SEO audit is a website analysis that helps determine its compliance with search engine requirements and find problems that affect search engine rankings. An audit is needed to keep the resource up to date and correct errors promptly.
Experts use the results of the audit to develop a promotion strategy and determine the necessary changes on the site. Without an audit, it is difficult to understand what exactly needs to be corrected so that the site takes leading positions in the search.
In this article we will tell you how to conduct an SEO audit of a website from scratch and what tools you will need for this.
Why do you need an SEO audit?
SEO audit allows you to identify and eliminate problems that prevent search engines (SE) from correctly indexing and understanding the site. The main goal is to improve the resource in order to increase organic traffic and raise its positions in Google.
During the audit, technical parameters are checked: broken links, errors in robots.txt and sitemap, loading speed. They also evaluate the quality and relevance of the content, analyze the structure of the site, its usability, and study the link profile.
Based on the collected data, a plan is developed to improve the resource, priority tasks are defined, and traffic growth is predicted. Regular SEO audit helps:
- Understand whether your site improvement efforts are working.
- Quickly adapt to changes in the way search engines work.
- Keep the site in high positions in search.
When is it necessary to conduct an SEO audit?
Here are the main situations when it is worth conducting an audit:
Launching a new website. Analysis will help you build a promotion strategy correctly from the very beginning. It will show what needs to be done to make the resource appear in search faster.
Promotion does not produce results. If the project does not get to the top for important queries, there are few visitors or no applications – the audit will show the reasons for this problem.
The site works fine, but has stopped growing. Analysis will help find new ways for development.
The traffic or positions dropped sharply. This may be due to the fact that the search engine has imposed sanctions on the site or errors have appeared on it. The analysis will help to find and eliminate these problems.
Changing SEO contractors. If you have hired new specialists, an audit will help them see the current state of the site and create a new work plan.
The site is outdated. If the web resource has not been updated for a long time, it may lag behind the current requirements of Google. SEO analysis will show what needs to be improved so that the project meets the standards.
Even if everything is going well, it is worth doing an audit every six months or a year. Regular checks will help you maintain your position and stay ahead of your competitors.
What is needed to conduct an audit?
- Access to web analytics systems Google Analytics 4. From there you can get detailed statistics about visitors – where they came from, what pages they viewed, how much time they spent on the site, etc.
- Access to webmaster panels Google Search Console. Through these panels, you can get information about errors noticed by search engines, as well as data on external and internal links, pages in the index, and much more.
- Information about the business and goals of the website owner. In order to correctly prioritize audit and optimization, you need to clearly understand who the company’s target audience is, what products or services it promotes, and what niche it operates in.
With these tools and data, you can comprehensively analyze the current state of the site, identify problem areas, and develop an SEO promotion strategy taking into account the specifics of the business and the needs of the target audience.
Quality Search Audit Plan
A search audit of a website requires a comprehensive approach and checking all factors that affect visibility in search: technical settings, content, structure, links. This is the only way to get a complete picture of the resource’s condition and identify problems.
A basic SEO audit plan consists of the following stages:
- Collection and structuring of the semantic core, analysis of the niche and competitors.
- Technical audit – checking indexing, robots.txt files, Sitemap, loading speed, server response codes.
- Analysis of the structure – division into sections, distribution of page weight, internal linking.
- Content evaluation – checking relevance, optimizing titles and descriptions, improving visual design.
- Analysis of commercial factors – checking the availability of company contacts and addresses, delivery conditions, customer reviews, description of guarantees and return of goods. Availability of prices and payment methods, information about the company are also taken into account.
- Usability testing – testing the ease of navigation, the ordering process, the visibility of key buttons (e.g. “Order a call”, “Buy”) and the operation of the site on different devices.
- Link audit – analysis of external links, identification of low-quality donors, search for new sources.
- Visibility analysis – tracking positions for key queries.
- The final promotion strategy is a summary of the required work, calculation of the expected effect, prioritization of tasks and allocation of resources.
The set of specific audit blocks may vary depending on the type of project – online store, service site, information portal, corporate site, etc. But the analysis of semantics, technical parameters, site content, link strategy, behavioral factors or conversion remains mandatory for everyone.
At each stage, you can use automatic services. They speed up the process, help identify many errors: technical shortcomings, content problems, low-quality links, etc.
However, you shouldn’t rely solely on automation. Algorithms are not able to fully assess the degree of influence of various factors on ranking in a specific niche. This requires human expertise.
The optimal solution is to combine automatic tools and manual analysis by a specialist. Services identify obvious shortcomings, and an expert interprets the data, determines the causes of problems and the best ways to eliminate them, taking into account the specifics of the project. This approach will provide more reliable SEO audit results.
Next, we will look at each stage of the search audit in detail.
Working with the semantic core and niche analysis
Developing a semantic core and analyzing a niche is the foundation of an SEO audit, which determines the direction of all further optimization.
What work to do at this stage:
Keyword selection
- Start with brainstorming. Write down all the terms related to your business.
- Use the Keyword Planner tool to select keywords. It will show the popularity and competitiveness of various queries.
- Study search suggestions and related queries in Google. They can help you understand what users often search for along with the main keywords.
- Don’t forget about long – tail keywords . They are less competitive and can drive more targeted traffic because they often show more specific user intent.
- Collect queries for all types of resource pages – home, category pages, products, information pages.
Competitor Analysis
- Identify 5-10 main competitors in your niche.
- Use the Key.so tool to analyze their keywords.
- Study how your competitors structure their sites and what they publish on their landing pages. Pay attention to meta tags, headings, and page content.
Defining the target audience
- Create portraits of typical representatives of your target audience to better understand their needs and expectations.
- Analyze queries in terms of user intent.
- Group queries by type: informational, transactional, navigational.
- Read on the topic: Selecting keywords for SEO: types, characteristics and recommendations
Semantic analysis
- Group similar queries into clusters.
- Distribute clusters across relevant pages of the site.
- Make sure each important page has its own set of keywords.
- Don’t ignore queries for which your resource is not yet ranked. They may also be able to bring additional traffic.
Ranking Analysis
- Use tools to check positions, such as Topvisor or Labrica.
- Evaluate the share of your queries in the TOP-3, TOP-5, TOP-10, TOP-100. Pay special attention to high-frequency queries in the TOP.
- Analyze positions separately for desktop and mobile devices, as well as by region if your project is focused on several geographic zones.
- Compare your performance with your competitors to understand where you can improve.
Growth Potential Assessment
- Identify queries where you have a chance to rank higher.
- Estimate the traffic potential when achieving higher rankings.
- Identify new niches or topics that you haven’t covered yet.
Formation of strategy
- Based on the data collected, determine priority areas of work.
- Create a plan to optimize your existing pages.
- Identify topics for creating new content.
- Develop a strategy for external presence if needed.
Site structure assessment
A good structure for most sites is like a tree: from the trunk (the main page) come large branches (sections), from them come smaller branches (subsections), and on them are leaves (specific pages). This helps both people and search engines easily navigate the site.
Here is a step-by-step guide to assessing the structure:
Page hierarchy analysis
Check:
- Is there a clear structure: “Main page → Sections → subsections → Specific pages”.
- Does the structure correspond to the theme and goals of the site?
- Is there too much nesting (no more than 3-4 levels are recommended).
Checking internal links
Internal links help users and search robots navigate the site. They also affect the distribution of page weight.
To analyze internal links, you can use the Screaming Frog tool.
When auditing, please pay attention to the following:
- Make sure that you can navigate to all important pages of the site from the home page.
- Check how relevant the anchor texts of your links are.
- Find and fix broken links .
- Add contextual links to texts where appropriate.
Breadcrumb Rating
Breadcrumbs improve navigation and help you understand the structure of your site. When auditing, check:
That breadcrumbs are present on all pages except the main one
- Do they display the path from the home page to the current page correctly?
- That all breadcrumb elements are clickable.
- Availability of micro-markup for breadcrumbs (schema.org).
Detecting duplicate pages
Duplicates can negatively affect SEO. To find duplicate content, you can use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool.
What else needs to be done here:
- Check the availability of pages at different URLs (with and without www, http and https, with upper and lower case).
- Find out if your CMS automatically creates duplicate pages.
- Check that canonical URLs (rel=”canonical”) are set up correctly.
- Make sure that URL parameters that do not affect content are handled correctly.
URL Relevance Analysis
URLs should be human-readable and reflect the structure of the site. Here we check:
Are keywords used in the page URLs?
- The URL matches the content of the page.
- URL length is 75-120 characters.
- URLs use meaningful words instead of identifiers (e.g. “category-name” instead of “dkjfnat=123”).
- The URL structure is uniform for similar pages.
- The URL does not use special characters such as spaces.
Avoid common mistakes:
- Don’t make your site structure too deep or complicated.
- Don’t ignore the importance of internal linking.
- Don’t forget about breadcrumbs and how to set them up correctly.
- Avoid duplicate pages.
- Avoid using unreadable or too long URLs.
A logical website structure improves both user experience and SEO. Regularly analyze the structure of your resource, especially after adding new sections or changing content.
Technical audit of the site
What is important to check:
Page loading speed
Page loading speed is important for two main reasons:
- This is one of the factors that search engines take into account when ranking sites in search results. The faster the pages load, the higher they can be in the search results.
- Fast loading directly affects visitor satisfaction. If pages load slowly, people get nervous and eventually leave. And that means fewer sales, orders, and conversions for your business.
To check the speed, there are special online services, for example, PageSpeed Insights from Google . They will not only show how quickly or slowly the pages load, but also tell you what exactly is slowing down the loading and how to fix it.
What speed is considered normal?
- For desktop sites – up to 3 seconds to load.
- For mobile devices – up to 2 seconds.
Anything slower than that is bad. Ideally, a page should load in 1-2 seconds.
Mobile Optimization
Most people go online from their smartphones, not computers. In November 2023, more than 63% of global online traffic came from mobile devices ( according to Similarweb ).
Also, since October 2023, Google has finally switched to the Mobile-First algorithm . This means that Google uses the mobile version for indexing and ranking on both mobile and desktop devices. Therefore, it is important that the site has an optimized version for mobile devices.
To evaluate the performance of your site on mobile devices, use the Lighthouse tool. It is more convenient to use it as a browser extension.
How to use Lighthouse:
- Download and install the Lighthouse extension in your browser.
- Go to the website you want to check.
- Click on the Lighthouse extension icon → “Generate report” button.
- A new tab will open. Wait a few seconds while the tool analyzes the resource.
- Get a report with data that shows how mobile-friendly your site is according to Google’s criteria.
If the test shows problems, it means the resource does not work well on mobile devices. Perhaps the text is too small, the buttons are inconvenient to press with a finger, the pages take a long time to load. In this case, the site needs to be improved. What exactly to do – the report will also tell you.
If the diagnostics are successful, mobile optimization is in order, and then Google will rank such a web resource well.
Indexing pages
Indexing is the process by which search engines add website pages to their database so that they can be displayed in search results. Pages that are not indexed will not be able to be displayed in search results.
During an SEO audit, it is checked which pages are indexed and which are not. There can be many reasons why a site is not indexed – for example, duplicate content on different pages, incorrect redirects, problems with the robots.txt file.
To check indexing, use the Google Search Console. They contain detailed statistics on the number of pages indexed, blocked, and excluded by the search robot.
To do this, go to the “Index” → “Coverage” section in the Search Console. There, you will see up-to-date information and change graphs.
If the number of indexed pages does not change for a long time, this is a bad sign, meaning there are problems with indexing.
It is necessary to strive to ensure that all important pages of the site that should be in the search are indexed. But there are also pages that do not need to be indexed – various service, technical pages such as administrator pages, activity feeds, and the like.
If you find problems with indexing, you should analyze the reasons in the webmaster tools reports and fix them according to the recommendations. After fixing the errors, you can request reindexing of the problematic pages from the search engine.
Robots.txt file settings
Robots.txt is a text file located in the root directory of a website. It tells search robots which pages or sections can be indexed and which cannot.
Check that the file exists and is accessible. To view it, type your site’s address in the browser line and add “/robots.txt” (for example, www.vashsait.ru/robots.txt). The file can also be found via FTP access to the site.
Make sure that it correctly specifies permissions and prohibitions for search robots. Check if important sections are blocked.
If you don’t have a robots.txt file yet, you can create it in the Google Search Console panels.
Sitemap settings
Sitemap is a file that contains a list of all important pages of a site to facilitate their indexing by search engines. You can view the sitemap at www.vashsait.ru/sitemap.xml. Google Search Console and Webmaster have special “Sitemap” sections.
How can you improve your sitemap:
- Make sure that all important pages of the resource are included in the sitemap.
- Exclude pages with redirects, duplicates, and non-existent pages from the sitemap.
- Update your sitemap regularly after adding new pages.
- Check your sitemap error reports in Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools.
Server logs
Server logs are files that contain information about all requests to the site, including errors and problems.
Logs are usually accessible through the hosting control panel. You can request logs from your hosting provider.
It is important to review the logs for errors 404 (page not found), 500 (server error) and others. Pay attention to pages with long loading times. You can use special tools for log analysis (for example, Screaming Frog Log Analyzer).
Fix the errors found – redirect non-existent pages, optimize slow ones, etc.
Checking Extended Results
Checking micro-markup helps find errors in structured data on a website. Micro-markup is a special code that is added to pages to convey information about the content to search engines in a format that is understandable to them.
Why do you need micro-markup:
- Helps search engines better understand what your page is about.
- May result in rich snippets appearing in search results.
How to check microdata:
- Open Google’s Structured Data Validation Tool → schema.org markup validator.
- Enter the URL of the page you want to check.
- Click “Run Test”. Wait for the analysis to complete.
- Review the report. It will show you what types of microdata were found on the page and point out any errors or warnings.
- If errors are found, correct them according to the tool’s recommendations. After editing, check the page again.
- Checking your microdata does not improve your site’s visibility by itself. It helps ensure that your structured data is working correctly. Regularly check and update your microdata to ensure that it meets search engine requirements and the content of your pages.
Avoid common mistakes:
- Avoid duplicate meta tags on different pages of the site.
- Regularly check and fix links that lead to pages with 301 and 404 response codes.
- Be careful when setting up your robots.txt file so as not to block important sections.
- Keep your sitemap up to date to facilitate indexing.
Audit Result – Promotion Strategy
After SEO analysis, a website promotion strategy is developed – an action plan usually for 6-12 months. It specifies all the necessary work, its order and cost. It is worth starting with tasks that will quickly improve positions.
The main principle is to start with tasks that will bring maximum results with minimal costs. This could be:
- Correction of critical technical errors.
- Improving texts on key pages.
- Optimization of structure.
- Working with internal linking.
- Building up external links.
The choice depends on the current state of the web resource, its niche and level of competition.
For each task, the potential benefit is assessed – how many new visitors it can bring or how it will increase sales. The time and money for completing the work are also calculated. The result is a detailed work schedule with deadlines and budget.
The strategy also specifies the expected results in 3, 6 and 12 months. This helps to understand what will happen, how much the promotion will cost and what effect it will have. For an SEO specialist, such a plan becomes a guide to action for the next six months.
A good strategy takes into account the specifics of the business, seasonality and available resources. It is flexible and can change if new challenges arise or the market situation changes.
Conclusion
In conclusion, conducting a thorough SEO audit is essential for optimizing your website’s performance and maintaining its competitive edge in search engine rankings. While it is possible to perform an audit yourself using various tools and techniques, enlisting the expertise of a top SEO agency can provide a more comprehensive and insightful analysis. A professional agency brings advanced skills and experience, ensuring that every aspect of your site—from technical issues to content relevance—is meticulously evaluated and optimized.
