SEO website audit service
Panem Agency is an ongoing partner that handles SEO, PPC, and content marketing efforts. They aim to improve Google rankings and boost traffic by revising targeted keywords, link building, and web development.
Today, no business can survive without a proper SEO strategy. Having a well-crafted strategy has become a necessity for many startups. Yet, before creating an SEO strategy, it’s critical to have a clear understanding of your website. To achieve this, a technical SEO audit is essential. And it’s not just a new website, those that underwent through maintenance or a complete redesign are in need of site audit. After all, a website SEO audit takes away the guesswork from SEO and helps you align your business activities with your digital marketing efforts.
SEO audit in a nutshell
Similar to market audit, all SEO audits aim to identify blind spots and accelerate your rankings. Website SEO audit helps bring prospects to your site through organic search, as well as increase your online presence. Major search engines change their algorithms on a daily basis, and not knowing your position within the system can have a significant impact on your financial status. The site audit itself can be done using specialized tools or by an SEO expert.
SEO Audit Basics—The Things You 100% Must-Check
1. Benchmark Your Rankings and Understand Your Competitors
Whether you are working on a new site for the first time or are auditing as part of your ongoing strategy, the more you know about what other players in the same space are doing, the better your chance of success.
Benchmarking Your Site’s Rankings
Understanding Your Competitors
Pro tip: Competition Level is a metric calculated based on the number of keywords of each competitor and the number of common keywords of both competitors. Sites with many keywords in common are considered competitors.
2. Check for Duplicate Versions of Your Site in Google’s Index
That said, running a site search is an important thing to do. You will also quickly get an insight into any subdomains being used, and it is not uncommon to also find duplicate site versions on subdomains set up for affiliates.
3. Check Your Site’s Indexed URLs
We will talk about this later in the auditing process, but for now, it’s good to know you can de-index or block certain pages from appearing in the search results by using the Google Search Console Removal tool. Note: these have to be URLs that you own and have registered with Google Search Console.
4. Check for Manual Actions
This used to be referred to as a manual penalty. It means that your site’s rankings will drop and that you won’t be able to rank as highly as you previously were until Google revokes the action. This action can either be at page level or sitewide.
5. Analyze Your Site’s Speed
6. Confirm That Your Site Uses HTTPS
7. Check for Mobile-Friendliness Issues
SEO Audit Quick Wins
11. Fix Broken Internal Links
Having broken internal links creates a poor user experience. If a user clicks a link on your site, they expect to be taken to that page, not served a 404 error. But that aside, it sends negative quality signals to the search engines.
12. Clean Up Your Sitemap
13. Check Your Redirects
Redirect Chains and Loops
Temporary Redirects
In almost all instances, you should be using 301 redirects rather than 302s. 301s are a permanent type of redirection vs. 302s, which signal a more temporary move. If you plan on keeping things where they are for the long term, a 301 redirect is probably the best choice.
Auditing Your Site’s Content
14. Find and Fix Duplicate Content Issues
15. Identify Thin Content Pages
For instance, if you are writing about a dense topic like “cataract lenses,” you will likely want to focus on the details of both the lenses on the market and the procedures available to patients looking to get these types of medical solutions.
16. Fix Issues with Orphan Pages
17. Compare Your Content to Top Ranking Pages and Analyze Searcher Intent
It may sound obvious, but spend time analyzing the top-ranking pages for the search terms you are targeting. If you notice a stark difference between your content and the pages that rank at the top of Google, you will need to consider a content audit to rework your page with searcher intent in mind.
If you’re struggling to identify the intent of a specific keyword, fear not. Many of our keyword research tools now have a Search Intent Metric to help you determine whether a keyword is Transactional (T), Commercial (C), Navigational (N), or Informational (I).
18. Run a Backlink Audit
It is important that you check for toxic links as part of any SEO audit, especially if you’re working on a site for the first time. If you’re new to toxic backlinks or would like a refresher, we have a handy guide to walk you through them.
‘Toxic backlinks’ can be considered toxic for several reasons (which you can filter for in the ‘Audit’ tab of the tool). Some negative factors that influence the toxicity level of a backlink in our tool include:
Let’s say you decide to tackle the backlinks with the highest toxicity score first. You’ll want to head to the ‘Audit’ tab to view the results. Then, work your way down the links, clicking to open the URL in a new tab.
Important note: Google’s Disavow tool is an advanced feature. It might be easier to reach out to the domain owner to have a link removed rather than navigating through the complex disavow process, especially if you are new to the world of backlinks.
All issues that Serpstat finds
Serpstat is a solid SEO tool. It’s got all of the features you’d expect from an SEO software suite. And it’s competitively priced compared to its main competitors. I haven’t had a ton of interactions with Serpstat support. But the few I did were impressive. A big checkmark here.
Serpstat is a solid tool that can be a cost-effective alternative to some of the industry heavyweights such as SEMrush and Ahrefs. Serpstat is certainly worth a trial if you are looking for a tool that can provide actionable insights and help improve your SEO and PPC campaign performance.
Why is SEO audit important?
SEO audit plays a vital role in determining the performance of your website. Google constantly checks how your website performs and updates its algorithms countless times, and SEO audit helps you find out how to adjust your website to meet the requirements. Moreover, it helps you find and fix technical issues that can slow down the website and drop your rankings.
What is SEO Audit tool?
SEO Audit Tool is one of the best ways to find the technical issues of your website that have a negative impact on its rankings. With just a few clicks, you can find out an overall SEO health score, missing or wrong metatags, download speed, troubles with content and multimedia, server parameters, links, and more. SEO audit allows you everything else you need to know about the SEO performance of your website.
What is an SEO audit?
SEO audit is essential if you want to keep your SEO strategy up-to-date. It’s basically a health check for your website, that helps you, as a website owner, analyze its ability to rank at the top of search engine result pages. It is important, as it helps you detect and fix errors, analyze how to steer your SEO optimization, and also have a peek at your competitor’s SEO strategy to compare them and improve yours.
What is included in technical SEO?
In order for your website to rank higher, the technical part of it should be optimized, and that is why technical SEO is needed. Technical SEO includes such characteristics of a website, as a secure connection, a responsive design and a fast loading speed. This data helps technical engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website faster. Since this part has nothing to do with the actual content of your website, it is called technical.
How do I run a technical SEO audit?
The easiest way to start a technical SEO audit is to choose a tool you will do it with. With Serpstat SEO Audit online tool, you can do it in just a few steps. As a result, you will get a clear description of every issue and recommendations on how to fix them, clear graphs, custom overview reports and custom settings of your audit according to any of your needs.
How is SEO audit done?
In order to perform an SEO audit, you need a suitable tool. Once you detect all the issues and errors in your website’s SEO strategy with the help of an SEO Audit tool, you should dedicate some time and effort to fix them. With Serpstat SEO Auditing tool, you will receive clear recommendations on fixing every technical issue your website has. With just a few steps, your website will be optimized for SERPs.
Sources:
https://panem.agency/a-seo-audit
https://www.semrush.com/blog/seo-audit/
https://serpstat.com/site-audit/
SEO audit
SpyFU is another extensively-renowned name in the SEO research circles. And just like SEMrush, it packs an entire arsenal of digital marketing tools – for keyword research, backlink tracking, competitor research, PPC research, rank tracking, you name it.
15 Best SEO Audit Tools in 2022 (Many of Them Are Free)
As you might have noticed already, Google’s algorithm is progressively getting more and more complicated. It’s not just a simple game of keywords anymore. Rather, Google currently uses more than 200 factors [1] in its ranking.
I don’t know about you, but that’s a heck of a lot of stuff to keep up with. I prefer leaving the heavy lifting to SEO audit tools! At least they are specialized enough to dig deep and discover any SEO issues that might be compromising my web pages.
Now, in that light, allow me to walk you through 15 of the best SEO audit tools in 2022. I’ve prepared this comprehensive list after years of extensive research and trials. And yes, I’ve been considerate enough to include both advanced and simple solutions, as well as paid and free SEO auditing tools.
Website audit is easy & efficient with the right website SEO checker.
Technical SEO analysis and on-page optimization demand solid data evaluation and a good deal of multitasking which can get messy. WebSite Auditor SEO tool accompanies its SEO audits with neat visualizations of accurate data:
I have been really impressed with the features that Website Auditor has to offer! This tool has really helped me to understand SEO better. If you are looking for software to help drive your keywords to search engines, and get a top 10 placement in search engines, then Website Auditor is a must have.
Website Auditor is the advanced onpage tool that saves you tons of time and arms you with detailed recommendations on how to boost your traffic quickly and easily. Having access to this information will put you in a very powerful position and make you one of the strongest SEOs in the business.
WebSite Auditor is very well structured and provides some essential information, summarization and visualization options. I have found the tool really useful both to SEO newbies and practising SEO consultants.
Making an SEO Audit report in WebSite Auditor is as easy as going to the Reports module, letting the tool create a free report. Use ready-made templates or customize your own to add those SEO factors that you want to monitor.
Sure you can! The website SEO checker will bring you optimization ideas from up to 10 top-performing sites in your niche. Or create a project for any competitor’s domain, and let the tool analyze your competition’s SEO health.
Yes, there is a free version available! And while that free version is limited, it’s still usable for lower volume SEO campaigns. Check out the comparison page for more information on the differences between a free plan and the paid ones. Besides, you can use a one-week free trial to feel the power of the full-feature toolkit.
Visualize Your SEO Progress
Get Notified About Any Technical and On-Site Issues on Your Website
Professional-Looking White-Label SEO Reports
Check Your Website for Issues Now!
SEO analysis is the process of scrupulous inspecting a website to detect weak spots that should be fixed to make the website better optimized for search engines like Google. Simply put, SEO analysis is a must for your website to rank higher and drive traffic.
SEO analysis helps you determine what you should do to improve your website visibility to popular search engines like Google and to get ranked higher. You should run SEO audits before making any changes to your website.
SEO tools are either online or desktop pieces of software that help automating different processes when you’re optimizing your website for search engines. SEO tools can be used for many different tasks: they provide information on backlinks, keywords, rankings and traffic, as well as insights into your online competitors’ SEO strategies.
If you want to check the SEO score for your or your competitor’s website, go to WebCEO SEO Analysis tool. The ‘On-Site Issues Overview’ shows the optimization score for your site and other important SEO factors at a glance. Home page, landing pages and on-site issues are taken into consideration, when counting the optimization score.
To do an SEO audit means to check your website in detail following each step on your audit list, and to find any issues that need to be fixed or improved to enhance each website page’s search engine performance.
- Check your site visibility on Google and other search engines
Check your website global and local rankings (organic, featured snippets, People Also Ask, Ads, News, Places, Images, etc.) with the Rank Tracking tool. - Analyze your website pages’ URLs, important meta tags, headings, content
The URLs, titles, descriptions, images alt tags and headings of your website should contain the keywords you target. Run the On-page Issues report and check for the keywords that you’ve used in these critical elements of your website. Also, make the titles look enticing so that users want to click on them. - Run a technical audit for your website
Fix broken links before your site visitors strike them. The Site Audit tool keeps a sharp look at any crawlability issue that may wreck the usability of your site. - Audit your website Backlink Profile, check if your website has toxic links and remove them.
Check your site for broken links as they may cause a very bad user experience for your website visitors. Perform a complete comprehensive backlinks audit of your website. Spy on your competitors backlink strategies with WebCEO. - Optimize your internal links structure
Internal linking on your website helps users easily find different pages on your site.and can help improve your search engine rankings. Check if your site structure is good with the WebCEO Internal Links tool.
A technical audit of your website is a must-have procedure that helps detect any technical issues on your site, such as pages not found, broken JavaScript files, broken images, server issues, page access issues, and so on.
The importance of identifying such problems is huge, as these affect your rank performance on SERPs: some of these problems are officially considered by Google to be ranking factors on which the search engine decides what position your website is worthy of.
WebCEO will easily detect any issues on your website. After the scanning session, WebCEO will build a list of problems that exist on your website and you will get instructions on how to solve them. Each point on the list will contain a link to the very pages where a problem was discovered as well as the position of an issue in your page source code.
If you want to check the SEO score for your or your competitor’s website, go to WebCEO SEO Analysis tool. The ‘On-Site Issues Overview’ shows the optimization score for your site and other important SEO factors at a glance. Home page, landing pages and on-site issues are taken into consideration, when counting the optimization score.
The best way to find out how often you should check your website is to start with weekly scans and analyze the quantity of issues you see with each new scan. If it is gradually decreasing – which will be seen on the Trend Over Time chart – you can revise your scan schedule.
Sources:
https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/seo-audit-tools/
https://www.link-assistant.com/website-auditor/
https://www.webceo.com/website-audit.htm
SEO audit
As one of the most popular SEO tools to date, Semrush has a nifty Site Audit feature that analyzes a website’s overall health. It also has an On-page SEO checker that analyzes Google ranking factors and provides actionable recommendations to improve a website’s performance. It’s also useful for conducting competitor analysis with its capabilities to monitor visibility and keyword rankings for multiple domains, as well as identify top-performing pages that drive organic traffic to competitor sites.
How to Do an SEO Audit: A 10-Point Checklist to Improve Rankings
The power of SEO audits comes from crawlers or tools that check the website. These tools function like Google’s bots in how they inspect websites for issues. Each of these tools has specific crawl settings and examines different areas that may affect the website’s performance. Later in this post, we’ll provide you with a list of SEO audit tools to use when checking websites.
The obvious reason is to know how the website is performing, what elements need to be optimized, and what opportunities you can capitalize on. However, the purpose of doing an SEO website audit goes beyond a “check it and leave it for later” approach.
While an audit can provide you with data to better optimize the site, it doesn’t constitute the entirety of your SEO strategy. Don’t treat it as a step-by-step document; instead, use it to build the foundation of your SEO roadmap.
Who Uses an SEO Audit?
- When bringing in new leads – Some agencies often use the SEO audit as a sales tool and foot in the door to set a meeting with potential clients. Digital marketers or professional SEO consultants can use the audit as a lead magnet to assess a lead’s website even before they start a campaign. You can use this as one of your supplementary marketing documents in your sales kit whenever you pitch complete SEO services to clients.
- When starting a new SEO campaign – It should be standard procedure to conduct an SEO audit when onboarding a new client. This report is crucial when working with a client for the first time. The audit helps you set the right expectations with clients and make the right decisions based on the goals of the client. This is your first step to making sure you’re going into a battle that you can win and, ultimately, achieve results for your clients.
- On the 5th or 6th month of the campaign – This allows you to identify if there have been significant changes in the website’s organic performance when you started optimizing. Just because you’ve managed to rank the client for their target keywords, that doesn’t mean you stop optimizing. Conducting a website audit helps you look for other opportunities to rank a website.
There’s no limit to how many SEO audits you can perform on a website. It’s important, however, that you’re tracking the improvements and adjusting your SEO strategy according to your findings and available data.
What are the benefits of regular SEO audits?
How has SEO evolved? In 1991, the first website was created. Then, 1994 witnessed the first search engine – Yahoo, whereas Google appeared in 1997. At that time, SEO was in its infancy. The success depended on the number of keywords on a page and its tags: the more pages with the necessary keyword a website has, the higher is the ranking.
Since 2003, website content has been gradually improved and structured with the appearance of the first quality search algorithms. SEO basics have started to include more components. The quantity could still be synonymous with quality, but the links were prioritized over keywords. The source and quality of traffic played no role and were useless for marketing and advertising purposes.
2010 was the turning point when quantitative factors were completely overridden by behavioral. As a result, the domain age lost its previous importance. Even a young but well-optimized website could easily overtake a 10-year web veteran solely using its content.
The modern SEO period started in 2013 with the appearance of search personalization. As a result, SEO advertising based on low-frequency keywords became dominant. As a result, people created several one-page websites and used them to attract specific ad traffic.
So now we have arrived at the present day when all the possible rates are adjusted to meet the single requirement – user convenience. No matter on what device or screen a user browses a website. The design must be eye-catching but, at the same time, not tiring to the eyes or brain. The content must be structured but, most importantly, short.
If you try to figure out how to meet all these requirements, the conclusion will be simple – it’s impossible. They often seem mutually exclusive. Everything is complicated with the ever-changing rules of the game. Predicting search engine tendencies sometimes looks more difficult than unraveling the mystery of the universe. Moreover, tons of competitors are snapping at your heels. This turns into a heavy burden on the shoulders of SEO, advertising, and marketing specialists. They become the first to be responsible for any decrease in sales.
How to conduct an SEO audit that won’t make you feel ashamed?
To avoid getting lost in the SEO definition and SEO indicators, you need to understand one thing: if you promote a site, you must regularly conduct a brief analysis of the completed search optimization. You cannot just forget about audits and let your website exist without any control and SEO analysis reports. At least once per month, corporate SEO specialists must use Google Search Console to collect data on:
1. Main website mirror and URL format
2. Robots.txt and sitemap.xml files
It separately indicates the search bots that are disallowed to scan the page, including Baiduspider (a search bot targeted at the Chinese market), HaoSouSpider (a search bot of the Chinese search engine HaoSou.com), and Sogou web spider (a browser virus which is now actively spread in the web. The recent studies have shown that it primarily targets the computers are located in China).
Another interesting fact is that in China, the indexing of the pages with red Apple products is disallowed.
If a user selects the Chinese language and goes to this category, the double redirect to the main page is activated.
3. HTTP headers of server responses
When a URL is accessed, a server returns an HTTP header with various data, including a server response code, last change date, coding of the document, and expiration date (the period during which the URL’s content is relevant).
4. Design of the 404 error page
If there is no page at the specified URL, a server must return a 404 mistake. So take care of the design of your 404 pages to make sure a user landing on it continues working with the website. That’s why specialists assess this factor during SEO audits and include it in SEO reports.
5. Broken 4xx links
403 errors are server errors which mean that some users are disallowed to access certain pages. These pages are active and throw the error only for the selected countries and regions. For example, https://www.apple.com/pl/tv/ and https://www.apple.com/tv/ return a 200 code, whereas the https://www.apple.com/in/tv/ page is no longer available since it has another URL https://www.apple.com/in/apple-tv-4k/.
6. Clean URLs
Clean URLs are user-friendly URLs that SEO specialists recommend using for all website pages during its promotion. Visitors may perceive long URLs as unclear and difficult or similar to encryption (e.g., site.com/?pag=1&24%). Choosing a friendly structure of URLs makes them more appealing (e.g., site.com/catalog).
You probably know that the URL of a page in Google Search results is displayed under the page title and above the snippet (brief information about the page displayed in search results). Similar to the title and snippet, the URL segments that match the query will be semi-boldened.
7. Meta description and meta headers
A title tag indicates the title of a page that tells users and search engines its name. The title tag is placed within the head tag of an HTML document. To make website promotion really effective, ideally, every page must have a unique name.
Meta description tag provides search engines with a short description of a page. Whereas a title tag should include only one sentence, a description may contain several sentences (small paragraph). As well as the title tag, the description must be entered within the head tag in the HTML code of a page.
Why SEO Is Important
It’s likely these potential customers will never see your site if it’s not ranking on the first or second page of results. Doing SEO the right way will bring more organic traffic to your site, which increases your conversion rates.
Enter the URL of the domain or page you want to check along with your target keyword and click “Scan Now.” The website seo analyzer will scan your URL for errors, warnings, and notices and provide you with a page score.
The page grade percentage is calculated based on the combination of factors including warnings, critical errors, and page speed. It’s a measure to provide guidance as you decide what changes to make on the page after analyzing it.
Use the errors as guidance for making corrections, and optimizing your page for on-page SEO. Keep in mind that the results of the website audit tool apply to the individual page you put in. So to improve your site’s SEO score overall you’ll likely want to make improvements to multiple pages.
Google’s bots crawl your site to determine its quality, and correct technical on page optimization is one of the main signals used. When you optimize your page based on the recommendations of the website analyzer, you can increase your organic traffic, improve ranking positions, and stay competitive against other sites ranking for your target keywords.
With so many factors in addition to SEO errors on the page, it’s best to use website analytics (we use Google Analytics) to see what changes over time after making the changes. Keep in mind that it takes time for Google and other search engines to recrawl and index the changes made on your site. Then you can look at changes in:
• User Behavior: number of pageviews, time on site, failure percentages.
• New users to the site vs returning users compared to previous periods.
• How the positions of your keywords and landing pages have changed (use Google Search Console to see the changes)
Yes. Set up a meeting with one of our Account Managers here and they will be able to guide you on what services we provide to correct those issues. You can also use the step-by-step guides on our Resources page if you want to try fixing them yourself.
Many websites rely on other traffic generation methods such as traffic from social media, email, referrals, and direct traffic sources over search engines. For sites like these, SEO errors aren’t as important because search engines aren’t their #1 traffic source. For a smaller website, a couple of errors can have a much bigger negative effect than those same errors on a larger website.
Sources:
https://www.seoreseller.com/blog/how-to-seo-audit
https://www.plerdy.com/blog/seo-audit-apple/
https://www.thehoth.com/seo-audit-tool/