The first step every SEO agency take when signing a new client is to perform an in-depth SEO audit.
SEO audit allows you to know what you are going to face in the next months and give you a clue on which angle you should look at during the whole engagement period.
There are many things that you want to achieve on your brand’s name in terms of optimisation-competitive ranking position, visibility, organic traffic, conversions to sales, heightened brand awareness, and the list goes on.
Where you want to position yourself in the future depends on the roadmap you are adapting now, and a solid SEO audit template will help you get there.
The Purpose of SEO Audit
SEO audit reveals your website’s problems and the possible challenges if you lack the knowledge to interpret the statistics in your SEO reports.
So what can an SEO audit do for your brand?
- Understanding your website condition and setting measurable KPI (goals)
How will you know that you are on the right path?
SEO audit gives you a clear picture of where you are currently in terms of our SEO implementations. It helps you see and track results of how effective your strategies for the past months are.
Search engines like Google want to offer the best user experience to users worldwide.
This is one of the biggest reasons SEO agencies’ first step upon carrying out an engagement or project is an audit. SEO audit results will tell your website’s current condition and what can you achieve after implementing certain strategies.
- Reference to develop a suitable SEO strategy
If you envision a successful plan for your website, you need to understand that SEO means commitment and never-ending improvements.
An SEO audit will ensure that the improvements and changes that you integrate into your website are not solely based on a mere trend but embedded invaluable insights.
If your website undergoes an SEO audit, you have the power to customise strategies that can boost your brand’s campaign:
- Updating your content’s meta descriptions
- Strengthening your Keyword Research
- Checking your Alt Tags
- Improving your Title Tags
- Reveal on-page SEO issues
Keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to search engine optimisation. You have to think about how search engines work and apply that to your website. Through this, you will know what to include in your plans.
- Understanding your brand position among competitors
An SEO audit goes beyond ensuring fast-loading pages and easy-to-use navigations on your website. It also means auditing your top competitors.
It may sound a bit off to audit your competitor’s site, but it opens up opportunities for your campaign strategy. For example, identifying keywords that rank for and the content they publish can give you an idea of how to deal things with your brand.
This is also a perfect way to know where they fall short and study the best approaches that they are practising and beat them from there. When you figure out what pages are performing and what type of content they contain, it is best to replicate and produce these pieces of content on your page.
Another thing is checking your competitor’s links and reconsidering other strategies that are beneficial for your SEO campaign.
When Should I do an SEO Audit?
It is essential to perform SEO audits regularly – especially if you are starting an SEO campaign for your website and even after your brand’s page had an overall, heavy makeover.
It matters that after your website underwent intense changes, you perform an audit to check if you missed out on essential elements or overdone some parts of your strategy.
Your website is a vessel of your online brand and it matters to keep it sailing as far as it reaches. It is a must to have a regular check-up to ensure you dont have lapses or holes unsealed that can be bad for your SEO campaign.
We recommend you to stick to this practice so you won’t have to face pile up problems in the future. The more time you spend monitoring your website, the easier you can spot irregularities.
What’s Inside an SEO Audit Template
Like your SEO report, you must know what goes inside your SEO audit template to ensure you are not missing the critical parts to check.
We recommend you have these on your checklist:
SEO Performance
One of the most vital metrics you must ensure to include on your SEO audit template is your brand’s website SEO performance.
Evaluating your SEO campaign’s performance opens new and fresh opportunities for you to work on in the future. It is not enough that you have implemented strategies that accelerate your website’s SEO goals but also, it counts more if you identified all bases that affect your campaign.
You may gauge your SEO performance using these SEO metrics: organic traffic, CTR, bounce rate, keyword rankings, domain authority, backlinks, and conversions.
Crawling & Indexing Status
Crawling and indexing are two vital elements when it comes to search engine optimisation. It makes your page more visible and reliable to a wider audience.
Putting your focus on these two factors will affect how you manage and maintain the integrity of your website. Why? If you produce content and Google is having a hard time crawling and indexing it, will that do good to your brand?
Check which pages dont get indexed or remained invisible to search engine results pages, then revisit what could go wrong with them.
Meta Description & Title
Your content’s meta description and title play a big role in your content optimisation.
You may argue that these dont make any difference, but Google will prove you wrong.
In our previous SEO guides, we tackle optimising your meta descriptions and title tags because they can impact your rankings and organic searches.
You may strategically place your target keywords on them so Google can easily spot your content and show it to visitors.
Structured Data / Schema Markup
Schema markup helps search engines better understand the content on your website to serve rich results. It also allows Google to see the meaning and relationships of the entities present on your pages.
Without this, it would be hard for your website to communicate better to the different search engines you want to see your content being published or offered to the people online.
Performing an SEO audit alarms you for any lapses that go on your schema markup or structured data.
Links & Navigation
Another crucial element you must include on your SEO audit checklist is the health of your links and navigational bars.
Link building is currency to your website. If you dont take this seriously, you will face a hard time attracting a new segment of the market or engaging more audiences in the long run.
SEO audit gives you the overall picture of which type of links should you maintain, get rid of, fix, or even earn more for your website to benefit the most.
Keeping your navigational links active and updated makes visitors stay more on your website. A better user experience is a sought after component of any website online, so ensure all of the links present on your page are working and not misleading.
Site Speed
The faster, the better.
You will agree with us if we tell you that it took only a few seconds for you to access this article or simply by just one click, our website was able to serve you with the type of content that you are looking for.
Site speed affects the user’s stint on your website. The faster they can transfer from one page to another, the more time they will stay on your site.
Mobile Usability
Checking your site if it is mobile-friendly is vital. Do you know that 60% of google searches came from mobile devices?
Having this said, it would be an advantage to optimise your website through mobile usability. One way for users to support your brand is to make them feel that you want to value them and are willing to adjust to their needs.
Not everyone loves to bring their laptops when doing research, but almost everyone in the world today is into their smartphones.
If you want your business to be out there, ensure that you are accessible to any type of device existing in today’s modern era.
Tools to Help with SEO Audit
Screaming Frog
One of the most reliable tools to have on your SEO campaign or performance assessment is Screaming Frog.
Screaming Frog builds a product called SEO spider that you can use to deploy crawlers to your website to identify SEO issues- technical or on-page SEO.
Regardless of how big your website is, you can count on it to do an exceptional job in detecting possible threats to your SEO campaign.
If you are starting your SEO audit and don’t depend on agencies to run it for you, the screaming frog has a free version you can use. You may run a maximum of 500 URLs to check.
When using the program, you will:
- Identify broken links
- Link errors
- 301 redirects
- Missing, duplicate meta descriptions, HTML tags
- Poorly optimised pages, and
- Other technical and on-page SEO issues.
For paid version, integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console is one of its powerful features.
Lighthouse from Google
Lighthouse is an open-source automated tool you can use to improve the quality of your web pages. It runs several tests to provide you with valuable insight into your site’s performance. Through this application, you’ll get to identify which aspect you fail and where you can improve.
Page Speed Test from Google
One of the things that make your website attractive and engaging is its fast loading page speed.
We know how painful it can be to visit a page that takes forever to load. It doesn’t add up to the overall appeal of your brand and it affects the impression of your visitors to your website.
Good thing you have a Page Speed Test from Google that releases reports to help you analyse and optimise your website.
Schema Markup Testing Tool from Google
You know how essential a schema markup is to your website that you must ensure it is run properly and structured smoothly.
Fortunately, you have a Schema Markup Validator and Rich Results Test you can run with the help of Google.
Rich Results Test is Google’s official testing tool to check your structured data to see which Google rich results can be generated by the structured data on your page.
Schema Markup Validator is a Schema.org-based structured data embedded in your web pages without Google feature specific warnings.
Mobile-Friendly Test from Google
Is your brand web page a mobile-friendly one? In today’s setting, mobile phones are the game-changers.
Almost everybody uses their mobile phone for social media, news, videos, and browsing the internet for the latest trends. Designing your website to be mobile friendly is an advantage as it is an indicator that your pages perform well on other devices.
SEO Audit Template
Check out our free SEO audit template here!
Final Thoughts
Search Engine Optimisation Audit Report shows your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats).
Through this report, you will have an idea of where to move your entire campaign from top to bottom. The report itself will help you perform better judgment of how well or weak your SEO campaigns are for the past few days and what you must implement to stay on the course.
When SEO agency run an audit, dont think that they only want to pinpoint what is wrong or off about your website.
Dont be afraid to be involved in the process of auditing your website as it can help you gain fresh insights, in-depth knowledge, and substantial data about your brand’s SEO performance.
Our SEO service at Roots Digital can run audit and checks for your brand. This is one of the services that our clients commend us for. Let us know how you want us to collaborate.
FAQ
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is the process of performing an in-depth evaluation of your brand’s website. This measures your site’s ability to compete in search engine results pages or SERPs.
Numerous factors are taken into consideration when running an SEO audit for your website – on- and off-page SEO, as well as technical SEO performance.
What is an SEO Audit Checklist?
A checklist is a guide or step-by-step thorough notes of what you should consider when performing an SEO audit.
In this document, you will see as well the issues and challenges that your site is currently experiencing.
How do I Write an Audit Report for SEO?
Some elements need to be present in your SEO Audit report to ensure its relevancy, validity, and technicality.
Here are essential elements that your SEO audit report should carry.
– SEO Performance
– Crawling and Indexing Status
– Meta Description &Title Status
– Structured Data / Schema
– Links & Navigation
– Site Speed
– Mobile Usability
