Learn SEO Audit Process to boost your Google Ranking

SEO Audit is a process involving evaluation of the search engine friendliness of a website in a number of areas. Performing SEO Audit is very important for your website to remain on top of the competition. Hire an SEO auditor who will manually review the website and will suggest recommendations of what needs to be fixed and what all needs to be changes to improve the performance of the website in search engines.

Know the importance of SEO Audit Process

SEO trends changes very often and what is working for you now may not work after 6 months. The algorithm of Google changes quickly and you needs to remain updated in order to stay in sync. Therefore, it is essential to perform regular SEO audit that can help your website to stay up-to-date with the latest developments.

Performing SEO Audit

Let’s know how to perform SEO Audit. Here’s a breakdown of SEO Audit process that can be followed.

STEP 1: Check for Google Penalties

This is the first step to identify whether your website is penalized by Google. If your website is under a manual or algorithmic penalty, your rankings might be negatively affected. Now that you found out your website is penalized, create an action plan to correct the issues to remove the penalty. There are two ways to check for Google penalties.

You can look for reasons for Google penalties by logging to Google search console and then select ‘Manual Actions’ from the left menu. If there is a manual action imposed on your website, you can see the reason(s) here.

The second method is to compare your Google organic traffic for the dates Google released an algorithmic change. A sudden increase or drop in organic traffic is an obvious indication that your website was affected by the changes.

What to do if you are under a penalty?

If the above tests indicate that you are indeed into trouble, then the most excellent approach is to find out the details about the Google updates and correct your SEO audit accordingly. If a site is penalized by Google because of thin content, then in the on-page SEO audit section, you should improve the quality of your content and redirect or remove pages that don’t meet the quality standards

STEP 2: Search Appearance

Check the brand name in Google and review the results. Things to check:

• Is your homepage coming first in the results?
• Is Google showing site links along with your listing?
• Do you have accurate description below your homepage?
• Is Google showing Google My Business Listing on the right panel for your brand?
• Are all the pages listed in the first page of Google results relevant to your website?
• Are the ‘related searches’ relevant?

How to fix this?

• Review and optimize your site structure.
• Review your homepage SEO
• Claim your Google My Business page

STEP 3: Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO is done to make sure that search engines can access and index your pages without issues. Things to check:

• You need to check whether your website is registered with Google search console and Bing webmaster tools.
• Review your URL structure and ensure SEO friendly URLs.
• Make sure you have breadcrumb menu for easy navigation.

STEP 4: On-Page SEO Audit

Now it is the time to deal with the content of your website. On-Page SEO is very essential to help search engines to understand the content on your website. Things to check:

• Are the titles and descriptions optimized?
• Are the headings and text formatting done using H1 and H2?
• Is your content fresh?
• Look for use of banner ads.
• Check for user-friendliness.

STEP 5: Off-Page SEO Audit

Off-Page SEO refers to as link building techniques utilized for promoting your website on the Internet. SEO backlinks are considered very important by the Google algorithm as ‘votes of trusts’. Therefore your website needs to possess excellent quality backlinks for ranking higher in Google results. Low quality links may hamper your website and Google tend to penalize your website. Things to check:

• Whether your incoming links and evaluating if there are toxic links.
• How many unique domains are linking to you?
• Which of the domains are considered as trusted domains?
• Depending on the above questions, you can look for solutions and take some corrective actions.

Conclusion

There’s a reason specific way that can be followed for a successful SEO audit. Google changes its algorithm very often and SEO “best practices” are inconsistent. There’s nothing like a one-size-fits-all SEO audit. However, you can follow the above steps to improve your site rankings.

Vidushi Infotech can help your business with its SEO services. We strive to improve user experience and give them best services. Our professional SEO Services have vetted digital marketing experts that work towards building a more user-friendly website. We formulate SEO strategies keeping your audience in mind.