SEO Audit in 1 hour: This is how you do it Yourself

You want to know what can be done better within your site to achieve more sales, customers and visitors. Unfortunately, you currently do not have the means to hire an SEO party, you like to do it yourself or you are too cocky to let someone help you.

However you turn or turn it: you want to get started yourself. And this article will help you with that, because in 11 simple steps I will show you how to do an SEO audit yourself.

What is an SEO audit?

The word audit means to check, check or verify. And with an SEO audit you do a kind of APK of your organic findability.

So see it as a kind of diagnosis of your website / online presence with the aim of making it easier to find. Opinions about the content of an SEO audit are divided, but in my view the following parts certainly belong:

· Technical check

· On Page SEO check

· Off Page SEO check

· Competitive Analysis

· Keyword

Why is an SEO audit important?

An SEO audit is important because you want to know what can be improved about the current situation. Because of course you can write even more content and start guest blogging even more, but if the loading time of your website is 10 seconds and your website has 500 backlinks from China, then you will never score well.

Which tools are important for an SEO audit?

There are now hundreds of SEO tools on the market and of course there are plenty of alternatives to the tools that I will call that. But these are the tools I used to do the SEO audit.

Feel free to use a different program, as you happen to have already purchased or like it better.

· SEMrush

· KWFinder

· SEO Site Check Up

· GT Metrix

· Google Page Speed

· Screaming Frog

· Google Analytics

· Google Search Console

· Mobile-friendly test from Google

· Google Structured Data Testing Tool

· Ahrefs

Step 1: Start with a general SEO check

The first thing I always do when I start an SEO process is to get the customer's website through SEO Site Check Up. SEO Site Check Up checks your website for the following points:

· Common SEO Problems

· Speed optimizations

· Server and security

· Mobile friendliness

· Advanced SEO

As you may already see, SEO Site Check Up is a kind of SEO audit in itself. It validates the website on many of the aforementioned points.

I always start with SEO Site Check Up to find out the biggest SEO problems immediately. Such as the lack of an SSL certificate, canonicalization problems or other points for improvement that should preferably be addressed today.

Step 2: Crawl your website for errors with Search Console

Now that we have the first most urgent areas for improvement, let's move on to another important step: crawling your website with Google Search Console and SEMrush.

Google Search Console is a tool from Google that gives you control and options over your own indexation in Google. If you don't have a Google Search Console yet, I advise you to create one right now:

Manual: Create Google Search Console and add your website correctly

When you click on 'Coverage' in Search Console, you will then see all the problems within your website. Think of 404's, pages that are on no index or pages that are blocked by your robots.txt.

In addition to Google Search Console, I also always use SEMrush 's Site Audit function to analyze and crawl the website.

SEMrush also looks at small areas for improvement and missing elements. That's something Google Search Console doesn't do.

Step 3: Check all On Page SEO elements

If all goes well I don't have to explain to you that the keyword you want to score on should be used in the text, in the URL and for example the Meta description.

Those 'things' where your keyword should appear are the On Page SEO elements. In other words, the elements that you can influence within the page. If you don't know them. They are:

· URL

· H1

· H2

· Images (name and alt text)

· Meta title

· Meta description

You can of course check the OnPage SEO elements manually (which is way too much work), but you can also do it with handy SEO tools.

I also use SEMrush for that. It has a handy tool called the On Page SEO Checker. He will then easily tell you what the On Page points for improvement are in the field of:

· Strategy

· SERP features

· Content

· Semantics

· Backlinks

· Technic

· User experience

Step 4: Analyze the loading speed

It has long been known that the loading time of your website is a ranking factor. And that a long loading time is terribly annoying and causes people to drop out has been known for much longer.

To analyze your speed, I advise you to use two tools:

· GT Metrix

· Google Page Speed

Both tools are unique in their own way and work completely differently. I'm a big fan of GT Metrix, because it tells you what to do.

Consider, for example, optimizing images, enabling caching or making use of minification or by turning off certain functionalities.

Step 5: Check if your website is mobile friendly

It depends entirely on which industry or niche your company is in, but it could be that 90% of your visitors visit your website via mobile. And since July 1, 2019, Google also indexes mobile-first.

The first thing you can do to test if your website is mobile friendly is to simply test it yourself on different devices. Click through the website, see if everything works and if everything is clear.

If you pass that test, you can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to determine whether Google also thinks your website is mobile-friendly.

Step 6: Make the structure of your website transparent

Now that we have covered some of the SEO principles, it is time to tackle the more difficult matter. And we start with the structure of your website.

The structure of a website is important for several reasons:

· A website must be easy to use by a visitor and people must be able to click through the site without difficulty

· Google must easily crawl through the website to find and index all pages

The structure is even more important with web shops than with websites. This has to do with the fact that you usually have to deal with many more categories there and you want to help Google and visitors find them as well as possible.

Step 7: Check whether your website has structured data

And we immediately proceed to the next step.

Structured data is the marking of a piece of content to make it easier to understand for Google. Consider, for example, reviews, products or recipes

When we talk about structured data, two things are actually important:

· Is your website provided with structured data?

· Has the structured data been added correctly and will Google accept it?

You can answer both questions with the Google Structured Data test.

He then tells you exactly which structured data is being used, what is currently going well and what is currently not going well.

Step 8: Find out which pages score well (and which ones don't)

So. We've covered the SEO technical stuff. Now is the time to see which pages score well and which do not.

We will do this by looking at which pages in Google Analytics have had many organic visitors.

First of all, go to the Google Analytics website and log in to the correct account.

Then click on 'Acquisition' on the left, then on 'All traffic' and then on 'Channels'.

Then click on 'organic search' and click on 'landing page' just above the table.

Would you like to know which pages have had the least organic traffic? Then click 'Users'. Then the order of the list is reversed.

Then you can immediately analyze how good the traffic is on that page a little further in the table. For example, do you see a bounce rate of 100%? That could mean that people do not find what they are looking for.

Step 9: Do a backlink analysis

Unfortunately it still is, but backlinks are one of the most important ranking factor within Google. Backlinks can make or break your website.

For running a backlink analyzer, I mainly use Ahrefs and SEMrush .

During the backlink analysis I mainly look at:

· The number of backlinks

· The number of domains from which the backlinks come

· Spam score

· Anchor tags of the backlinks (and the relationships between the anchor tags)

· Referring IP addresses

· Domain authority

· Page authority

· Ratio nofollow / dofollow

· Extension of the links

· Whether there are bad links between the link profile

· Ahrefs has the largest database and shows the most information. That's why I mainly use Ahrefs.

If I really want to go into depth and analyze a link profile deeper and better, I mainly use SEMrush.

SEMrush shows a bit more useful information and graphs to show how well or badly you are doing. It depends entirely on what I want to know or what I want to do to determine which tool I am using.

Step 10: Spy on your competitors with a competitor analysis

To score higher in Google, you have to do one thing above all: beat your competitors. It is therefore extremely important to keep an eye on what your competitor is doing.

What content do they have? What backlinks do they have? How fast is their website?

These are all things that you can easily find out. I just explained how you can do that with your own site. Now you can do that with their website too.

When I analyze the competition in the field of content, I look at three parts:

· What are the keywords my competitors are found on?

· What is my competitor's top-scoring content?

· Which keywords can my competitor be found on and not me?

Ahrefs gives me the answer to all these three questions.

Determine competitor keywords

Ahrefs is incredibly simple. First of all, you have to enter your competitor's domain and press enter.

Then click on 'Organic searchterms' on the left in the list and you will see a list of all the keywords that your competitor is found on. You can then select by country, position, volume, difficulty and much more.

Search terms where your competitor can be found and you are not

You can also easily find this out with Ahrefs. Click on 'content gap' on the left in the row. Then enter the URL of your competitor and your domain at the bottom.

Step 11: The next step

So. In an extremely short time you have done an analysis of your website. What I advise you to do is keep track of your keywords. You can also do this with SEMrush.

Why I advise you that? Then you keep a finger on the pulse and you know when you fall or rise in Google. You can then quickly analyze and adjust where necessary.

The next step is to get started with the areas for improvement within your website. Please note, there is a good chance that you will need help with this.

But if you still want to try it yourself and have questions about something? Then there is a good chance that I wrote a blog about it. If that doesn't help you either, please feel free to contact me.

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