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by Jaselyn Royan
Conducting an in-depth SEO audit is an important task, and as an SEO consultant, I can tell you that it is not easy to do an audit without technical assistance or experience.
A detailed SEO audit can let you know how well your site is performing and highlight areas for improvement. I have been a part of the audit team of SEO Penguins for the last ten years and can surely guide you about where to begin if you have no clue what to do.
SEO Penguins offers free SEO auditing services to suggest to its clients the type of services they need or the package they should subscribe to to improve their SEO score.
So, if you plan on getting SEO-related help from us or any other SEO agency, you must know that the initial step is audit.
Some agencies might charge for the initial audit. Even SEO penguins will charge for this service if you repeatedly ask for consultation and do not pay for suggested campaigns.
In this guide, I will discuss what an SEO audit is and the different types of audits, and I will list some of the important steps you need to follow to conduct an in-depth audit. So, let’s dig in right away!
SEO Audit is the technical process of evaluating how well your website is tuned for Google and other search engines. With a detailed audit, you can easily identify errors that can prevent your site from ranking on the top search results and get an idea of opportunities that can help you gain more visibility.
You can easily find out about the strengths of your site, which can make it successful, mistakes or glitches that need to be fixed, things that are not working on your site, and also about the elements that you need to update and improve.
Now, I want to break down another important piece of news for you: there are different types of SEO audits. You should know about the different types, especially if you have a large website. For your information, I have discussed the major types below.
You can conduct one big in-depth audit or tackle different aspects of your site individually using the audit types listed below.
SEO Penguins would allow you to choose the type of audit you want to conduct if you already know what might be wrong with your site.
As the name already hints, this type of audit is about identifying how well content on your site is performing. A content audit can identify areas where your content needs improvements in terms of quality or accuracy. You can find plagiarism in your site content. This in-depth audit would also highlight opportunities for featured snippets, FAQ sections, and passage ranking.
This type of SEO audit refers to checking and making sure that every element on the backend of your site is optimized according to the search engine crawlers' likings. You can check and improve meta descriptions, titles, image alt text, image resolution, structure, keyword placement, and more with an on-page SEO audit.
An off-page SEO audit involves looking at your site and other pages and domains that link to your pages. In this type of audit, your site's backlink profile will be analyzed, and you will find out about the quality and quantity of links. In addition to this, you would be able to identify any broken links.
This type of audit majorly includes checking the technical performance of your site. This can include metrics such as site speed, security, code structure, etc. By making a technical SEO audit, you would be to know the areas that are disrupting the performance of your site and would also bring opportunities to fix technical problems. You can also get technical SEO services from SEO Penguins to boost your site's performance.
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your business site to rank well in the local search results. A local SEO audit would cover all elements (on-page & off-page) that have something to do with ranking your site in the local searches. You can find areas where you can improve your position in the local market.
Now that I have listed the top five types of SEO auditing, I suggest you read the steps for making an in-depth SEO audit to know about the overall health of your site and identify areas for improvements!
I have listed the steps you need to follow to make a detailed seo audit. If manual auditing is difficult, you can always get an SEO Penguins audit.
Building backlinks is very important if you want to improve your site's authority in the search engine's eyes. You need to check the internal and external links to see if they work well. Broken links can ruin your chances of getting on the top serps, so you must find and fix them.
You need to ensure that you properly link different pages within your site and get backlinks from sites relevant to your niche but not your competitors. Building links with high-authority sites can help you build your credibility and win a better position in searches. SEO Penguin’s link-building services are best in this regard.
In seo auditing, you need to check the site structure and ensure that all the information or content on your site is well structured and placed in the right order. Generally, a site structure would contain the first landing to the home and divided routes towards different sections such as services, blog, about us page, etc.
You need to check whether the structure is accurate; if not, you need to get help from your site’s developers and designers. You also need to check and remove any overlapping links that might be ruining the user experience of our site.
Finding thin content is one of the most important steps in making a site audit. You must know that Google and other search engines don’t like thin content and after the Panda algorithm update, the search engine has demoted all sites with thin content.
Thin content is the type of content that doesn’t offer any value to the reader. Generally, posts that are under 400 words are deemed thin. Today, you must ensure every blog post or content you add is at least 800 to 2500 words.
By generating long-form content, you can deliver more information, get more engagement, build opportunities for internal links, and adjust more keywords and LSIs. You can order the content optimization service of seo penguins to fix thin content problems in a jiffy.
You also need to make sure that you check originality in your site’s content. If your website content or blogs are duplicated or plagiarized from another source, it will damage your authority, ruin your ranking positions, and even get penalized by the search engine.
Today, you can access online plagiarism checker tools to help you scan your site’s content and find duplication. You should remove duplicate content or paraphrase it in different words if you don’t want your site to be penalized or lose its ranking position.
Keywords are important as they make your site more discoverable for the search engine and your target audience. You have to scan your site and identify the keywords you have used. The keywords you add must always be relevant to your niche, have a high search volume, and have low competition. You can use a keyword analyzer tool to help you with this task.
When optimizing keywords, you need to ensure that you only add them where they make the most sense in context. It can be hard for you to adjust keywords on every page, as overstuffing can lead to being deemed as spam. This is why experts always recommend adjusting or using keywords in your site’s blog posts.
During a site’s SEO audit, you must check the meta tags. Meta tags include the title and description that appear in Google search results. These tags help the search engine determine whether the page's content is worthy of indexing. You must know that meta tags are one of the biggest factors the search engine considers when ranking a page on its serps.
You can easily use online meta tag analyzer tools to determine whether your tags need improvements. You need to ensure that your title tag doesn’t contain more than 50 to 60 characters, your description doesn’t exceed more than 150 characters, and both contain your targeted keywords.
You need to review all of your site’s pages and see if there is room for improvement. Note that if you are not updating your site’s content or other elements, there is always a chance that someone else will take your position in the search results.
Making even the smallest update to your site’s pages would signal Google that it should crawl that page. Regular updates would help keep your site relevant and fresh for the target audience. You can easily retain your position in the top searches by updating your site regularly.
You can update your blog by adding new information on your pages, adding different keywords, repurposing your old content in different words, and publishing new content regularly.
Page speed is crucial for ranking your site at the top of search results. After the Google speed update, if your site or any of its pages take more than two to three seconds to load, it will decrease its ranking as low page load time results in a high bounce rate.
You can use page speed analyzer tools to check whether the load time is well-optimized. You need to find any glitches that might be making your pages lazy and fix them. You can also improve load time by compressing the size of images on your site.
You can contact experts at SEO Penguins and get help optimizing your page load time and run speed for every device.
Today, the majority of Google's traffic is from mobile phone users. So, if your site is not responsive on small screen devices such as mobiles, it will not rank well or get any traffic or leads. Good mobile responsiveness has been one of Google's major ranking factors for the last ten years.
You must use mobile-friendly test tools to check whether your site works fine on smaller devices. If not, you must immediately improve that page or the complete site. By making your site mobile-friendly, you can surely win the interest of Google and the traffic.
Using HTTP is not recommended for your site in this competitive era. Google uses HTTPS as one of its ranking signals as it is quicker and more secure. It is easy to verify that your site is using HTTPS by manually typing the different non-HTTPS iterations of its domain, such as www.site.com, site.com, and http://www.site.com, and confirming that they have all been 301 redirected to the HTTPS iteration.
Next, you should scan the search index for any instances of non-HTTPS URLs. Search Console's Index Status report may be used to determine which URL version of your website is canonicalized. You can also manually canonicalize the HTTPS versions if necessary.
If you want to conduct an in-depth site audit, you need to have technical experience or be familiar with using AI tools that can help you with this task. In this guide, I have tried to explain in detail what a SEO audit is, the different types of audits you can make and also discussed above.
From fixing thin content to switching to HTTPS, I have discussed some of the important tasks you need to perform to not only find issues in your site but also to improve them if you want to win a good ranking position and build your authority in the eyes of the search engine and your target audience.
If you find all this to be too much for you, you don’t have to stress about manual execution anymore. You can easily order SEO services from SEO Penguins and get your site improved in very little time and the most affordable budget. You can get a free proposal from our team today!
I hope that you find this guide helpful in auditing your site. For more informative SEO-related blogs, stay tuned to SEO Penguins!