When a business comes to you looking for better results from their online presence, one of the most common requests is to get more traffic from SEO. And a crucial way to boost traffic is to build a picture of how their site looks from an SEO perspective through an audit and improve areas of weakness. This article presents useful insights for getting better SEO results from our recent webinar in which three experts performed live SEO audits on user-submitted websites.

Often, businesses spend much of their SEO efforts (and budgets) on coming up with more and more content without stopping to consider if they’re getting the fundamentals of SEO right. Because the truth is that modern SEO is far more complex than writing a bunch of content and making sure the right keywords are on each page. There are plenty of technical and non-technical nuances to SEO; an audit plays a crucial role in determining if a client’s website is nailing down those nuances and having the best chance of bringing in the most traffic from search engines. 

When a client comes to you looking for SEO services, always start with a technical audit to get an idea of everything that’s happening on the site. This initial audit lets you prioritize the SEO roadmap and get an idea of some quick-win opportunities. Audits can throw up major stumbling blocks preventing good SEO results that aren’t necessarily immediately visible or obvious to clients on their sites. 

It’s imperative to tie the results of an audit into the specific client’s business goals and strategies. Are they looking to expand to a new market segment? Or maybe they just want more traffic from their current target market? Make sure to get this added contextual info from clients to improve the recommendations you can provide after any audit.

We live in a mobile-first world now with the majority of Internet traffic to websites coming from mobile devices. An easy initial check to do is to assess site speed using at least two tools (PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and GTMetrix, are all examples that are free to use). If a client is selling a service on a page that loads slowly, they could be missing out on lots of conversions. 

Delving deeper into the reasons for low-speed scores can reveal issues that fixing will quickly make a big difference to SEO results. One common issue is pages that have lots of unused JavaScript code. Loading this code is resource-intensive, and if it’s not needed on the page, you need to instruct the client to get rid of it either through an in-house developer or enlisting the help of a freelancer. The delivery of CSS (code used to style websites) can also impact site speed; make sure to optimize its delivery with caching and asynchronous loading.

An underrated way to audit a website is not to solely rely on tools, but rather navigate a website with the mindset of the client’s target audience. For example, if the client sells safari tours in Africa, visit that website and ask if it’s immediately obvious what this website is selling and if it’s easy to understand the product or service offerings as a user. You might flag potential issues that impact both user experience and SEO results, such as:

• 
  Location-specific pages with thin content written for the sake of having some content rather than providing value to users about that service in that specific location
• Annoying pop-ups displaying immediately upon first page load which could not only frustrate users but also negatively impact search rankings
• Chunks of text that would serve clients much better as an FAQ that could then be marked up with schema and appear as rich results in search engine results pages
• Sites with overly large headings or clunky menus that deter people from scrolling down the page, filling in forms, or navigating through the site to do what the business wants them to do

These are just some examples of problems that checking the site from a user perspective can bring to your attention in a way that’s perhaps more intuitive than relying only on the set of recommendations presented to you in an SEO audit tool.

Coming back to tools, a website crawler tool can prove very useful during any SEO audit in identifying a number of structural issues hindering SEO performance. The go-to option often used by SEOs is Screaming Frog, but there are other alternatives available like DeepCrawl. These tools emulate the way Google and other search engines crawl your website. 

The results displayed in a site crawler tool might look initially a bit intimidating, but the popular ones all have visualization options to get a more intuitive understanding of the tool’s findings. Some findings flagged by these tools include non-indexable pages or pages with other errors. 

The other type of problem a site crawler can easily identify is lots of auto-generated pages with very little content on them. This can happen when you add a tag or category to blog posts in your CMS which then automatically creates new pages with very little content on them. 

It’s important to remember that each site has a crawl budget, which Google defines as the number of URLs Googlebot can and wants to crawl. When you have lots of pages with thin content, this can negatively affect your crawl budget and make it more difficult or extend the duration until Google finds your most important pages. So, a quick win is to use a site crawler to find this thin content, no-index those pages, and ideally, adjust settings in your CMS so as not to generate these new site pages every time you add a tag or category.

There are of course other elements to consider during any SEO audit. But using these insights should provide a solid basis to spot pitfalls that could be holding clients back and ultimately boost the traffic they get to their sites. 

Related:
Webinar Insights | How To Audit Sites The Right Way For SEO
What To Focus On When Running A Website Audit?