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
·
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
·
Google Page Speed
·
Screaming Frog
·
Google Analytics
·
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
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:
·
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
·
Page authority
·
Ratio nofollow / dofollow
·
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.
Top
Scoring Content from Competitors
Finding out the top-scoring
content from competitors is just as easy as determining organic search terms.
Do not click on 'organic search
terms' in the left row within Ahrefs, but on 'top pages' and you will see the
best scoring content of the domain you entered.
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.
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