There’s a lot of hair-splitting when it comes to naming SEO tools, but a good SEO audit tool should do at least the following:
Auditing your site helps you refocus your content strategy on users first and search engines second. Often, SEO audits reveal untapped opportunities for boosting traffic and leads.
Keywords
The keyword element of an SEO audit involves assessing the relevance of keywords to each page on your website. It includes the use of LSI (latent semantic indexing) tools, such as KeywordsFX and LSI graph, to determine if keywords are used correctly throughout the site, if the page title contains the keyword, if the meta description uses the keyword, and so on.
Using this information, you can make the appropriate adjustments to your website content to boost its search engine performance. This is important because search engines consider the overall context of a page when ranking it. This is why it’s so important to have a consistent SEO strategy. Consistent audits also help you stay ahead of your competitors and keep up with Google algorithm updates. Just like your car, SEO requires ongoing maintenance to run smoothly. Regular audits can identify issues that hinder performance and uncover new optimization opportunities. They can even help you avoid costly mistakes by identifying and fixing problems before they get out of hand.
Content
If a site’s SEO foundation isn’t strong, it won’t rank well. That’s why a comprehensive SEO audit is crucial. It identifies issues and uncovers new SEO opportunities. This allows businesses to improve their websites’ performance and boost rankings.
A basic SEO audit should include a review of the website’s URL structure, content, and internal search optimization. The audit should also review keywords and analyze competitors’ SEO strategies to identify new opportunities.
This process helps businesses identify technical SEO issues, discover SEO gaps, and make necessary optimizations. It can be done on a scheduled basis or as needed. It is important to set goals upfront, which will help shape the parameters of an SEO audit and determine how much data is collected. It is also important to determine what types of changes will be implemented. This will help prioritize the most effective solutions. This will also help the audit run more efficiently and save time. For example, it is often more efficient to focus on improving content than addressing backlinks or other technical issues.
Backlinks
A backlink audit involves analyzing your website’s incoming links to identify potential issues or opportunities. It can be performed using a variety of tools, including Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and Google Search Console. The key to performing a successful backlink audit is understanding what metrics to look for and how to interpret the results.
For example, a high number of links from one domain can signal an unnatural link building campaign. You can use your backlink audit to find these types of links and then reach out to have them removed. If you can’t get them removed, you can disavow them in Search Console.
A backlink audit can also help you spot spammy links that could cause a penalty from Google. These include links from link schemes, PBNs, and irrelevant blog comments. If you have a large number of these, you can disavow them in Google Search Console to avoid getting penalized. This is an important step in avoiding manual penalties that can harm your SEO ranking.
Site speed
If your website is slow, searchers are going to go to one of the many faster sites that rank higher in search results. That is why site speed is a critical element to audit and optimize.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool gives you a quick overview of the speed (on desktop and mobile) for your pages. It also offers suggestions on how to improve.
Indexing issues, such as non-canonicals, redirects, and 404s, should always be checked when performing an SEO audit. For a more in-depth analysis, Ahrefs’ Site Audit can scan your site for 140 different technical SEO problems.
Aside from analyzing on-page and technical SEO elements, it’s important to track your rankings so that you know if the changes you implement are working or not. That way, you can keep doing the things that work and drop the ones that don’t. Using an SEO rank tracking tool like SpyFu is a great way to do this.