What Is SEO Audit and Why Is It Important?

Table of contents:

• What Is SEO Audit?
• Why SEO Audit Is Important
  • Helps to Detect, Prioritize and Fix Website Errors
  • Helps to Evaluate How Specific SEO Activities Affect Your Website Condition and Allows You to Devise a Tailor-Made Game Plan
  • Helps to Stay up to Date with Ever-Changing Google Algorithms
  • Helps to Obtain Valuable Data About Your Website
  • Helps to Find Inspirations for Further Growth and Development
  • Helps to Benchmark Your Operations Against Your Competitors’ Strategies
• What Is SEO Audit and Why Is It Important? Key Takeaways

What Is SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is essentially a health check which allows domain owners (you) to analyze their website’s ability to rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

So, what is an SEO audit report in a nutshell? It’s the process of validating and optimizing a website for search engine requirements. It can be either general or focused on specific elements. Consequently, we can differentiate various types of SEO audits such as:

• technical SEO audits – checking your website speed, loading time, architecture, security, indexing, website rendering (meaning if e.g., the content generated by JS is seen correctly by Google),
• on-site SEO audits – checking elements like SEO-friendliness of titles, headers, internal linking, alt descriptions, and more.
• off-site SEO audits – verifying the number of backlinks, their quality, and anchor texts (meaning the keywords used to link to your website).
• content SEO audits check if the content published on the website is attractive to users, properly optimized, and tailored to the search intent. It’s an indispensable element of every content marketing strategy. It also helps to determine what content pieces need to be added, expanded, or (sometimes) deleted.

• Core Web Vitals audits – analyzing your Core Web Vitals indicators, website design, and performance in order to improve user experience. It’s the first step to tailoring your website to CWV requirements and improving your positions.
• local SEO audits – checking elements like local citations, Google My Business profile, and other local SEO factors that have a crucial impact on your positions in Google. It verifies elements that translate into the number of local customers you manage to attract to your business. It’s a must-have for the owners of brick-and-mortar shops, restaurants, hotels, and other local enterprises. Want to learn how to prepare this report and why it’s worth doing it?

As you can guess, depending on the website type, it may also be crucial to pay particular attention to extra elements such as:

• structured data and the buyer’s journey if you run an ecommerce,
• language versions, content translations, hreflangs, or geolocation (you shouldn’t have the last one) if you run an international business,
• content quality and expertise in the case of Your Money Your Life (YMYL) websites and industries.

Since you focus on specific keywords when performing SEO activities, your audit should be based on a detailed list of these phrases. So, if you haven’t performed keyword research and analysis before, it also has to be done when auditing your website.

Why is it so crucial? Without it, you won’t be able to evaluate your website optimization, SEO-friendliness, backlinks, or architecture. Why? Because you won’t be even able to tell which pages are the most important and relevant.

So, what does the finished product look like? It can be a report describing the above-mentioned elements and their correctness. It should also include recommendations of steps that ought to be taken to improve the website’s performance.

The audit report can be in the form of a docs file, PDF, or even a multimedia slideshow. It’s frequently accompanied by a spreadsheet with the collected data (e.g., from the site crawl or reports from external tools like SEMrush, Moz, Woorank, etc.).

To stay on the cutting edge and keep your finger on the pulse, it’s advisable to perform an SEO audit on a regular basis, preferably every 6 months. If it’s not feasible, then analyze your website performance at least every few years.

Why SEO Audit Is Important

Are you wondering why you need an SEO audit? It allows you to see areas that need improvement and detect practices that are detrimental to your website’s ranking. Aside from that, conducting an SEO audit also benefits you in the following points below.

Helps to Detect, Prioritize and Fix Website Errors

An SEO audit helps you identify mistakes that are preventing your website from getting the traffic it deserves and from ranking high in the SERPs. It also verifies if any of your strategies are causing you to lose web traffic instead of attracting it.

Problems that an audit can detect include but are not limited to the following:

• External links going to your site that’s harming your ranking.
• Duplicate content that is confusing Google and other search engines.
• Missing meta tags
• Slow load time of web pages
• Error messages
• Many more

As you can see, an SEO audit will help you find and fix website errors that may impact your search results ranking, web traffic, and conversions or sales.

Helps to Evaluate How Specific SEO Activities Affect Your Website Condition and Allows You to Devise a Tailor-Made Game Plan

An SEO audit provides valuable insights into how your website is performing in the SERPs. It also helps you analyze the effects of specific SEO activities. Thanks to it, you can see if performed actions are likely to help you achieve your business goals and if you’re going in the right direction.

With this information, you can then devise a tailored game plan to maximize your website’s potential and focus on elements that are worth improving first.

Helps to Stay up to Date with Ever-Changing Google Algorithms

Google is regularly rolling out updates to its ranking algorithms, which means that what worked for you last year may not work this year. An SEO audit will allow you to stay on top of all changes and ensure that your website passes the criteria of the latest modifications.

It’s a great and simple way to see how your website is performing and if anything needs to be adjusted or tweaked.

Helps to Obtain Valuable Data About Your Website

Why is an SEO audit important? It’s a valuable source of information about your website performance and results.

Moreover, as you continue fixing all the issues on your page, you also need to measure all the site’s improvements continuously to verify if you’re going in the right direction. Thanks to it, you’ll be using the available budget to the fullest. An SEO audit report allows you to keep track of what the situation was like before you made all the changes. This way, you can monitor your performance accurately and stay ahead of your market rivals.

Note that every excellent SEO strategy starts with an SEO audit of a website. If you want to be data-driven and have a solid base to compare your future results, you’ll need a comprehensive audit of your website.

Helps to Find Inspiration for Further Growth and Development

What is an SEO audit? Apart from the above-mentioned definition, it’s also an ideal way to find ideas for further growth and development of your website. It reveals all the weak points of your online presence that need to be addressed and also gives you inspiration on how to use specific SEO techniques to your advantage.

For example, if it turns out that your website has too few backlinks and you don’t know how to get more, an SEO audit can reveal some great link building strategies that you can use.

All in all, an SEO audit is a great way to uncover hidden opportunities that can help you increase your web traffic and grow your business.

Helps to Benchmark Your Operations Against Your Competitors’ Strategies

With SEO auditing tools, you can also conduct a comprehensive analysis of your competitors’ websites. And through that, you can learn their keyword rankings, backlinks, SEO tactics, and even their weaknesses and strengths. You can see which of their content is getting a lot of backlinks and evaluate if their strategy is effective. Then, you can find inspiration on what should be incorporated into your strategy to boost your SEO success.

Also, by monitoring how competitors get their backlinks, you can discover many outreach opportunities. This way, you can obtain backlinks from quality domains and further leverage your parameters.

What Is SEO Audit and Why Is It Important? Key Takeaways

Hopefully, now you know what an SEO audit is and why it’s important to perform it on a regular basis.

As you can guess, preparing such a detailed report analyzing your website can be a tough nut to crack, as it involves numerous complex activities and requires using professional tools. If you want to conduct an SEO audit of your website but aren’t sure where to start, contact us. Our experts will be happy to analyze your page and help you improve your performance.

This is an update of an article published in 2020.