. If you want an SEO expert or SEO specialist to work with you, feel free to reach out to me at my SEO agency. We provide a wide range of SEO services such as eCommerce SEO and SEO audit service.