What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is the practice of evaluating how effectively your site is optimized for search engines. You can think of it as a health check that allows you to identify SEO mistakes, potential SEO issues, and opportunities to improve your rankings.
You can perform an SEO audit using specialized SEO audit tools. A well-executed SEO audit covers various aspects of your on-page SEO, off-page SEO, et technical SEO. It also provides you with several benefits, including:
- Evaluating and enhancing your site’s functionality and user experience
- Analyzing and improving your site’s visibility and ranking on search engines
- Identifying opportunities to improve your site’s content and structure
- Identifying and fixing technical issues limiting your SEO performance
- Assessing and improving your site’s SEO health
Importance of an SEO Audit
An SEO audit provides bloggers with insights into their SEO strategy. It allows bloggers to identify ranking opportunities and spot issues that prevent their content from ranking on search result pages.
In other words, the SEO audit lets bloggers evaluate the effectiveness of their SEO techniques. It allows them to determine which techniques need improvement, which ones to continue using, and which to discontinue.
The SEO audit is also helpful in certain situations, such as when you observe a drop in traffic, a decrease in conversions, or an increase in bounce rate. It may also come in handy after a Google algorithm update.
How to Perform an SEO Audit
An SEO audit is usually comprehensive, even for a small site. It is difficult to do manually, and you will typically require an SEO tool.
Multiple paid SEO tools have dedicated options for performing SEO audits. You may also use the free Rank Math SEO Analyzer to audit your homepage. You can refer to this guide on analyzing your site’s SEO using the Rank Math SEO Analyzer.
That said, here are multiple tests you should review during an SEO audit. You can consider it your SEO audit checklist. However, you should know that the SEO tool may evaluate them under a different name.
1 Keyword Analysis
The keyword analysis helps evaluate the effectiveness of your targeted mots clés. It will assess their search volume, relevance, and keyword difficulty to ensure you are targeting the right keywords relevant to your audience.
2 On-Page SEO Assessment
The SEO tool will review your webpages to see how well they conform to on-page SEO techniques and best practices. It will review your on-page SEO elements like title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and keyword usage.
3 Technical SEO Evaluation
The SEO tool will analyze the technical aspects of your site, including your website architecture, indexability, mobile responsiveness, connection protocol (HTTP ou HTTPS), and overall site performance.
4 Backlink Profile Review
The SEO tool will assess the quality and quantity of the backlinks pointing to your site. This is called your backlink profile and helps identify suspicious and spammy links that can harm your rankings.
5 Site Speed Analysis
The site speed analysis helps evaluate your site’s page load speed. A slow page load speed will negatively affect your user experience and search rankings. It will also hurt your Éléments essentiels du Web, which are among the metrics Google uses to evaluate your page experience.
6 Mobile-Friendliness Check
Google a un mobile-first indexing policy. This means it prioritizes indexing the mobile version of a site over its desktop version. Your SEO tool will evaluate the mobile-friendliness of your site by reviewing several factors, including whether it uses a responsive design.
7 URL Structure Review
A clean and descriptive URL structure gives visitors a good user experience and allows search engines to understand your page’s content. Your SEO tool will analyze your URL structure for clarity and usability and evaluate whether your URLs contain your keywords.
8 Meta Tags Optimization
The SEO tool will check whether your meta title et meta descriptions are descriptive, relevant, and unique to your webpages. It will also evaluate whether the meta tags are relevant to the visible content on the page.
9 Image Optimization
The SEO tool will assess various attributes of your images, including their alt text and file name. The alt text and file name should be unique and relevant to the image. The SEO tool will also evaluate whether your images are of appropriate size and optimized for a fast load speed.
10 Internal Linking Structure
Internal links allow visitors and search engines to find your pages and understand your content hierarchy and site structure. It will also spread link equity et Classement to your pages. Your SEO tool will review your internal links to ensure they are logical and helpful to visitors and search engines.
11 Schema Markup Assessment
Your SEO tool will check for Balisage Schema (also called structured data) in your content. The Schema markup helps search engines to understand your content. It is also a requirement for sites looking to appear for rich results.
12 Robots.txt File Review
La fichier robots.txt tells search engines how to crawl your site. Your SEO tool will check whether you have a robots.txt file and whether it is properly configured.
13 XML Sitemap Check
La XML sitemap provides search engines with URLs to the important pages on your site. Your SEO tool will check whether your site contains an XML sitemap and if it is updated and properly configured.
14 Duplicate Content Analysis
Contenu en double can dilute your PageRank and link equity. Multiple SEO tools analyze your content for potential duplicate content issues that may confuse search engines and hinder your rankings.
15 Orphan Pages Identification
Some SEO tools can identify pages orphelines on your site. These are pages that do not link to any content on your site. They do not receive links from other content either. So, the SEO tool will check for the presence of orphan pages during your SEO audit and present them to you.