SEO Audit: A Complete Guide for Enhancing Your Website's Performance in 2023-2024??

This strategy encompasses various components of an effective SEO audit. While the sequence of these elements may not be rigid, the information provided below is essential for conducting a comprehensive and effective SEO audit for any website. Additionally, it's important to emphasize the ongoing monitoring and updating of content. This task should be managed by a dedicated team or, at the very least, allocated sufficient time for conducting regular SEO audits, assuming your employer supports this initiative.

1. Starting with the Right Tools ???:

Kick off your SEO audit with robust tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or SE Ranking. These are your digital magnifying glasses, helping you conduct a thorough domain review. Your focus? Identifying technical SEO issues such as poor content density, low HTML-to-text ratios, repetitive titles, meta descriptions, and keyword cannibalization.

All of these are crucial elements to inspect as they all negatively impact your rankings if not addressed. They can all be fixed pretty swiftly by adding content, ensuring each page has a different focus keyword and unique content for that keyword to avoid cannibalization and lastly, ensuring each page has a different title and meta description that accurately reflects the content on the page. (don't be keyword stuffing - that's so 10 years ago.

It's also important to mention that meta descriptions are not a huge ranking factor. Google will craft a meta description by taking chunks from the best meta descriptions or adapt them based on the searcher's query, so plan to not spend your whole day optimization meta descriptions when there are much larger SEO issues that are directly impacting your rankings.)

2. Leveraging Chrome Extensions for On-Page Optimization ??:

Make quick and effective adjustments to your website using free Chrome extensions like 'SEO Meta in One Click ', 'Meta SEO Inspector ', and 'SEO Pro Extension' .

These tools are perfect for optimizing on-page elements like headings, image alt texts, descriptions, broken links etc. They offer a straightforward solution for immediate improvements, enhancing your site's SEO with just a few clicks.

3. Assigning Tasks to the Right Teams??:

Once you've identified technical issues, it's time to delegate. Assign technical SEO problems to your tech-savvy team and content issues to your creative content team. This ensures each aspect of your SEO is handled by experts, much like a chef entrusting different parts of a meal to skilled sous-chefs.

Not every organization has these resources, so make sure that if you're working at an agency or company, you ask questions about how they address this before starting so you know the standard operating procedures for addressing these technical SEO issues.

If you're a freelancer, you'll need to find a trusted ally to help you with these tasks as they take more time and honestly, it's best to use Technical SEO experts instead of trying to fix it yourself - which can lead to mistakes. You can also learn more about technical SEO in this informative article .

4. Analyzing Pages with Low Engagement ??:

Explore pages that are highly visible yet have low engagement. Revitalize the content, resolve issues with sparse content, and confirm the proper configuration of 301 redirects. This process aims to improve the user experience on your site and optimize it for search engines. For this task, utilize Google Search Console (GSC). Navigate to the 'indexing' tab on the left-hand side panel and then click 'pages', to view which pages are indexed and which aren't, along with detailed explanations for any indexing issues.

4a. Ensuring Proper Indexing in Google Search Console??:

Check that your top-performing pages and key content pieces are properly indexed in Google Search Console (GSC). This is like making sure your best products are displayed in your store's front window. You can also see what keywords you're being found for, what pages are getting impressions and not enough clicks - which is an indication of a opportunity to improve that page to increase CTR's (Click Through Rates) for that specific page.

6. Conducting a Comprehensive Competitor Analysis??:

Understand how visitors interact with similar content and what they expect. This step is about learning from your competitors and using that knowledge to enhance your own site’s content strategy and user engagement.

By analyzing your competitors (simply type in your keyword in Google's or Bing's search bar) you can see what ranks highly, how the content is structured and see what visitors are going to expect based on the top organically ranking sites (not promoted sites as these are advertisements with a PPC budget behind them and do not accurately reflect organic rankings at all.)

7. Managing Your Link Profile ??:

Conduct a thorough analysis of toxic backlinks and disavow harmful ones. This process is crucial for maintaining a healthy and credible link profile, which is a key aspect of your site's relationship with search engines.

You can sign up for HARO for free to get multiple emails a day from reporters looking for some help with getting an article written for them. However, you're not always notified if your article is used so you have to check that manually in your SEO tool of choice.

Another strategy for link-building is to find broken links on websites using chrome extensions and manually reaching out to the owner of the website and letting them know it's broken and offering a link to an article you've written. This doesn't always work, but it's a good strategy as it focuses on helping rather than selling or being 'spammy'.

8. Cross-Referencing Keyword Data ??:

Use GSC and Google Keyword Planner to identify gaps in your content strategy, especially regarding search intent and keyword usage. Including LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords , synonyms, and secondary keywords related to your main keywords, and employing NLP techniques can significantly enhance content relevance.

9. Expanding Your Audit Scope ??:

Don’t forget to check mobile responsiveness, optimize page load times, and ensure compatibility across browsers and devices. Also, assess your website’s UX design, which plays a crucial role in keeping your visitors engaged and satisfied. Use tools for free like PageSpeed Insights or LightHouse (chrome extension and webpage) to check these types of elements and get Google-recommended solutions in fixing them and further information about what the issue is and why it's a problem.

10. Tailoring SEO Strategy to Your Organization??:

Finally, customize your SEO strategy to fit your organization’s specific needs. This ensures that your SEO efforts are effectively integrated into your company’s overall business strategy.

Remember, an SEO audit isn’t just about quick fixes; it’s a continuous process of improvement and adaptation as algorithms and user needs constantly change.

By following these steps, you can increases your chances of SEO success and help ensure your website is not only visible but also provides a valuable and engaging experience for your users.

Happy optimizing! ??

-Jeremy Pagel (if you need an SEO audit, this is my LinkTree where you can schedule a time to meet with me to explore opportunities and options. Not required but just another resource for your SEO journey!)