seo audit
If your website is already live and you want to improve your search engine, or organic, rankings, then an SEO audit is the first task on your list. An SEO audit is like a checklist that analyzes your website for some of the most important factors in terms of ranking and effectiveness. An SEO audit also serves as a benchmark, so you can see how much your website has improved after the optimisations.
Another reason for an audit is so opportunities can be identified. Your on-page optimisation may be amazing, but the site speed may be terrible. This article will show you the major factors that are looked at during an SEO audit.
On-Site Optimisation
On-site optimisation refers to everything on your own website. How often are keywords used, and are they used in the best way? Also, how is your meta information, like the keywords and description? You can have all the links in the world pointing to your website, but that doesn't mean you will get good rankings if the website itself is poorly written or doesn't even contain the keyword you want to rank for.
An on-site SEO audit will check these factors to ensure that your website is made to capture organic traffic.
Keyword Rankings
When someone searches the keywords you are trying to rank for, where are you in the search engines? By knowing this, it will be easier to tell how well the changes are affecting your website. This also shows how much work needs to be done to get you to the top. Going from rank 100 to 1 is harder than 4 to 1.
Site Speed SEO Audit
The SEO audit also checks your site speed. This may not seem very important, but many search engines pay attention to site speed. Faster websites tend to have an advantage, so it is imperative that the SEO audit check this factor. At the same time, site speed is one of the easiest factors to fix.
Site Architecture and Menu Text
This is another factor that may seem trivial for an SEO audit, but it is actually quite necessary. Can people easily find a page after navigating to your website, or do they have to frantically search to get more information? A well designed website makes it easier for search engine spiders to crawl the website, and it makes it easier for people to find what they are looking for.
Another factor in the SEO audit is menu text. Most websites don't make good use of menu text, which is wasting a lot of SEO potential. For example, adding a keyword into your menu text can give you a big on-site optimisation boost.
PageRank and Alexa Rankings
PageRank is a metric used by Google to measure your trustworthiness in their search engine. Due to this, PageRank is a big factor in your website's rank. If all things are the same, then a higher PageRank website will usually rank on top.
Alexa rankings are also important. Alexa ranks your website against all the other websites in the world. Getting a high rank in their system shows that you are getting a great amount of traffic, which every website owner needs.
Inbound Links SEO Audit
Perhaps one of the biggest factors in your website's ranking is the number and quality of inbound links you have. An audit will show just how many links you have, and it will show what the anchor text is and where they come from. Having a large number of low-quality links can actually hurt a website, and the audit will show these problem areas so they can be quickly fixed.
This will also determine how much work is needed to get your website up to the top spot. If you have 10 inbound links and you the third website, then only a few more may be needed to get you in a higher rank. However, if you have 100,000 quality inbound links and you are at the 30th spot, then a lot of work will be needed.
Code Compliance
Anther factor for the SEO audit is code compliance. How well does your website conform to the HTML, CSS and PHP rules? There are many hacks used by professional Web designers and programmers. While these hacks may make it easier to design a website, they can also compromise the integrity of your rankings.
Having compliant code usually increases the speed of your website, and it generally gives your website a small boost in rankings. Since SEO can be very competitive, you need every boost and bonus you can get to reach the top.
Design and Usability
How good is your website design? This doesn't refer to how good it looks, but how well it performs. If you have a lot of memory-heavy images, then your design may be pulling down your speed and your rankings. Not only that, but the SEO audit will find ways to improve the design so it better ranks in the search engines.
Usability must also be very good, otherwise your rankings may suffer. If users have a hard time using features because they are buggy or slow, then there is a good chance that search engines may have a hard time reading and ranking your website. Making a website that caters to the user is one of the best ways to improve your rank, because a search engine wants to bring people to good, functioning websites.
Conclusion
The goal of an SEO audit is to help build your rank. While work can be done without an SEO audit, it will be hard to analyze if the inbound links and on-site changes are really doing anything. It all becomes guesswork and conjecture without a benchmark, and you don't want any guesswork when it comes to improving your website's rank.
Be sure to get a professional audit before going on an SEO campaign. While you can audit some of the factors yourself, such as keyword rankings and site speed, it will be difficult to know what to look for and you may not get accurate results. Hire a professional company to do your audit so you get a good, solid report about your website's current SEO standing and effectiveness.
