Attracting traffic to websites from search engines remains a crucial marketing channel for businesses of all sizes. Getting SEO right requires creating great content that people are looking for, having a technically solid website, and having a quality backlink profile.
Regular SEO audits play a key role in uncovering problems with websites that are holding back their ability to rank, and ultimately, stifling business growth. Whether you run your own business or you help clients optimize their websites, this article provides actionable insights for conducting a thorough SEO audit, cleaning up mistakes or issues, and getting better results from SEO.
There are several free and commercial SEO auditing tools available to help simplify SEO audits. SEMrush, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Sitebulb, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and GTMetrix are all well-known examples of such tools.
It’s important to understand that tools aren’t mandatory for all aspects of an SEO audit. Tools make the auditing process far more efficient, but you don’t need them all the time. Start out by simply navigating a website and trying to spot obvious problems with your own eyes.
You might immediately notice issues, such as content that doesn’t relate to the company’s mission or products and services. For example, a home renovation company with a blog post about trampolines is likely sending mixed signals to search engines and is also attracting low-quality traffic from people who aren’t going to convert.
Other issues you can spot with the naked eye are poor presentation or even typos on the home page content. While these problems won’t affect rankings directly, SEO is, at the end of the day, a channel through which businesses market their websites. If you take people from search engines to a page with spelling mistakes and badly designed graphics, they’re unlikely to do business with you.
If you notice that a site loads slowly or in a clunky way, you need to check its Core Web Vitals scores. Not only does user experience directly impact how well a company’s website can convert, but Google actually uses these scores as a ranking factor for content on both mobile and desktop.
You could put all the effort in the world into writing great content or product descriptions, but if the speed and performance metrics aren’t up to scratch, a website’s SEO results will be sub-optimal. Issues that commonly detract from good speed and performance scores include overly sized images or videos on the site and bloated JavaScript code.
Using a commercial auditing tool, you can flag problems with on-page content across all of a website’s pages. One important issue to address is where you find titles that are too short. Many SEO professionals emphasize the importance of the three kings of on-page SEO:
The SEO title is the title that appears in search engines. The page title is what people see when they click on your page from a search engine. Both need to be descriptive and ideally contain the keyword you’re trying to rank for. It’s always a good practice to have descriptive titles across all website pages, not just a few. After all, you never know which pages might succeed at bringing in traffic from your site—short non-descriptive titles decrease the chances of a page ranking or getting traffic.
Crawlability problems can really hamper SEO efforts. If Google and other search engines can’t find particular pages, the website can’t get them indexed and ranked. Site crawlers, such as Screaming Frog, can go through all of a site’s pages and detect crawlability problems.
A common issue is a website with many URLs that can’t be crawled due to poor internal linking. For example, someone might create a new web page and then nobody ever links to that page from existing content. With no internal link pointing to a page, search engine bots can’t find it and index it. Adding an internal link to each page can fix this problem and get your pages crawled.
Broken links, server issues, or incorrect redirects are some other crawling issues you might encounter during an audit. Flagging and fixing crawlability issues makes a big difference to SEO results.
A properly thought-out website navigation is useful for both users and search engines to understand a website’s structure. Sometimes, sites simply just place links to all their available products or posts directly from the top navigation bar, which is not good SEO practice.
It’s better to develop a hierarchy of content split into different categories so that users and search engines have an easier time navigating a site and understanding the context or meaning of pages. Furthermore, having those broader category pages opens up more opportunities to rank for general search terms in addition to the specific product/service search times targeted by a site.
Google’s John Mueller has previously indicated that a hierarchical site navigation is preferable versus a flat site structure because “if we’re only seeing URLs through your sitemap file then we don’t really know how these URLs are related to each other and it makes it really hard for us to be able to understand how relevant is this piece of content in the context of your website.” In other words, put the main category in the home page navigation bar and use sub-topics at the next level down.
Any good SEO audit should include checking a website’s backlink profile. Most commercial auditing tools come with a backlink analyzer. When the links pointing at a website from other domains are high-quality and relevant, Google rewards those websites with better rankings. When links come from spammy or irrelevant domains, websites don’t see a ranking benefit, and they might even get a penalty.
Knowing the number of backlinks alone that a domain has doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of those links. When you use a tool to analyze backlinks and it flags some potentially spammy links, it’s wise to disavow those links so that you can clean up the site’s link profile. Often, negative (black hat) SEO tactics send tons of unwanted links to a competing website in an attempt to tarnish that site’s reputation with Google.
Conduct a comprehensive SEO audit either quarterly or every six months to stay on top of any problems that might be hurting the ability of your site or your clients’ websites to rank. Consider using Duda if you want a professional website builder that effortlessly creates attractive, high-performance websites, and makes your job in optimizing for organic search engine success that little bit easier.
