If you’re running a business with a website as your communication and marketing channel, you need to ensure your site is truly ready to compete on search engines. An SEO audit plays a crucial role here; it’s like a health checkup for your website that clearly reveals whether you’re heading in the right direction. This article will introduce you to what is an SEO Audit and guide you through 10 essential steps that will transform your website into a genuine sales-generating tool.
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is the process of examining and evaluating your website’s performance across various aspects, including site structure, content quality, page loading speed, mobile compatibility, URL management, and internal linking—all factors that affect search engine rankings like Google. This tool enables you to identify areas for improvement and development, enhancing your website’s quality and helping it achieve higher search rankings. The advantage is that you’ll understand your website’s strengths and weaknesses, fix issues precisely, reduce costs for creating new content, and continuously improve your SEO strategy’s effectiveness.
10 Steps to Conduct an SEO Audit: Your First Steps to Successful Sales Growth
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Verify URL and Domain
Choose a single primary URL. The primary URL is your main website address that should be clearly configured and communicated to Google to ensure good rankings and avoid duplicate content issues from multiple URLs. Redirect all URL versions to the primary version. Additionally, verify that you have an SSL Certificate for security.
For example, https://name.com consists of key components: https:// is the protocol indicating a secure connection (SSL), and name.com is the website’s primary domain name.
Choosing a single primary URL, such as https://name.com, means selecting either the non-www or www version, but setting redirects to the primary version to prevent SEO issues caused by Google viewing https://www.name.com and https://name.com as different versions, or https versus http as different URLs.
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Review On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is the process of optimizing various elements within your website pages to suit both users and search engine algorithms like Google. The main goal of on-page SEO is to help your website or specific pages rank well on the first page of search results when users search for keywords related to your content.
On-Page SEO elements include optimizing content to match search intent, reviewing and improving title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags for proper keyword placement, adding Internal Links, structuring URLs appropriately, ensuring fast page loading and mobile-friendly design, checking content structure (H1, H2, H3) and appropriate keyword usage, and verifying correct image usage and ALT Text.
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Check Website Speed and Performance
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to examine page loading speed and check Core Web Vitals, which are important factors Google uses for ranking. This helps identify bottlenecks causing slow loading, such as large images or scripts that need optimization, allowing immediate fixes. The result is improved user experience, reduced bounce rates, and better SEO scores from Google, which favors fast-loading websites.
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Verify Mobile Friendliness
Check that your website displays properly on mobile devices through Google Mobile-Friendly Test and optimize UI/UX accordingly. This increases the likelihood that mobile users will stay on your site longer and reduces bounce rates. Mobile Friendliness is one of Google’s ranking factors that emphasizes mobile user experience.
For example, the Google Mobile-Friendly Test checks whether your site displays full-screen or has issues with font sizes and difficult-to-click links, allowing you to fix problems precisely.
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Check Indexing
Ensure that Google can index all your web pages. You’ll be able to see and fix pages that Google hasn’t indexed or that have errors, such as 404 pages or Robots.txt errors, which helps your website achieve its full ranking potential.
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Review Backlinks and Broken Links
Checking the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your website helps assess your site’s credibility and SEO ranking, while fixing broken links improves user experience and reduces crawl errors.
For example, use tools like Ahrefs or Google Search Console to check quality inbound links and broken links for appropriate management and fixes.
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Analyze User Behavior
Analysis with Google Analytics helps you understand which pages users visit, how long they stay, what interests them, and their entry channels. This data helps improve content and design to better match user preferences.
For example, Google Analytics shows real-time visitor reports, popular pages, bounce rate, and user journey paths.
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Check for Duplicate Content
Verify whether duplicate content exists, which may affect rankings. This prevents issues where Google might penalize your website due to duplicate content across multiple URLs, causing SEO rankings to drop. Use tools like Screaming Frog or Siteliner to check for duplicate content and manage it through optimization or canonical tags.
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Review Meta Tags and Schema Markup
Ensure meta tags on every page are complete and correct, and use schema markup to help Google better understand your website content and display it appropriately in search results, thereby increasing your website’s click-through rate.
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Summarize and Create an Improvement Plan
Gathering all audit data and creating a plan to prioritize fixes will make website development efficient, clear, organized, and enable quick progress tracking.
For example, create an SEO audit report with a work schedule, such as fixing broken links first, then improving website speed, then reviewing Meta Tags again, etc.
Convert Digital: Your Website Health Management Partner
Conducting an SEO audit is the crucial first step in developing your website for sustainable growth. With these 10 comprehensive steps—from URL structure to user behavior analysis—that we’ve presented above, you should now have a much clearer overall picture of your website. This will help you plan and take action more effectively.
However, SEO isn’t a one-time task. It’s an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and improvement. Regular SEO audits will help you stay ahead of competitors and maintain good search rankings in the long run. But if you find this process complex and time-consuming, you can consult with Convert Digital. We offer comprehensive full-service solutions, and with our professional team, you can be confident that your website’s health will be regularly maintained because we monitor and check everything for you.
About Post Author
Tidarat Srivilai : Content Team Lead
Content expert who loves updating herself with new knowledge. She has over 10 years of experience in both marketing and journalism. A passionate foodie with a love for exercise, she also excels at baking delicious treats in her spare time.