How to do an SEO Audit?

You may be an experienced digital marketer or a novice, but there are several ways to improve your auditing skills for Search Engine Optimization. I’ve been in this space for 16 years now and had to deal with over 1,000 website problems. Personally, I enjoy the auditing aspect of SEO, it is always changing and new issues arise over time. Your SEO auditing process should differ from platform to platform and campaign to campaign. For example, a local SEO and national SEO auditing process will be very different. Generally speaking I will provide you some of the key components of an SEO audit process. Let’s get started with these quick tips on how to improve your SEO auditing skills.

Start with an Auditing Tool

First, start with an auditing tool like SEMRush. There are several auditing tools out there to get you started. It is a simple process of getting initiated without any expert assistance. This will be able to crawl your entire website quickly without you missing thousands of issues. We’re constantly fixing website issues month over month, so make sure you provide your fixes in priority order during your audit process. An example of an SEO audit below is from SEMRush for one of our clients. As you can see there are false positives. We tackle items by priority starting with errors and work our way into warnings and notices over time.

Manually Inspect & Browse Your Website

There are several items we manually inspect while an SEO auditing tool is running in the background. Look for the XML sitemap. Find pages, posts and demo content that may have been left in there from the development of the website. Run through the website and see if you can find an HTML sitemap as well, is this website easily crawl-able? Are you having a hard time finding pages? If you are you will want to increase the crawl-ability of the website. Right-click on Google Chrome “inspect”, click on the console tab, do you see any errors or warnings? Fix them. We run into this problem and usually have issues with websites not being fully secure because they are calling http:// rather than https:// on an element on the website.

You could click on the not secure notice next to the website address, on top of your browser, and it will explain why the website is not fully secure. Example below:

Search Google for Your Main Keyword or Brand

During the SEO auditing process, we want to spot any inconsistencies or issues when websites are being crawled. Manually searching for a keyword you may rank for, or search your brand, and check if you see the intended meta description. If you do not, go and check your robots.txt file or see if there is a NoIndex tag implemented on the website.

Run Site: in Google Search

Sometimes our manual process or tools will not pick up some pages so running site: urlofyourwebsite.com in Google search could result in some other findings that can be holding back your website’s SEO.

SEO Auditing Process

Now I only covered only about 1/10th of the entire SEO auditing process, but our workflows and SEO auditing process shifts based on the website and platform. Auditing a website on Shopify versus WordPress can differ due to the structure. If you are interested in a free website audit you can contact us today, no catch! If you own an agency and want to start a white label SEO package with us, you can!