Are you interested in performing an SEO audit on your website but unsure of where to begin?

You may significantly raise your website's search engine ranks by identifying SEO errors and carrying out an SEO audit. Increased traffic, sales, and money follow from this.

Opportunities to enhance a site's search performance can be discovered through an SEO audit. In order to solve or improve them, it requires identifying technical, on-page, content, and link-related problems.

Since there is no standard methodology, every SEO audit procedure is unique.

What is an SEO Audit Work?

Have you ever wondered, "How do I find my SEO mistakes?" for example, "How do I check my site for errors?" An SEO audit is the solution to all of those issues.

Reviewing your website and evaluating how well it adheres to the best SEO practices is the process of conducting an SEO audit. Typically, an SEO audit will include:

• Reviewing website content
• Identifying areas of improvement and opportunities
• Finding technical SEO mistakes
• On-page SEO optimization issues
• Off-page SEO problems
• User experience issues
• Problems and shortcomings with the site architecture
• Competitor insights

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All of these topics and more are covered by a competent SEO audit. It provides you with a thorough, all-encompassing SEO report of your website.

Why is SEO Audit Important?

Because SEO may be an extremely complex and competitive field, it is crucial to do an SEO audit. To exist, compete, and succeed in search results, you must constantly be at the top of your game.

Therefore, it is advised that you routinely identify and correct your SEO errors. Otherwise, minor SEO issues could worsen, resulting in decreased search rankings, organic search traffic, and monetary losses.

How to Do an SEO Audit?

So, how do you perform an SEO audit? Here is a step-by-step instruction manual for doing an SEO audit in2023.

Lets get started.

Step 1: Crawl Your Website

Crawling your website using a program like SEMRush is the first step.

SEMrush will crawl your website in the same way that Google bots do when you perform a website crawl. At the conclusion of the crawl, an SEO audit report will be generated. This analysis will include useful details regarding the design, crawlability, indexability, and other aspects of your site.

Log into SEMRush and select Site Audit from the menu on the left side of the screen.

You must add your website to SEMRush as a project in order to conduct an SEO audit. Click the Add new project button in the top-right corner to do that.

If you already have a project, choose it and then, up towards the top of the screen, select the blue Re-run campaign button.

Step 2: Look for any duplicates of your website

These can all appear the same to you. It's possible that not even those who visit your website can tell the difference. These, however, are all various versions of your website that would be competing with one another for Google.

You should only have one version of your website, and search engines should only index that version. If you are use with google search console that why found the duplicate your website .

Step 3: Confirm Your Website Is HTTPS

This is a Google Chrome warning, although practically every Internet browser provides users with some sort of caution. As you might expect, a warning like this could have a detrimental impact on the authority, credibility, and earning potential of your website.

Second, Google can lower your website's position in search results, which will have an immediate impaction your website's organic traffic and earnings. Keep in mind that since 2014,Google has been using HTTPS as a ranking indication.

You can learn more about the HTTPS status of your website in the SEMRush Site Audit Overview.

Go to Site Audit >Overview > HTTPS.

Step 4: Look for issues with crawling

The process of discovery is crawling. Google deploys its robots to search the Internet for material during this process.

You want Google to be able to crawl any page on your website that is accessible to the general public. Google won't be able to index a page if it cannot crawl it. A page won't showup in search results if it is not indexed. The following section will cover indexing in more detail.

Here are a few typical explanations for why Google may occasionally be unable to crawl web pages:

• Internal Links with "rel=nofollow": This tag instructs Google to disregard the link. Instead of being a directive, the NoFollow property is more of a hint. Google does not always crawl NoFollow links, though.

• Broken internal links: Google crawlers primarily use internal linking to find pages on your website to crawl. It is more difficult for Google bots to crawl your page if internal links are broken.

• Orphan Pages: Pages without any links going to them are referred to as orphan pages. Google crawlers may overlook orphan pages because they lack internal links.

• Slow page loading time: Because Google has a limited crawl budget, its crawlers will only visit your website for a short while before moving on.

Step 5: Verify the indexing.

Indexing a website comes after crawling.

Google stores and organizes the information it discovers while crawling in an index. Once a webpage has been indexed, it can be rated for pertinent search terms. Alternatively, there is no chance that it will rank and send organic traffic to your website.

Therefore, you want Google to successfully crawl and index your sites. Google, however, occasionally is unable to index every page on a website.

You must locate all such pages as part of your SEO audit and take out any obstacles for Google.

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If your website has indexation problems, you may tell in 2 simple ways:

Method #1. Utilize the site's search function

To find out how many pages from your website Google has indexed, use the search operator site: your website.com.

Let's say that this figure is far lower than the total number of pages you have. In that instance, Google's inability to index the remaining web pages is probably the result of some issue.

However, you won't get many results you can act on using this strategy. The following approach does.

Method #2 . Google search console

You can get a great report from Google Search Console that details how many pages Google indexes.

• Access your Google Search Console account by logging in.
• Click on Pages in the left sidebar menu's Index tab.

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More information on why Google isn't indexing the web pages on your website is available if you scroll down. Each of these reports has a link that you may click to view the precise URLs of any sites that may need to be fixed.

Be aware that there are situations when you want Google to ignore certain of the pages on your website. Consider the /thank-you page that visitors to your website arrive at after completing a sale.

The /thank-you page is frequently used to track website conversions. Your conversion data would become unreliable and erroneous if users were able to access that page through search results and visit it. In order to stop Google from indexing the website, you should. A no index tag or the robots txt file can be used to block certain pages.

Step 6: Measure the Performance and Speed of Your Website

Your website's loading speed affects its position in search results. The engagement and conversion rates of your website can be directly impacted by your site's loading speed in addition to search rankings.

However, SEMRush provides more straightforward, actionable information.

For instance, SEMrush offers two reports that you can utilize to enhance the functionality and user experience of your website. These two reports are Core Web Vitals and Site Performance.

The average load speed is well-represented in the Site Performance report. Additionally, it compiles every conceivable problem that might be causing your website to load slowly so that you can address it.

Step 7: Test Your Website’s Mobile-Friendliness

Mobile devices account for62% of website traffic. Without a mobile-friendly website, you lose out on that traffic.

Google also recently implemented the mobile-first indexing technique, which implies that for search engine indexing and ranking, Google now predominantly uses the mobile version of the website.

Therefore, it will be more difficult for your website to rank well in Google search results if it performs poorly on mobile.

Check to see if your website is mobile-friendly during this SEO audit. Utilize Google's free Mobile-Friendly Test tool to get started.

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For thorough analysis of the mobile usability of your website, we advise using Google Search Console.

• Access your Google Search Console account by logging in.
• Click on Mobile Usability in the left navigation menu's Experience tab.

Step 8: Identify and Fix Thin Content Pages

Thin content pages can harm your site's credibility, authority, and search rankings much like duplicate pages do. Pages with thin content are those with minimal information that offer readers no real assistance.

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Lower word counts are one technique to spot thin material. To determine how many words each page on your website has, you can use a program like Word Counter. However, if your website contains hundreds of pages, utilizing a word count checker might be a time-consuming and unproductive method.

Although a low word count is typically a sign of weak content, this isn't always the case. Furthermore, determining whether a page is thin or not depends on criteria other than just a low word count.

It all comes down to how helpful and valuable it is in the end. Always strive to provide high-quality, practical material that advances your company.

After Google's most recent Helpful Content upgrade, this is particularly crucial at this time. A site-wide Google algorithm called Helpful Content favours content that puts people first.

Step 9: Fix Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions

The titles that show up on the results page of a search engine are known as meta titles or title tags. It has a significant impact on search engine rankings. Therefore, resolve any SEO problems with metafiles that you come across.

The following are a some of the typical meta title problems:

Select Issues under Site Audit. When you type "title" into the search bar, SEMRush will provide a list of all the problems pertaining to meta descriptions. The next stage is to look for meta description-related problems.

The descriptions that appear on search results pages are known as meta descriptions.

Although meta description optimization can help raise click-through rate (CTR), it is not a direct factor in search engine ranking. Improved search engine rankings and increased search engine traffic are both closely correlated with higher CTR.

Step 10: Fix Page Titles [H1 Heading Tags]

The page title is a ranking factor for search engines, just like meta descriptions. A page title(H1 tag) is mostly for website users who land on a page, whereas meta titles are largely for search engines.

The primary heading or title, known as H1, is often found at the top of a page. Best practices state that an H1 should:

• Be interesting and pertinent to the page's content.
• Be distinctive and include the main phrase you're attempting to get your page to rank for.

Step 11: Check Your Website’s Backlink Profile

We have mostly discussed the technical SEO audit and the on-page SEO audit up until this point. It's time to examine the off-page SEO audit by looking at the backlink structure of your website.

Although Ahrefs will be used in this example, SEMRush is fully capable of performing off-page SEO audits.

• Access Ahrefs
• Site Explorer will appear on the top menu bar.
• Put the domain of your website in the box and click search.

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You may view a list of referring domains by selecting the 'Overview' tab in the left navigation bar.

Additionally, since not all backlinks are helpful, you should watch out for any potential toxicity in your backlink profile. Backlinks from dubious websites with lower quality spam can be more detrimental than beneficial.

To find possible spam links, click on Referring domains in the left menu bar.

Step 12: Check for Manual Actions and Penalties by Google

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If Google doesn't remove a manual penalty against your website, your site's search engine rankings will fall. The manual action could be taken on a single page or across the entire website, depending on the importance of the problem.

To determine whether you even have a manual penalty is the first step. Google Search Console makes it simple to discover that.

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• Access Google Search Console.
• To find Security& Manual Actions, look in the left sidebar.
• Click on Manual actions under that tab.

You should see a green tick that reads "No issues detected" on it.

Here is a helpful tip provided by Google on what to do if your website has been the subject of a manual action. The manual steps that Google can take are listed in this guide along with instructions on how to resolve each problem.

Conclusion

You have it now! That is how an SEO audit is carried out.

Check out these professional SEO strategy pointers next to increase your search traffic even more. However, you must convert that traffic if you want to avoid losing it. You may be surprised to learn that70% of website visitors who leave never come back.

FAQ

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