SEO Website Audit

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What Is An SEO Website Audit?

An SEO website audit is the process by which website owners can gain insight into the performance of their website, and understand the impact and shortcomings of their SEO strategy. 

Why Is an SEO Website Audit Important?

An SEO website audit is essential for the successful performance of a website; this is because it:

  • Allows a website to discover the reasons behind poor performance in SERPs, be that a negative SEO attack, black hat SEO techniques, or attempting to rank for the wrong keywords
  • Enables a website to gain insight into what their competitors are doing, and whether their strategies are successful or not
  • Can help improve your domain authority 
  • Can drastically improve conversions and sales
  • Provides more information about the factors that affect ranking in SERPs

What Is Covered in an SEO Website Audit?

An SEO website audit looks into a whole range of elements, these include:

1. Technical Factors

An SEO website audit should take a look into all the backend technical aspects of a website and identify any issues in the website’s coding.

2. On-Page Factors

The audit should also check all of the on-page factors. This includes…

3. Competitor Analysis

The website SEO audit should also look into competitor performance. 

  • It should look into the ranking of competitors 
  • It should look at how they are using meta-data, keyword placement and backlinks
  • It show analyse how competitors  engage with their audience, and their social media presence.

Things To Consider For Your SEO Website Audit

There are a few things to take into consideration when conducting your SEO website audit. 

  • How is your website architecture? Is it easy to navigate and comprehend for both crawlers and users? 
  • Are you using the right breadcrumbs
  • Are you using JavaScript? Yes? Well, don’t. Even a slight mistake in the Javascript code can lead to you blocking Google bots from crawling your site. Google crawlers can also have trouble understanding Javascript, and you should be aiming to make their task as simple as possible.
  • Are you using anchor text correctly?
  • Are your images correctly optimised? Are they accompanied by concise and relevant captions and alt text with keywords.
  • Is your content well researched, free of grammatical and punctuation errors and easy to read
  • Have you conducted excellent keyword research, and incorporated target keywords in your content. Is it optimised for featured snippets?

SEO Website Audit Tools

There are a few different tools that can be used when conducting an SEO website audit.

1. Netpeak Spider

Netpeak Spider Landing Page - SEO Website Audit

Netpeak Spider is a website crawler that detects technical SEO issues that reduce a website's visibility/ranking in SERPs.

With this tool, webmasters can conduct a technical audit of their websites quickly. The software combs through web pages and their attributes to make sure that there are no SEO errors that can affect the site's ranking on the web.

If there are any problems, the webmaster can resolve them to make sure that the website becomes more accessible to its target audience.

Netpeak Spider also checks content such as web pages, titles, headers, meta descriptions for duplicates and points them out to the webmaster. T

he webmaster can then decide whether they will bury the duplicates or alter them to serve other purposes. 

After crawling a website, this tool can be configured to save it's findings in CSV format. These include headers, reference links, redirects and other potentially harmful issues.

This allows teams to figure out how they can avoid these problems and resolve them better in the future, if they arise. 

2. SEO PowerSuite Website Auditor

SEO PowerSuite Website Auditor Landing Page - SEO Website Audit

SEO Powersuite Website Auditor is a website auditing tool that will tell you how search engines view your website. It crawls through the files and pages on your website to find problems that may be impeding the success you need in search engines. 

This tool uses an SEO spider to audit the whole website including the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

The Website Auditor also analyzes the links and resources within the website. The Site Structure section of the auditor breaks down the website audit into parts that you can understand and (assess) more efficiently.

The Site Audit section shows you an overview of the important parts of your site and (assesses) elements like images, URLs, redirect links, indexing and mobile-friendliness. 

The Page Audit section shows you the web pages that are performing well, as well as the ones that aren't.

It checks for broken links (internal and external), large pages, hierarchy issues, thin content pages, duplicate title tags and meta descriptions and W3C validation errors, amongst other things. 

SEO Powersuite Website Auditor provides a deep look into website issues that you might need to resolve to rank better in SERPs.  

3. Serpstat Website Audit Tool

Serpstat Website Audit Tool - SEO Website Audit

Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform designed to help businesses improve their SEO performance in major areas, including marketing, search analytics, PPC, and more. 

Depending on your plan, the Website Audit Tool helps you audit hundreds of pages with just one click.

After the audit, you will get a detailed set of data that allows you to review your website's performance and assess important elements like title tags, H1 headers, meta descriptions and duplicate content.

The data also includes SEO issues related to links, redirects, meta tags, schema markup, page speed and HTTPS certificate.

The site audit is very thorough as you get information on major issues like 404 pages, and also minor things like title tags that are too long.

The dashboard also makes it easy to find and resolve issues as it categorizes problems into priorities: High, Medium and Low. 

With Serpstat Website Audit Tool, you can see how optimized your website is and compare it to the level of optimization that your competitors' websites have.

This helps you identify the optimization practices you need to implement and which ones you should ignore. You will identify new issues and address them accordingly so that your website will rank better in SERPs. 

4. SE Ranking

SE Ranking Website Audit Landing Page - SEO Website Audit

SE Ranking is a cloud-based SEO platform that offers a wide array of tools that help marketers optimize a website and achieve a good positioning in SERPs.

The website audit tool in SE Ranking helps you see how your website is performing in SERPs by analyzing your website against all the main SEO parameters. 

The tool uses a powerful page crawler to monitor metrics, including page indexation status, domain metrics, and technical parameters such as page load time and HTTP status codes.

It also assesses overall website health, meta tags and headers, parameters per page, page resources, image optimization and UX issues. 

After crawling the website, SE Ranking will give you a detailed report that highlights any critical errors on your website and show you how to fix them.

You can compare a current audit to a previous audit to see how much your website has improved over time.

You also have the option to download this report in PDF format, which is useful if you want to use it offline or send it to clients.

5. MySiteAuditor

MySiteAudtor Home Page - SEO Website Audit

MySiteAuditor is a platform that offers sales tools and lead generation for SEO professionals. The platform helps marketers analyze and optimize their website to generate leads and sales. It allows users to embed a free SEO auditing tool to any website they want to assess. 

MySiteAuditor does not just audit entire websites only. It can also audit specific web pages or landing pages for any targeted long-tail keyword.

This tool provides a report with a simple SEO score that shows the health of the website and the strength of the site’s SEO strategy.

You also have the option to download your audit report or export it in PDF format.

6. SEMRush Site Audit Tool 

SEMrush Site Audit Landing Page - SEO Website Audit

SEMRush Site Audit Tool is a feature of SEMRush, the full-featured SEO suite, which analyzes a website to identify and fix critical SEO issues that might have a negative effect on your ranking in SERPs. 

It takes between a few minutes and a few hours to complete an audit with this tool. It searches your website for crawl errors, missing headers, duplicate content, slow-loading content, SSL problems and overuse of keywords, amongst other things.

Once an audit is completed, the tool returns the results in the site audit dashboard. 

The on-page SEO checker scans your entire website and gives you tips on how to improve each page in order of priority.

These tips can include suggestions on which keywords to add, how to improve your copy and meta descriptions, which websites to approach for backlinks, how to improve your internal linking strategy, and much more. 

SEMRush Site Audit Tool gives you a list of issues to fix and arranges them in order of priority, which can be very helpful for people who aren’t SEO experts.

It doesn’t just tell you what you should fix. It also tells you why you should fix them. 

In a nice touch, this tool also allows you to export your tasks to Trello, the popular project management app.

Other tools include: Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Moz, DeepCrawl, Google's Structured Data Testing Tool, etc.

How Can We Help?

Looking for insight and understanding into how to optimise your website and shoot up the rankings? You’re in the right place - contact us to be paired with a team that perfectly meets your needs. It might be us!

Or, for some independent work, why not check out our blog for some great articles on marketing and SEO that’ll help boost your understanding.