Hi there, I’ve been in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for over 6 years and through the changing SEO landscape I’d like to share some big tips I’ve discovered over the years. I’ll discuss the introduction to an SEO audit, facts to consider, and the top tools used in an SEO audit.

What is a SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is an overview of a website on which the SEO implications are or should be applied. This is usually done to know the weaknesses and strengths of the website.

When I talk about the process of SEO auditing, there are many professionals and even agencies that provide their services as auditors for SEO, but it is not difficult to perform yourself.

As it relates to SEO testing it is important to know why you are not ranking and what are the critical errors on your website that is defending your position on the search engine result page. The SEO testing will help you improve your website and increase the traffic.

How Does SEO Work?

To perform an SEO audit you should understand more about search engines. Search engines have three core functions that include the following components.

1. Crawling: search engines send out a team of robots (crawlers or spiders) to scour the internet for updated content. Content can be a webpage, image, video, PDF, etc. and the content will be found by the URL links. The goal of a crawl is to seek and retrieve a searcher’s information that the content on the URL link is a good match for.

2. Index: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s considered “good to serve to searchers” and will be in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.

3. Rank: When your content is indexed it’s considered highly relevant content and that content is then served to a searcher’s query. The ordering of search results by relevance is known as ranking and the higher a website is ranked the more relevant the search engine believes the site is to the query. That’s why it’s critical to provide the pieces of content that will best answer a searcher's query, which means that results are ordered by most relevant to least relevant.

How to Perform Your SEO Audit

Now, that you know the foundation of search engines these are areas of your website you should review in your SEO audit.

With a on-page SEO audit there are many things to review such as the meta title, meta description, URL, and optimizing your images. A important thing to consider in your on-page check is the keyword selection and its placement on the website. The keyword research tool can let you know the statistics for your keywords like the keyword search volume, CPC, and difficulty.

Another critical factor is your incoming and outgoing links. Checking internal and external links is extremely important because broken links have a bad effect on your website in the search engine. If the website is modified or removed, the page will leave the link broken and in this sense, you should check the number of broken links.

Don’t forget to review your backlinks of your website. The backlinks are the links that refer to your website and this must be of high quality. The backlinks must be placed on your keyword and it should be from a page with high domain authority without much spam score.

Last, evaluate the site speed of the website. Site speed refers to how quickly a browser can load webpages from a given site including Javascript, HTML, CSS, and other elements. You should evaluate the speed of your website to both desktop and mobile versions. If the speed is slow, look for ways and errors to increase your speed.

SEO Tools

The above-mentioned steps are all manual audits, but it would take hours for a single site. Not only that, but there could also be human error in auditing your site. To avoid this and make your auditing time-efficient, you should use these SEO audit tools.

1. Ahrefs

One of the most recommended tools for examining the overall SEO of your website is using Ahrefs, which is a paid tool. It shows the analyses about the website, including everything that is included in SEO best practices. First of all, it has an algorithm to give a score of a hundred by looking at the efficiency of the website known as Domain Rating (DR), a term introduced by Ahrefs to know the score of the website.

Ahrefs is the best tool to get an overview of the website, which includes the number of backlinks, organic traffic, rank, organic keywords, and referencing domains. Not only that, it goes even further for all these categories as it shows and guides all backlinks to analyze the linking strategy of the website while also indicating the source of traffic.

It also shows the list of countries from which traffic originates and shows the growth rate of all these categories, whether it goes down or up.

The second most important thing that Ahrefs offers is keyword analysis. In keyword analysis, it tells you the scope, the CPC, and the keyword difficulty. In this way, you can check the keywords that are used on the website for which you are analyzing.

Along with the top sites, top referencing domain, top backlinks, it shows the statistics by graph for the growth rate that indicates the success rate of the site.

The backlink section shows the DR the websites from which you received the backlink, while it also displays the broken link of your website. The backlink section also tells DR the quality and total score of the backlink. If you enter a specific keyword, it also tells you the number of backlinks required to rank above your competitors.

2. Prepostseo

Content marketing is one of the most important facts in SEO that needs to be focused and analyzed. Without high-quality content, it's not easy to rank higher or apply SEO implications to your site. However, in addition to reviewing SEO practices, you should analyze the content you've written for your site, especially if you post the content as a blog post.

Prepostseo.com is an SEO tool that looks at your content quality. You can also check some other SEO actions through this tool. Below are some of the SEO tools that help to audit your site:

  • The Plagiarism Checker is a tool for verifying the uniqueness of the content. The tool is based on the latest algorithm for comparing your content with other published content on the Internet. If you have any duplicate content, it would indicate the ratio of unique and plagiarized content. In this way, the Plagiarism Checker tool will help avoid publishing content that has already been published on the Internet.
  • The Broken Link Checker Tool is another tool to check the broken links to your website. Broken links are a bad impact on the search engine on your website. You just have to enter the URL or domain in the tool and it will tell you the broken links. If you have a broken link, then you should make an effort to remove it.
  • The Readability Checker Tool of this website checks the readability of your writings. The search engine always recommends that you write the content according to a 7th-grade student. To do this, you must write naturally and in a communicative language. However, to verify that you have good readability, you should use this tool, where you simply upload or paste the content to check its score.

3. SpyFu

This is another SEO audit tool that is affordable and easy to use. Essentially, these tools are designed to keep an eye on competitors, their traffic, and their strategies. You can easily get to know their keywords, the source of traffic, the source of backlinks, and other analyses that would help you make your strategies better and more competitive.

This tool has automated report generation for various factors such as research on backlinks, broken links, ad placement, and other similar SEO perspectives. For keyword research, it says about the difficulty, volume, CPC, and other relevant information about the keyword you select.

SpyFu is a good tool for SEO auditing, as it automatically generates SEO reports that are generated after a thorough analysis of the website.

Features of SpyFu include SEO report, PPC research, keyword research, backlink analysis, competitive testing, ranking review, ranking tracking, domain analysis, and domain comparison.

If you want to check out a website with affordable prices and more features, this tool could be a good option for you.

4. MOZ

MOZ has SEO tools to analyze and audit a website. The basic audit of a website can be done free of charge with this tool, while you need to buy a subscription for a full audit.

Similar to Domain Rating, the MOZ has its score, known as the Domain Authority (DA), and it is several 100. To expect the overall SEO audit, the DA can be helpful, as DA depends entirely on the backlinks, the age of the domain, the quality of the backlink, rank, and the amount of traffic that is organic.

MOZ is also an effective tool for digital marketers as it provides complete statistics about a website and the performance of the website. Technical staff also use this tool to detect the technical errors of a website, such as checking the XML sitemap or the robot txt file.

MOZ is also a specialist in the analysis of keywords and backlinks because it displays all the keywords and backlinks of a website. Most websites use this tool to check the keywords and backlinks of their competitors.

MOZ gives you access to their tools for the first 30 days free of charge and after that, you have to buy their subscription.

Conclusion

If you are wondering why you aren’t getting traffic to your website or feel like you don’t have the SEO know-how the above tactics and tools will help you build your website presence.

SEO Glossary

Backlink: are links from one website to a page on another website that indicates that the search engine likes the content.

Crawling: the method search engines find your web pages.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (https): it is an encryption that protects the integrity of your website through preventing intruders from messing with your website.

Indexing: the storing and organizing of content found during the crawling process.

Keyword Research: the process of finding keywords that people are using in queries.

Off-page SEO: increasing of domain authority through content creation and earning backinks.

On-page SEO: optimizing parts of your website.

Organic: earned placement in search results.

Query: topic, phrases, and words typed into a website search bar.

Ranking: search result order by relevance to the query.

Search Engines: think Google, Bing, Yahoo, they store information, index, and retrieve query relevancy for all content in their databases.

Search Engine Results Page (SERPs): the webpages served to user queries.

SEO Audit: a full website evaluation of how it appears on SERPs.

SEO Testing: the process of evaluating how to best optimize your webpages for SERPs. The goal is to improve your SEO strategy and increase in ranking.