It’s hard to know where to start with an SEO audit but in this guide, we’ll show you how to do a full audit, including checking where you rank, how you perform and checking the technical side of your website.

 

What are SEO audits and why do them? 

SEO audits are a way to check the health of your website from a search engine optimisation point of view – this means looking at all the things a search engine would look at and make sure you’re doing the right things to get good rankings in the search results.

 

How often should you do an SEO audit?

A full SEO audit should be done every 6 months to a year. Smaller checks like ranking reports and performance reports should be done every month, and on page optimisation work should be completed on an ongoing basis.

 

What you will need to perform an SEO audit

In order to perform an SEO audit, you will need the following tools:

• Google Search Console 
• Google Analytics
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• An SEO tool, that could include SemRush, Ahrefs, Moz
• Screaming Frog crawling tool

 

Step 1 – Check your performance and rankings

Use a ranking tool to find your average ranking positions for your target keywords. For this you should use an SEO tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs, that lets you enter keywords and see your rankings. For example, in SEMRush, you can type in a list of target keywords and you will get your average rankings for these keywords. We would recommend you add up to 50 as a good starting point and remember to add variations of keywords. For example, this could include:

• Mortgages
• Mortgage providers
• Mortgage providers leeds
• Student mortgage providers
• Best student mortgage providers

 

The report created will show you your average rankings for your target keywords (if you rank at all). These can be used as a benchmark. So if you don’t rank for a keyword, your goal can be to get a ranking. If you do rank but on page 3, your goal can be to get to page 1.

 

Step 2 – Check your competitors 

There are two approaches to take with competitors:

Approach 1 – is to use an SEO tool so see where your competitors sit against the list of keywords you entered to check your rankings. An SEO tool will allow you to see, for your selected set of keywords, which competitors are sitting where in the SERP. 

Approach 2 – you can also manually type your target keywords into Google and see who is in number 1 and number 2 spots. This will give you an indication of how Google interprets the keyword, what they are choosing to display, and the level of domain authority and influence these top sites have.

We recommend checking 5 to 10 of your top priority keywords manually to get familiar with the organic search results and what your target customers will be seeing themselves when searching.

 

Step 3 – Check your indexability 

Now that you have some target keywords and competitors in mind, it’s time to make sure your website can actually be indexed by a search engine. There are a few things to look into when it comes to indexability:

• Makes sure the right pages are indexable

It’s important to audit that all the pages you want to be indexed are being indexed, and that any you want removed from the index for various reasons, are removed. The easiest way to do this is to go into Google Search Console and check the ‘Coverage’ tab. This will show you all pages with errors, pages that should be indexed, and all pages that are excluded. We would recommend to check all the ‘excluded’ pages and check all the types of exclusions that are coming up. Then you can go into each of these and check the URLs that are being excluded.

Remember that you can export Google Search Console reports into xls format, which makes them easier to scroll through or filter. If you notice pages in the report that are being indexed that shouldn’t be, or pages that are being redirected or pages that should not be 404s, be sure to fix that.

 

• Make sure no duplicate versions of your website are being listed

You want to make sure only the correct version of your site is being listed and indexed by Google. To do this, type into google: site:yoursitename.co.uk

This will return all the pages under this domain in the search results. You can both check that there are not other versions of your site that shouldn’t be there, and see how many results are showing up e.g. how many pages are being indexed.

 

Step 4 – Check your mobile-friendliness

With mobile-first indexing, Google is telling us that mobile is important. So another big thing to edit on your website is mobile-friendliness. To do this you should use a mobile-friendliness auditing tool. Luckily there are a few ones including the mobile friendly tool: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly and Google Search Console’s mobile usability checker.

Most reports will give you a summary of any issues, and they will give you a summary of what the issues are along with a list of recommendations to resolve them. 

Most of the time you will need developers to look into these issues and fix them from a website development perspective rather than a content perspective.

 

Step 5 – Check your website site speed and core web vitals

On the technical side, one of the most important things for good web performance and SEO is site speed. You can check your website and mobile site speed with one of Google’s free tools: Google SiteSpeed Insights. This tool runs your site through various speed and performance audits.

This report will give you scores from bad, medium to good and recommendations of how to solve the issues in question and improve your score.

Remember that mobile should always be resolved first, as Google now includes mobile first indexing as part of its ranking factors.

 

Step 6 – Meta content

Why is meta content important for SEO?

Meta tags (meta title, meta description) are important for SEO because they are the parts of your site that appear in the search engine results page. They are what users see and have the biggest impact on how your site is presented to your target audience. Meta content is the first thing you should audit when it comes to on page SEO.

To audit this, you should use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog to audit your meta content. You can generate a report with all pages on your website and their meta titles, descriptions and their length. 

You should check that:

• Meta title is around 60 characters long
• Meta description is around 160 characters long
• Keywords are in the title
• Keywords are in the description tag
• Every page has a meta title and description

If there is missing meta content, or the meta content isn’t fully optimised, you should rewrite it with the user and the main target keyword in mind.

 

Step 7 – On page elements 

Why are headlines important for SEO?

Headlines, and most importantly your H1, are important for SEO because they are the on page title of your page. Your H1 has a lot of SEO value – so it should include your main keyword, and it should summarise the content of your page in a concise, user friendly way.

Things you should check on your page include: 

• H1 – check length and keyword
• H2 – check they are used and include longer keyword queries
• Other headers are being used in order
• Image alt tags – keyword alt tags for all images
• Body copy – ideal length and natural use of keywords throughout.

As part of on page optimisation elements, you should audit the length of your content. Content length is the number of words on your page.

In SEO, thin content can sometimes be considered as detrimental for the search engines. Therefore you should make sure that any pages with thin content are necessary, and padded out if needed. To identify pages with thin content, you can use the same crawl report and check your word count per page. If some numbers are looking low, you should investigate why and review where needed.

As well as content length, you should also check for duplicate content. Duplicate content should be addressed as search engines can penalise you for this. Google will see two pages as having duplicate content if over 80% of the page content is identical.

You can use the tool https://www.siteliner.com/ to audit your site and help identify duplicate content on your website.

 

Step 8 – Backlink profile

Outbound links per page: it is recommended that a page has no more than 100 outgoing links. This is so the page does not look spammy or like a link farm, which is a black hat SEO trick that is now widely frowned upon and penalised.  

You can check your number of outbound links on a page per page level in your crawl report.

Internal links: it’s best practice to have a healthy number of internal links per page. You want to give more links to top level pages to give them more SEO value. You can check the number of internal links per page in your crawl report.  You also want to fix any broken internal links.

Backlink profile: Backlinks are external websites that are linking back to yours. For SEO it’s important to gather links from authoritative websites to boost your domain authority and your SEO score. 

Not all links will help your SEO performance – so you should audit your site for toxic links and disavow them in Google Search Console if this is the case. 

Many SEO tools will be able to run a backlink audit where it will show you your backlink profile, which includes your domain score, any toxic domains and any authoritative domains that are linking to your website.

For example SEMRush’s tool has a nice domain report, which is also updated every month so you can monitor your backlinks over time.

For backlink opportunities, check out our guide Best link building tips to improve your domain authority.

 

Conclusion

This guide should hopefully give you a good idea of how to do a full SEO audit of your website and the best tools you can use. If you would like any additional support in setting up your own report, or a side wide audit, get in touch with one of our team.