How to Perform an SEO Site Audit for Maximum Benefit

Lennon Liao

According to a study we conducted at BrightEdge, an estimated 51 percent of all your website traffic comes from organic search. Other factors such as direct traffic, paid search and social media account for less than half your traffic combined. This means that a site with poor SEO could be missing out on enormous potential for growth and profit. An SEO site audit is critical for understanding how a site is performing in search engine rankings and how that position can be improved.

Understanding an SEO Site Audit

An SEO site audit helps site owners break down the different components of SEO and pinpoint their weakest points and eliminate any errors that could be damaging their rankings with the search engines. As sites improve their rankings through SEO, they will naturally receive more organic traffic and they will position themselves for tremendous growth.

A thorough site audit will look at a variety of factors including:

  1. On-page SEO
  2. Technical and Accessibility SEO
  3. Linking

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO describes the steps you take to ensure that the content itself has been optimized to attract visitors. This means paying close attention to the page descriptions and tags that communicate with search engines and potential readers. Although fixing problems with on page SEO tends to be straightforward, it is important to avoid neglecting details.

  • Title tags should be unique and include keywords relevant to the content on the page
  • Meta descriptions should be engaging to encourage those reading the description on SERPs to click while also including keywords

Meta Tags in SERPs

  • Images should include alt tags that have keywords as well as image names that give accurate descriptions, such as [BrightEdge Logo] instead of just [Logo]
  • Headings need to use keywords– particularly in H1– while also breaking up text and making it more scannable
  • Content should clearly describe the purpose of the site without keyword stuffing,

Technical and Accessibility SEO

These aspects of the SEO website audit will examine the more technical areas of your site. It will ensure that your page can be easily crawled by the spiders from Google. If a website is a challenge for Google to crawl, it will rank much lower. It can also impact how well users can move around your website. A site that is difficult to maneuver will have higher bounce rates– according to KissMetrics clear navigation is an excellent way to keep visitors on the site. The technical part of the SEO audit will check for the following issues.

  • The site navigation must be intuitive to ensure that users and spiders can easily move around
  • The site should load quickly regardless of device
  • The directory structure should be less than 3 folders deep
  • All 302 response codes that are no longer temporary need to be updated to 301s to be more search friendly and to pass the search equity onto the successor page
  • All 404 error codes and broken links need to be repaired
  • URLs should be rewritten to be user friendly and excessive appends reduced
  • Ensure pages have been indexed and that the site ranks well for the company name
  • All duplicate content should be eliminated
  • The site should be mobile-responsive or redirect at a 1-to-1 ratio to a mobile version of the website

Linking SEO

When sites link to one another, it is the virtual equivalent of giving each other a handshake. Google assumes that when a reputable website links to another site, that site is also reputable. Conversely, if a poorly designed or penalized site has inbound links from other websites, the search engine has in the past viewed those websites as similarly low quality. It is therefore important to make sure that all the websites that you link to still exist and that they are worthy of the link to avoid hurting your own SEO efforts.

  • Links should use relevant anchor text and be applicable to the content itself
  • Outbound links should open in new windows
  • Links should only point to reputable sites
  • Any links that are broken should be removed or replaced

Completing the SEO site audit

There are a variety of different tools available to help sites successfully complete a mobile site audit. You can use a combination of a few different platforms, such as Google’s Webmaster Tools, to check for a variety of different factors.

BrightEdge offers clients a thorough SEO site audit that can provide them with the results in a single dashboard. This can help them identify clear tasks to be completed and assign jobs within the platform so the site can be fully optimized.

BrightEdge Site Audit

The easy-to-read dashboard makes it simple to keep all of the errors and the progress made in a single place so that the audit can be regularly monitored throughout the process.

BrightEdge Site Audit Trended Errors

An SEO site audit is a critical component to benchmarking, planning, and keeping a website optimized and prepared for the demands of ranking well in SERPs to generate traffic. Websites should regularly audit and review their sites to ensure optimal site function. When performing a site audit review the major components of the to ensure that the website audit is thorough and maximally useful.

 

How do I get personalized site audit for my website?

Demo-Banner