Do you want to know if your website is SEO friendly? What potential issues might be present on it? But most importantly, how can you find out and correct these problems? You've come to the right place!
We will present various steps to conduct a SEO audit of your site. We will guide you step by step so that by the end of this article, your site will be optimized and you will be able to achieve the performance you desire!
Conducting a SEO audit of your site: reasons and when to do it?
First of all, it's useful to ask yourself the questions: What are the reasons that motivate me to perform a diagnosis of my natural referencing? And when should I conduct SEO audits?
To get straight to the point, an SEO audit will allow you to identify the strengths, weaknesses, and therefore the areas for improvement for your site. Once you have this information in hand, you can define action plans to improve your ranking and thus visibility on search engines.
Now, let's turn to the question of timing. An SEO audit is conducted:
- When you launch your business (even if you are not yet ranked, the audit will allow you to analyze the competition and quickly implement good SEO practices).
- When you decide to establish a strategy (for a client or for your own business).
- When you have a new version of your site / an optimization (to check that there haven't been issues and that your site can continue to be indexed).
- If you notice a significant change in position or a substantial drop in traffic (once again, to verify the continuity of good SEO practices and to understand these changes).
- Otherwise, conducting an SEO audit at regular intervals can only be beneficial for anticipating and responding quickly.
8 simple steps to conduct an SEO audit
1. Prepare for your SEO audit
You will need to gather a few tools, most of which are free, to successfully carry out your comprehensive SEO audit:
- SEMRush: a very powerful SEO tool that gives you access to numerous statistics and reports
- Google Search Console: Google's tool for monitoring the status of your referencing on its search engine
- PageSpeed Insight: essential for assessing the loading speed of your website on both computer and mobile devices (Reminder: the loading time of your site's pages is one of the most important criteria in the eyes of search engines)
- Google Analytics: knowing your ranking and the source of your traffic is crucial for implementing action plans
- Detailed SEO Extension: an extension that provides an overview of the SEO structure of your pages
You can also find a list of 10 essential tools to improve your SEO.
2. Establish and analyze a keyword strategy
One of the first and very important steps to conduct a diagnosis of your natural referencing is to evaluate where you currently stand. Indeed, before you aim to optimize the SEO of your site, it is preferable to know which queries and keywords you are ranked for. To do this, you have several options:
- On Google Search Console, you can go to the "Performance" tab to study the number of clicks or impressions for each of the queries where Google indexes you
- On Google Analytics, you can study the most performing pages of your site based on your KPIs (Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate, etc.). You can also identify the keywords through which visitors are coming. This is a very powerful analysis tool because, with sufficient data, you can compare two periods. A useful option for assessing the impact of your modifications.
- On SEMRush, you can create a project that includes your domain name. Then, in the “Local SEO” tab and then “Position Tracking”, you can manually add keywords, using the tool itself or through Analytics to get an overview of your ranking.
- Bonus: the SEO Hero Ninja website allows you to see your rank for the keyword you define
3. Analyze your positioning compared to the competition
Once you are aware of your site's progress and have an idea of where to improve, it is essential to know how your competitors are positioned. Indeed, the main goal of an SEO audit is to identify areas for improvement to surpass your competitors. There is only one first position on search engines, and that is the one you should aim for (Well, the top 3 positions are also great!).
To compare yourself with your competitors, SEMRush offers a very visual solution. Thus, you can go to the “Position Tracking” tab to add your competitors and get a positioning map based on organic traffic and organic keywords.
You now know the status of your natural referencing and how you stand compared to your competitors. Now we will show you the different levers to optimize your site and thus your referencing to be able to appear in the first position on different SERPs.
4. Check if Google is indexing all the pages of your site
How can you know if Google is indexing all the pages of your site? How can you tell if duplicate pages of your site are not indexed with different URLs? These are examples of questions to consider fairly quickly during an SEO audit.
If some of your pages are not present on search engines, it will be very difficult to rank for your target queries. On the other hand, if the same page has several URLs or if you have the same content on different URLs, that has a negative impact on your natural referencing.
A very straightforward method to study which pages of your site Google indexes is to type in Google the query: site:your-domain-name (For example, for Digidop, it would be site:digidop.fr).
Once validated, you will obtain all the pages of your site that are visible on Google. You can then check if there are any important pages missing or if there are duplicates.
If you want to learn how to index your pages on Google quickly, here is a quick tutorial:
To know more in detail about the indexing issues of your site's pages on Google, you can access the “Coverage” tab via Search Console. In this tab, you can have an overview of the indexing errors of your pages, including a brief technical explanation.
5. Ensure your site has a fast loading time
A crucial step not to be forgotten when conducting your audit is to check the loading speed of your site. This is a very important data point, as it is both a ranking factor on computers and mobile devices. Moreover, you should also consider your audience; your site needs to be pleasant to use. The speed of your site is part of UX (User Experience). Having a fast loading time will be beneficial for both your visibility and capturing your audience’s attention.
Fun Fact: According to Google statistics, 53% of internet users abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
To assess the loading time of your pages, there is no need for complicated technical manipulations. Again, it's quite simple! For this, just go to SEMRush, in the "Local SEO" tab, then go to "Site Audit" and finally access the loading speed results of the pages. You can now see which pages of your site have excessively high loading times.
Once you know which pages are loading too slowly, you can go to Google PageSpeed Insights. There, you can analyze your pages in more detail and receive technical recommendations on what can be improved.
6. Ensure your web pages are responsive (optimized for mobile)
Again, this is an important point that must be analyzed. Many websites are very beautiful and attractive on computers but lose all their charm on mobiles and tablets. Your site represents your identity, and in today’s world, it is impossible to overlook good adaptation to small screens.
Fun Fact: In 2020, global mobile internet traffic accounted for approximately 51% of global internet traffic (Source: Statcounter)
You get it, you must not neglect mobile devices in your SEO strategy. Once again, in order to provide the best results to Internet users, Google will prioritize sites that have good mobile optimization.
To determine if your site has good mobile ergonomics, it’s quite simple. Head to Google Search Console, then in the “Experience” category, and finally in the “Mobile Usability” tab. This way, you will receive a technical report on the errors encountered on your pages.
7. Analyze your content (pages, articles, etc.)
On the various search engines, the content of your site is the foundation of SEO. The web is full of information, and you need to stand out with your content. Here’s a list of various points that need to be analyzed to optimize your pages:
7.1 Best SEO practices to follow
Here is a small list of practices to follow to enhance your content and ensure it is well-ranked:
- Fill in your Title tags (They should not exceed 60 characters and must be relevant)
- Fill in your Meta description tags (They should not exceed 155 characters and must attract internet users)
- Follow the order of heading elements (One H1 and no title jumps)
- Provide "Alt" tags for your images (description of the image for crawlers)
- Compress your images (To minimize the size of your pages; as we mentioned, your site's speed is crucial)
- Enrich your content (Caution: optimizing your natural referencing must not come at the expense of UX! Remember that you are addressing humans)
- Use your keywords within a semantic field (Your content should include strategic words and use synonyms to achieve a good ranking)
A useful and free tool to check the structure of your pages is the Detailed SEO Extension. This Chrome extension will help you verify the SEO structure of your page, and also indicate if any "Alt" attributes are missing from your images, for example.
7.2 Watch out for duplicate content
So far, we have mostly discussed factors that improve ranking. However, it is also important to consider factors that can derank or at least negatively impact your content. Specifically, we will talk about duplicate content.
To simplify, duplicate content is when search engines find the same content on different URLs. This point should not be taken lightly, as Google can penalize your website.
In the SEMRush Site Audit tool, you can find affected pages under issues. Duplicate content can be observed within the same site or across different sites. Therefore, you must completely avoid plagiarism in content creation methods.
7.3 Fix your link errors
Regarding your site's content, another important point to check is the analysis of your links. There are two aspects in this part that it is essential to pay attention to.
First, you must be cautious about orphan pages. Orphan pages are pages on your website that are not linked to any other pages. However, to optimize your site, there must be internal linking between your pages. Your pages should be easily accessible, which is possible through links. Thus, through this internal linking process, you enhance the weight of your various pages. If a page is "orphaned," it will not benefit from the power of other pages. Furthermore, it will be more challenging for crawlers and algorithms to understand the subject of the orphaned page.
Secondly, you need to search for broken links on your website. Broken links are links that do not work or redirect to a 404 page. This is a technical issue that is detrimental to UX and can have a slight impact on your ranking in search engines.
Once again, in SEMRush, you will find suggestions for improving your links in the "Issues" section of your site audit.
8. Examine the quality of your backlinks
When implementing an SEO strategy, there comes a time when you need to focus on obtaining backlinks. Simply put, this entails acquiring links from other websites that point to a page on your site to enhance its authority.
On the web, being a reliable source is crucial for achieving better traffic, and the backlinks strategy reinforces its authority. Moreover, a highly trafficked site linking to a page on your site will significantly boost it due to that link. However, you must be cautious again, as this practice is heavily monitored by Google due to its common misuse. Google may penalize you if it thinks you are trying to deceive it.
Toxic backlinks are links that harm your ranking. To identify them, simply conduct a backlink audit on SEMRush. You will then be able to see the potential toxic links pointing to your site.
Google has introduced a disavow links tool for your site to avoid penalties. However, be cautious not to overuse this tool. Furthermore, you should strive to obtain as many quality links as possible to enhance your authority in the eyes of search engines.
That’s it! Your machine is ready to achieve the best positions on search engines thanks to this comprehensive SEO audit. As we mentioned earlier, don’t wait for obvious problems to conduct a technical diagnosis of your site. The goal is to identify small issues to avoid being caught off guard.
At Digidop, we can assist you in building an SEO-optimized website. Indeed, our areas of expertise in Webflow site creation, natural referencing, and nocode tools allow us to offer you quality online visibility!
