SEO Audit
Performing a full SEO audit can feel overwhelming—especially if you don’t have a strong background in technology or best inbound marketing practices. However, anyone can perform a quick audit to ensure there are no glaring site issues.
What Is an SEO Audit?
Before you undertake any audit, you should understand what this process is and what kind of information it provides. An SEO audit can be thought of as a site checkup. This process examines the site’s infrastructure to ensure you are user friendly and maximally visible to search engines.
While a comprehensive audit does entail having some industry-specific knowledge and running fairly technical checks, you can run a basic audit within minutes.
What You Need to Get Started
Running a quick SEO audit doesn’t require any special knowledge or equipment or costly subscriptions to analytical tools. You can run this audit with:
- Any computer with Internet access.
- The website’s domain name (URL).
- The company and/or brand name. (Sometimes this is used in your domain; sometimes it’s not.)
- Location of your business. (This is only necessary if local business is important to your brand. For example, location is very relevant to a moving company.)
The Process
- Get an Overview
To obtain a high-level view of your site and how it’s performing, go to SEMRush.com. (Note, for basic information, this site is free and doesn’t require an account.)
Type in your domain, and you’ll receive a basic report that tells you:
- Search volume (and whether that’s increasing or decreasing).
- Top organic keywords and their rankings.
- Top competitor sites (with comparative graphs to see if you’re outperforming them or not).
The report will look something like this:
- Assess the Site
Go to your site and examine it objectively. Look for:
- Attractive, user-friendly appearance.
- Interesting content that tells a story and immediately engages the consumer.
- Accurate industry-specific content that other sites will find authoritative enough to link to.
- Ease of navigation. Can you easily find the blog, shopping cart, and other relevant pages?
- Well-integrated social media aspects.
Also check that pages load quickly and fully. Users aren’t going to wait around, so if your pages are slow to load, that could mean lost traffic.
- Perform Search Engine Checks
Go to your preferred search engines. Generally, that means Google and/or Bing. Ensure your domain loads and doesn’t result in any error pages.
Next, type in your brand name plus:
- Any relevant social media outlets (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).
- Your location. (Depending on your scope, this could be city, state, or larger geographic region.)
Your pages should both appear in these results and rank favorably.
- Check Social Media
Go to your relevant social media pages and ensure:
- Accurate brand information.
- Frequently updated and engaging content.
- Positive customer interactions via those platforms.
Don’t be discouraged if this process takes longer than expected the first couple times. As you become increasingly familiar with these analytical tools and the data they provide, it will take you less and less time to gather the necessary information. As you learn more about SEO practices, you can also start to delve deeper into the technical process with elements such as robots.txt, canonicalization, and more.