An SEO audit evaluates the website’s performance in search engines and identifies the factors that have negative impact. There are of course fancier and more complex ways to define the SEO audit however the goal of this post is to determine which elements are considered the most important by top SEO experts.
This article is for people that already have SEO knowledge and know, at least in theory, how to make an SEO audit.
We consider that a quality audit is tremendously valuable to any online business and that’s why we decided to make a special blog post on this topic. We hired Minuca Elena to reach to 27 SEO experts and asked them:
Each expert answered to both questions. They also explained the reasons for suggestions and which are the essentials steps and tools to use in an SEO audit. 1. This question is dangerous since nearly any aspect of SEO can cause a website to crash in the SERPs. Focusing on one specific part of an SEO audit could result in a blind spot.That said…
Look at every aspect (technical, onsite, offsite) as if each of them has an equal opportunity to be causing the issue.
Usually, technical SEO factors are the ones you want to find. Things like site speed issues, indexing problems, etc are simple and quick to fix.
Onsite SEO problems like content issues or optimization problems, can be fairly quick to fix as well, but more costly (in the event you need a content overhaul).
Offsite, link-based problems are the painful ones to fix, but nonetheless shouldn’t be pushed aside.
2. Totally depends who you’re asking.
For example, technical SEO experts love to solve everything with technical solutions. When you have a hammer, everything is a nail.
They’ll often downplay the role that links, content, and optimization play in SEO.
But to give you a straight answer, I’d say that search intent is very commonly overlooked.
People need to match their content with the style, and type of answer that Google is already serving up. A simple Google search on the target keyword and looking at the results can help determine this.
1. It’s always the basics that should be looked at the most, but every SEO audit should be unique the site you’re auditing.Generally, I look at a few things straight off the bat:
Site Load Time – With Google putting more importance on the overall load time of a site. I am looking at if a site is over 3 seconds on average per page and checking the highest traffic pages load time specifically.
OnPage Basics – Making sure we have good meta titles, a sitemap in place for Google to get round the site on, we’re using 1 H1 tag per page, image alt tags and checking for the use of internal linking from content-heavy pages.
Technical Points – Finally I’ll do an overview of some of the more tech-heavy parts of the site like Hreflang markup, Schema/Microdata Markup, Mobile friendliness as well as scanning the site for duplicate metadata and content.
2. The most overlooked aspect is internal linking. Too many companies either completely neglect the way your site is linked between itself (Or as we call it in the SEO industry, Link Sculpting) – It is one of the most heavily underused tactics I have seen in the SEO industry, and one of the most beneficial ways to see quick turn around times on websites.
1. The first and often most important step is a crawl. We use a variety of tools but typically a manual crawl in ScreamingFrog is the first step. This then acts as a reference point for the entire audit.In some cases, we may then use a secondary crawl tool like Moz or DeepCrawl but typically our manual crawl is the one area we refer to again and again whilst looking at technical and on page SEO.
The crawl data allows us to take a bird’s eye view of the site: internal links, external links, response codes, page titles, meta descriptions, h tags, images, canonical URLs (and much more) can all be seen in the crawl data.
Just reviewing the crawl and looking for patterns here can be hugely useful.
2. The main area we see neglected is overall strategy and factoring in the reason the audit is being conducted. There are a lot of automated audit tools that will tell you if you are missing meta tags or have too long page titles but this is mostly useless.
You have to consider what we are trying to achieve here. Are we looking to diagnose a problem? Are we looking for general improvements? Do we want a situation analysis to form the bones of an SEO strategy?
At Bowler Hat (my agency), we perform an audit for every single client we take on. This at the very least gets us totally up to speed with regards to the current situation.
We can then determine what work needs doing and what the priorities are for that work – which always factors in the client’s marketing objectives.
1. The most important thing when it comes to conducting an SEO Audit is the ability to reverse engineer your competition. When we are conducting an SEO Audit, after we finish examining the standard factors that could affect the ranking ability of a website, we get into specific keyword & Landing Page level.What we do here is that we run a Google search for each main keyword, Parse the website using an automation tool and we analyze the results of the competitors VS our client’s website for more than 500 factors.
We then categorize the analysis based on the factors that the best statistical significance and the things that are easy to fix. So, we have a complete roadmap on the things that we have to work in order to be able to quickly move the needle for those specific keywords.
Furthermore, we are looking into TF-IDF, and contextual internal links that are known to be highly relevant in order to increase the rankings of a website.
2. In my opinion, the most overlooked aspect of an SEO audit, other than the competition analysis and reverse engineering is the relevance of the backlinks.
People often discuss the number of backlinks and the quality of the backlinks but I hardly see any audit incorporating the relevance factor of backlinks into it.
It is very important to analyze the backlinks that a website has and its competitors’ backlinks in order to know who to outreach to when doing the campaign.
1. I have always felt that SEO is all about the content. A good SEO looks first and foremost at matching desired searches with the current content.Once matches have been made, the next step is to identify the gaps. Which searches are not covered adequately (or at all) by the content?
I also look at traffic and searches that lead people to my site the most. If I’m already ranking as high as I can for a given search, I set it aside. But if there is a search that’s getting me good traffic, still with room to grow, that’s my target – that’s the gap I want to fill.
Then there are decisions to make. Do I tweak the current content to cover those gaps? Do I create a new page for searches not already covered? Do I need more content on some searches, so that related pages point to each other to reinforce their importance? Do I go on a writing blitz elsewhere on the web on those topics, to create a bigger bubble for the missing or weak terms?
2. A pro doesn’t overlook anything of importance. A non-pro will most likely use a free online tool. Those tools capture the quantitative stuff, like load speech, number of characters in a particular element, etc. It can also tell the number of backlinks, although I just checked one site in three free tools and came up with 36 backlinks in one and 13,313 in another, so that’s up for grabs.
What these tools can measure is how many times a word or a pair of words shows up on the page. But they can’t measure whether these are the right words.
Things that are easy to measure are, at least in theory, easy to fix. They typically don’t need to be revisited very often. Things that are hard to measure get overlooked because people get lazy. All the more reason to do an SEO content audit. But I suspect that’s what gets overlooked the most.
1. For deep dive audits, I pay a lot of attention on what the crawler reports, it can be the site is not optimized at all, it can be the URL structure which is causing duplicate content, etc.There’s really no single area that I look at but I do run something really simple right at the start of the SEO audit, which is to run it through Google Page Insights and through BuiltWith.com. The results there already give me an idea of what can be improved on the site and it gives me an idea on what things I need to look for when the crawler’s report is done.
Audits may look simple but with sites with thousands and thousands of pages, you need to know what you are looking at so those 2 tools help me a ton.
2. The most basic things are usually missed but from my experience, what’s often missed are checking the server crawl logs and the structured data for the pages. They aren’t sexy at all so they are often overlooked but they often yield really great results.
1. In no particular order, I always check for the following:A. Site Speed – is the website very slow?
B. Site Content – is the content highly relevant where users are more than happy to link to them?
C. Site Framework – Is it being indexed properly by Google?
D. Site Privacy – Does the site have Https?
E. Site Responsiveness – is the website mobile friendly?
Aside from the hosting provider and the platform/CMS of the website I make sure that the ones above are highly optimized before I proceed to check the backlinks. A good website foundation will always go a long way in rankings.
2. The on-page level is the most overlooked aspect of the audit, sometimes you just have to tweak some pages that are hurting your website and fix how Google bots find your pages and it usually does the trick.
In my experience, I usually trim down pages to the really relevant ones so that Google will vote each page of my website as relevant.
The other thing is usability, and how fast the information is provided for by the website amongst others.
1. We conduct several audits a week for prospects and each one is different… however, every time it really comes down to basics (with a twist… more on that in a moment). Are the basic on-page factors on par and does the site have any authority (backlinks).Now to the twist…
Back in the day, all that would be required during an on-page check would be checking the title tag, h1’s, keywords density etc all the basic stuff we all know.
But it’s 2019 and the game has changed.
So the thing we pay MOST attention to is the first page of Google for the main keyword (alongside the 90 other pages in first 100 results) this page gives us all the information we need to rank AND identifies what’s missing on the site we’re trying to rank.
During the site audit we use machine learning & software tools to look at 500+ ranking factors and identify which ones for this specific industry, the specific search term and specific kind of content are most important.
Only then do we look at backlinks and what needs to be done.
Many times only a fraction of the power in terms of backlinks is needed to take top spots when getting the above right.
2. Now in the same way what I just discussed, doing on-site optimization the right way – not how it has always been done… but completing proper onsite optimization scientifically is the most overlooked aspect of people’s SEO audits.
Too many SEO companies still think by simply placing the keyword in the title, H1’s-H6’s, in image alt tags and just having 1000+ words on the page the job is done.
Well, times have changed… and taking this outdated approach to onsite optimization will not result in first page rankings.
1. One of the first items I’ll check, and one that consumes much of my attention during an audit is its ‘crawlability’. Assessing a site’s crawlability can encompass many of the crucial elements of an audit.I’ll start by investigating the site’s robots.txt file to make sure it’s not blocking crawlers from important areas of the site right through to ensuring there are no black holes caused by redirect chains.
2. In my experience, keyword cannibalization is one of the most overlooked aspects of an SEO audit.
When you have two or more pages of your site ranking for the same keyword topic, you’re not sending a clear signal to search engines as to what page they should prioritize. This issue is essentially diluting each page’s authority for the search.