An SEO audit is the process of evaluating on page & off page SEO elements, competitor analysis, and finding opportunities that relate to current best SEO practices. The goal of an SEO audit is to learn where you stand from an overall website health and web presence perspective and its results lead to creating and implementing a plan of action for better overall online performance. As with any area of both personal and business growth, knowing where your weak points lie and having a plan to improve are the first steps to success.
Throughout the SEO Audit process, you will identify foundational issues that are affecting your organic search performance and develop a roadmap to both fixing those issues and building upon them. The audit should reveal:
-Technical SEO issues
-Overall structural issues such as improper sitemaps
-On-Page SEO Issues
-Server Issues (Page load speeds for example)
-User experience issues
-Where you stand against competitors
-Keyword opportunities
-Content strategy plans (Including click through rate optimization on top performing pages)
SEO Audit Tools
The amount of data needed to successfully perform an SEO Audit would require extensive digging and research to gather without the use of tools and resources. Luckily, there are dozens of SEO resource options out there to choose from, some free and others on paid platforms. Below we breakdown some of our favorite tools that compile data in one place for an easy detailed SEO audit process that can be completed in as little as one hour!
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
This is a free tool that crawls your entire website and extracts data essential to examining your on page SEO. This tool allows you to find broken links, analyze title tags, metas, header tags and so much more all in one place drastically reducing the time spent on your audit.
SEM Rush
SEM Rush is a tool that compiles over 40 different tools that assist you in your SEO efforts. This tool allows you to do keyword research, competitor analysis, content management ideas, easy backlinking system, link audits, rank tracking and more. This is an excellent tool for both auditing and ongoing SEO purposes.
GTmetrix
Quickly evaluate website performance through this free tool. GTmetrix.com scans your website and grades your performance compared to average stats. It takes things such as server scaled images, image dimensions, Javascript and CSS Minification, browser caching, redirects and more.
Mobile Friendly Tool
Google offers a free mobile friendly website test that clearly tells you how user friendly your website is from a mobile device. If not mobile friendly, it also provides details on why and how to resolve the issues. https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly .
Google Search Console
Google Search Console, previously known as Webmaster Tools, is an amazing analytical tool that provides a better understanding of how Google and other search engines see your website. Through this platform, you can submit sitemaps to google, perform link audits, view indexing problems, troubleshoot search features, which queries trigger your website and how many clicks that triggered page gets and more.
SIteliner.com
Siteliner scans the pages on your website and shows you data such as average page load time, number of words per page, text to HTML Ratio, Duplicate content, pages with errors, etc. It also provides a comparison against other websites so you can see where you stand against the average.
These are some of our many favorite tools we use during our SEO Auditing process. It is important to perform an SEO Audit on your website on an ongoing basis. The quicker you notice issues, the less negative impact they are able to have on your overall website presence. Google makes frequent changes so keep an eye out for bigger updates and algorithm changes and perform audits accordingly! If you have any questions or would like Klout9 to perform an audit on your website free of charge, contact us today!