SEO Audit: Why Is It Needed And How To Conduct It Correctly?

Often site owners believe that their site is working correctly. This is not always the case, and many moments go unnoticed. Therefore, experts advise engaging a software SEO company to study all the details and SEO audit.

SEO audit: what tasks does it solve and how often is it needed?

SEO audit is a check of the site for compliance with the requirements of search engines. He must remove the obstacles that prevent the resource from advancing in the search, and show directions for further growth in its popularity.

After the analysis, you will have lists of errors and tasks in your hands. Having dealt with them, you will improve the position of the site in Google.

Any site, if it develops, will change. Therefore, website seo analysis should be carried out regularly. This is a health check of the resource and prevention of possible problems.

Effective SEO software and auditing tools play a vital role in identifying and resolving on-page optimization issues to improve website performance.

Regular SEO audit allows you to:

• find site weaknesses and growth points. This is necessary in order to properly allocate available resources (time and budget) and get the most out of them. Sometimes even small changes to the site can lead to good and fairly quick results;
• deal with indexing issues. More often, problems fall into one of two groups: not all the necessary pages get into the search engine index, or, conversely, unwanted content is indexed. For example, service pages duplicated or automatically generated by the site engine;
• respond to changes in algorithms. Google is changing its ranking algorithms in an effort to improve search results. To maintain positions and maintain traffic, you need to follow these changes and change the site to meet the new requirements of search engines. For example, use HTTPS or increase the speed of loading a site – representatives of search engines often talk about this;
• find and fix errors on the site. If the resource is “live”, errors are inevitable. Even a simple update of the engine or one of the plugins used can lead to them. Programmers working on the site also do not always comply with SEO requirements.

Example: URLs of important pages have accidentally changed on a web resource. This led to a deterioration in their positions in the search results, now they need to set up a redirect. Such an error can be found and corrected as a result of using technical SEO tools.

What you need to analyze: five directions

A comprehensive SEO audit consists of five major parts. Let’s analyze each of them.

1) Technical SEO audit. The essence is clear from the title. This is an analysis of all the technical aspects of the site that affect its position in the search, for example, sitemaps, robots.txt, the correctness of the Title and Description meta tags, the presence of duplicate pages, and loading speed. To perform a website audit and detect any technical issues, you can use the Sitechecker tool.

2) Usability audit. The more convenient the site for users, the better the behavioral factors. They affect not only the conversion but also the position of the site in the search. The significance of behavioral factors is higher for those resources that compete for top positions.

During usability analysis, you need to study navigation, structure, elements that the user interacts with, display on mobile devices, and other such things.

3) Audit of external factors. First of all, these are backlinks to the site. In addition, this group includes factors that are important for local SEO promotion.

4) Content audit. High-quality unique content has always been the basis of search engine optimization. It is necessary to analyze the level of its optimization, structure, design, and compliance with the semantic core. Content analysis allows you to understand whether it is worth increasing its volume and how best to do it.

5) Audit of commercial ranking factors. This is a separate group of characteristics that are relevant for those who sell something through the site. It includes the range of products, their descriptions, contact information, online consultation, and availability of delivery. These characteristics are taken into account when generating results for commercial requests – for example, “buy product X”.

With a full SEO audit, the approach should be comprehensive and use SEO software tools. None of these areas of analysis can be ignored. Therefore, using high-quality SEO website analysis software is indispensable.