Whether you’re a client hiring an SEO agency to boost their online visibility or an in-house digital marketer looking to optimize your own website, performing an SEO audit is an essential first step.
There are hundreds of ranking signals that search engines evaluate when determining SERP rankings. An SEO audit should evaluate all of these, giving you a clear roadmap for improving your site’s performance.
On-Page Optimization
Search engines use a number of criteria to determine which websites are most relevant for a particular search query. These are known as ranking signals and are a vital part of any SEO strategy. A comprehensive SEO audit will review as many of these signaling factors as possible and recommend any changes necessary to improve performance.
A large portion of on-page optimization focuses on content, which is the first step in getting your website to rank well for a specific keyword. This includes ensuring your content matches user search intent and that you are using keywords throughout your content in a natural manner, without overdoing it.
Another aspect of on-page optimization is page speed, which can have a huge impact on your website’s performance and rankings. Google’s free tool PageSpeed Insights can be used to quickly assess your page’s speed and make suggestions for improvement. The best SEO tools will have a dedicated page speed assessment feature or be integrated into a more comprehensive suite.
Technical SEO
There are hundreds of ranking signals that search engines evaluate when determining the relevance and quality of a webpage. An SEO audit is a deep dive into these factors to ensure your site is technically prepared for organic search success.
A thorough technical SEO audit is a necessary precursor to competitive link analysis and content strategy. If your site has significant technical issues, other SEO efforts will be ineffective at best. At worst, they’ll have no impact at all.
Performing an SEO audit takes time, and you will almost certainly come away with a lengthy list of suggestions for improvement. It’s important to prioritize and implement these improvements in a way that has measurable, scalable impacts. Thankfully, there are great tools for analyzing and prioritizing SEO recommendations. Ahrefs is one of my favorites, with a user-friendly interface that allows you to view a summary of all issues (expandable for deeper insights), review crawl logs, dive into page and link performance metrics, or delve into indexability factors.
Off-Page Optimization
The off-page aspect of SEO focuses on your website’s external reputation and authority. Essentially, if your website is like a bathtub with rubber duckies in it and you start adding more duckies, the ones that are floating in the water will rise to the surface and become the most visible.
That’s why it’s important to have an external reputation audit performed. This helps you identify the issues that are keeping people from finding your site and refocuses your SEO efforts on the most effective strategies.
SEO is constantly changing and you need to keep up with it in order to stay competitive. An SEO audit will help you identify and address the technical problems that may be keeping your website from ranking well, but an ongoing maintenance strategy is a must to maintain optimal performance. The team at Imaginuity can help you build and implement that strategy to get the most out of your brand’s digital presence.
Content Strategy
Content strategy is a discipline that encompasses the planning, development, and management of your content. It draws from other areas of expertise such as information architecture, content management, business analysis, and digital marketing.
It’s essential to perform a content audit in addition to your SEO and technical audits, so that you can assess the effectiveness of your existing content and find areas for improvement. Performing a content audit will help you identify duplicate content, missing keyword phrases, broken links, and other problems that can affect the performance of your website in search engines.
Using a tool like SE Ranking will allow you to conduct a comprehensive content and technical SEO audit, providing you with a full picture of your web presence. This tool has a free version that works well for small websites and has affordable pricing for larger sites. It also offers dynamic SEO tools with an intuitive user interface. Try it for yourself!