Whether it is to increase your visibility on Google or adapt your SEO strategy, the SEO audit is the key element to help you achieve your goals. One of the hardest things about doing an audit is knowing where to start. To help you in your analysis, here is our guide with the essential steps and tools!
Everything you need to know about the SEO Audit
SEO Audit, What is it?
An SEO audit designates an inventory at a given time of the strengths and weaknesses of your site. The analysis is intended to highlight the obstacles to your visibility on the internet, to then define the key actions to be implemented to compete with the sites in first position on Google.
Why do an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit will be necessary for you to define the actions to be taken to improve the natural referencing of your site.
You will be required to do an SEO audit in several cases:
The launch of a new website
Even before the development of your site, you must have already defined your visibility objectives, while respecting Google’s guidelines concerning natural referencing. This, to be able to claim the top results. Because indeed, the structure of your site is one of the SEO pillars.
When launching your site, the audit will help you determine the actions to be implemented to achieve your objectives and adjust your visibility strategy.
The redesign of a site
You can choose to redesign your site because its design is getting too outdated, the back office does not allow you to evolve or because the performance of your site is down or even at a standstill.
The redesign of a site is a key moment to do an audit of your SEO in order to guide your strategy and adjust the content, the internal linking or the architecture according to this audit. It is also an opportunity to reinvent and innovate through your brand image.
An abnormal drop in your organic traffic
Changes to Google’s algorithms can impact your site’s visibility. Overnight, you can lose the majority of your traffic and top positions in search engines like Google.
The means in SEO applied by your competitors can modify your ranking in the SERP. The SEO audit will allow you to understand how to rectify your strategy to try to regain your position.
A strategic evolution
Whether the strategic development is linked to a change in your company’s offer or brand image, your objectives will evolve with it. In this case, the SEO audit will help you define your new strategy.
The change of SEO provider
When you entrust your website to an agency, it is common to do an inventory at the start of your project. It will give you an idea of the budget, the investment and the actions to be implemented with the agency.
The benefits of an SEO Audit
An SEO audit will be a real asset to ensure your presence on the web and shine digitally. It will allow you to highlight the points that could prevent the proper functioning of your site, and to raise the actions to be put in place to increase your positioning .
Once the audit report has been drawn up, you will see an improvement in the visibility of your website on search engines. With the results of this report and the implementation of strategic changes, you will be able to improve:
- Your natural traffic
- Your conversion rate
- Your turnover
Onsite VS Offsite Audits
A good in-depth SEO audit will be based on these two elements:
An Onsite audit, on the technical aspect : is your site fast? Coded with best practices? A complete review is done on all your pages, to know if the keywords are relevant and used in the right areas (H1-H6, content, title tags, meta…).
An Offsite audit, for legitimacy and authority : this review analyzes your backlinks, anchor texts, authority and trust rate of your site.
For a relevant audit, also make an overview of your mentions and your visibility on social networks. In short, a detailed analysis of each element related to the SEO of your site. The full report is between 20 and 30 pages.
Also Read: 6 Off-Page Seo Strategies You Must Implement
How to do an Onsite Audit?
If your potential visitors cannot see your site, it becomes problematic and impacts new content. This audit is therefore based on two internal parameters: accessibility and indexability . It takes into account the analysis of the robot.txt file and meta tags.
Step 1: Control your Tags
First, be sure to check all your tags:
- Canonical: when you set the canonical URL of a page, you signal to search engines which page URL is the “master” page. In this way, you avoid that your URLs are designated as duplicate content.
- Meta robots: it allows you to choose the pages that should not be indexed “Noindex” or not explored “Nofollow” by search engines. These tags are useful for designating pages that are not used for your natural referencing or that have similar content.
- Hreflang: in case you have a site with the same content in several languages, the hreflang tag will be useful to tell search engines that the content is not duplicated.
Step 2: Manage your HTTP Codes
All pages on your site contain HTTP code. When Internet users visit a website, it sends a request to the hosting server.
- Code 200: the page is valid
- The code 300: corresponds to a redirection
- The code 400: designates an error
- The 301 code: the redirect is final
- Code 302: the redirect is temporary
- The 404 code: the page cannot be found, it has been deleted or its URL has been modified. Consider optimizing your 404 page with a personalized message and a redirect to a similar page. This will prevent your visitors from getting frustrated with this obstacle.
Step 3: Find Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is sanctioned by Google and interferes with your SEO.
To avoid penalties, write down all your identical (or similar) URLs and tags and modify them with canonical tags, meta robots or 301 redirects so that search engine robots go to the most relevant range.
Step 4: Organize your URLS
A page’s URL is what helps your visitors and search engines identify the content of your page.
These should be relevant and short:
- Use only lowercase letters, no accents
- Ungroup words with hyphens “-”
- Include your keywords
- Do not exceed 70 characters
For example : take the title of your page and remove unnecessary words https://www.kwantic.fr/comment-faire-audit-SEO
Step 5: Boost your Loading Speed
The loading speed of your pages is essential for the proper functioning of your website and your technical SEO. Test your loading speed with Google’s PageSpeedInsight tool to optimize your website.
How to do an Offsite Audit?
The Offsite part is the popularity level of your website and its trust score. The popularity level is influenced by the amount of traffic on your pages and the general bounce rate. In a way, this analysis shows you how Internet users react to your site and where you are placed in Google results vis-à-vis your competitors.
Step 1: Analyze your Competition
Studying your competitors will let you know how their sites are driving more traffic than your site. Thanks to this relevant data, you will be able to modify your natural referencing strategy.
An Offsite audit boils down to listing the best performing sites in your market. Then the SEO audit of their site will allow you to determine:
- The keywords on which your competitors are positioned
- Their strengths and weaknesses
Be careful, the purpose of your competitors’ SEO audit is not to copy their strategy but to adapt yours to what is happening on the market in order to do better and outperform them on the search engines.
Step 2: Audit your Inbound Links
Incoming links refer to links on other websites redirecting to your website and which have an impact on your natural referencing. If these links are of poor quality, your website will be penalized by search engines and you will lose places in your positioning. Google may even choose to de-index your website.
This is because Google’s algorithm is very picky about low quality or toxic backlinks. These can come from directory sites, over-optimized sites, spam or even sites that have no connection with yours or your market.
3 options are available to you: clean your incoming links, delete them or disavow them via Google’s disavow tool .
Step 3: Examine your Market
The Offsite SEO audit helps you study your market:
- Identify your target audience . Once done, your keyword research will be more compatible with the needs of your persona.
- Adapt your digital strategy by examining new niches in your market.
- Scrutinize all the results related to your keywords to determine which ones to use and which ones are not viable.
Step 4: Study your E-Reputation
An Offsite audit includes all the external environment of your site but also your notoriety on social networks and referring sites .
The SEO audit will allow you to have a global vision of your business on the web:
- What are the networks on which you are quoted? This will help you adapt your communication strategy by knowing if you need to be more present on this or that network.
- What are people saying about my business? This analysis will allow you to adapt your speech to meet the needs and expectations of Internet users.
- Who is talking about you? The Offsite audit will highlight the identity of the people who talk about you, but in particular the quality of their content. This analysis will be useful for you to identify the best ambassadors for your company or the influencers able to convey your brand image.
Also Read: How To Implement An SEO Content Strategy With Hubspot
How to do an On-Page SEO Audit?
The on-page SEO audit refers to everything on your site: the content, the keywords or even the technical elements that help search engines and users to understand the domain and the subject of your site. web.
Step 1: Quality Content
Naturally, Google loves quality content. It is therefore essential to have material to work with for your website.
You need to show Google that you are an expert in your field compared to your competitors. To do this, design “deep” content, that is to say content in which you try to meet the expectations of Internet users on a particular request.
For this, this content is generally in the form of long articles with high added value (1,500 to 3,000 words). Thanks to this content, you will be able to place a maximum of semantic keywords to expand the content while optimizing the natural referencing of your page.
Be careful, make sure that the keywords chosen for the content of your informative and commercial pages correspond to the expectations of users. Otherwise, Google will consider that your page does not provide a relevant answer and it will lower its ranking in search engines. Quality but above all relevant content is essential to respond to the requests of Internet users on the web.
Step 2: The Engagement of your Internet Users
When creating your website and very regularly, it is very important to check the level of commitment of your Internet users.
Indeed, Google will reward websites that manage to capture users and retain them. In order to estimate this commitment and know how to improve it, here are the two main data to analyze:
The number of pages per session
That is to say the number of pages consulted by the same Internet user before he leaves your website. This data allows you to know if your content is attractive, if your internal linking is relevant, if your backlinks are well done, but also to understand the results of your conversion tunnel.
Bounce rate
This indicator gives the level of satisfaction of Internet users consulting your pages. A thorough study of your page by page rates will allow you to identify the pages with problems and on which changes are essential.
The analysis of this data will allow you to boost its indicators and will be beneficial for your website , its natural referencing, its popularity and its brand image.
Step 3: The Technical Structure
At the base of any website project, it is in a way the foundation of the house. However, it still leaves something to be desired in many projects while it will play a key role in SEO.
Never lose sight that in order for your pages to be indexed by search engines, they must first be crawled by Google’s crawlers.
Don’t neglect the security of your website either. Google values websites adopting the HTTPS protocol, to the detriment of HTTP sites. This element is to do with your host to find out how to obtain an SSL certificate allowing you to have a secure connection between the search engine and the web server.
Step 4: A Responsive Design
From the design of your website, you must ensure that it is compatible with other mobile devices.
Today, more than 50% of web traffic comes from mobiles. It would be unfortunate to deprive yourself of this target with an incompatible design. In addition, Google ranks websites differently on mobile because it takes into account their compatibility with mobile and on different dimensions.
To be well referenced on these search engines and benefit from the traffic generated by a mobile, you need to think carefully about your website from the start.
Tools for doing an SEO Audit
During your SEO audit, you will have the opportunity to use many tools to take stock of your site, adapt your SEO strategy and see any problems and errors to be corrected. These tools will help you on several points and can sometimes be essential .
- Semrush
- Ubersuggest
- SEOQuantum
- Rankxplorer
- Semrush, the favorite paid tool
It is the tool most used today by SEOs. Semrush is a benchmark in this area despite its high cost (between 100 and 600€ per month) and its complexity. Because yes, mastering all of this tool is harder than you think.
But above all, Semrush is a 360° digital marketing tool, it has features in natural referencing but also paid or Community Management. Semrush allows you to crawl your website using small robots to see technical errors, this will help you with your Offsite audit. The tool will also help you with your keyword research for your content.
Tools to control the Indexing of your website
- Oncrawl
- Ahrefs
Tools to observe your Positioning on Google
- Allorank
- Monitorank
Tools to evaluate your Backlinks
- MajesticSEO
- SEO Observer
- Moz
Essential Tools from Google
- Google Mobile Test
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google PageSpeed Insights
Google has implemented a number of tools allowing you to have an overview of the data coming from your site.
The most powerful being Google Search Console, an essential and completely free tool, it is a veritable gold mine from a semantic and technical point of view. The search console will give you the keywords generating the most train and impression on your site and also the position of these keywords in the SERP results. Google search console is perfect for helping you find the keywords to optimize in your content, build a personalized report and follow the evolution of the ranking of these different keywords.