SEO website audit - improve your position in Google

Most SEO audit instructions have two problems:

They go too deep into technical details;

They are designed to take days (sometimes WEEKS) of work!

For auditing large sites, with hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages, you may need more time. But for most small to medium sized sites, a few hours of work will suffice.

The SEO audit process we will follow:

Steps 1-4: looking for the most SERIOUS errors (that are keeping the site from growing).

Steps 5-9: find small problems that are easy to fix.

Steps 10-12: analyse organic search traffic (and look for simple but promising growth opportunities).

Steps 13-14: analyse link mass (IMPORTANT).

Steps 15-16: conduct a content audit and analyse missing semantics.

The main purpose of the article is not to tell you how to do a "technical" SEO audit (it can be done with almost any tool for SEO site audit).

We will show a comprehensive approach to conducting an audit from an SEO perspective. Which means we'll be checking positions, link profile, existing content... Anything that might be preventing a site from ranking high.

SEO audit tools

Here's a list of the tools you'll need for the audit.

Google Analytics

Google Search Console

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google Structured Data Testing Tool

Ahrefs (7 day trial)

Copyscape

SERP Simulator

Web Page Word Counter

You don't have to use all of them, but they will help simplify the process.

Make sure only ONE version of the site is available

Very soon I will show you how to check a website for SEO problems.

But first, make sure that only one version of the site is available.

Think about what addresses can access (or link to) your site.

For example:

http://yourdomain.com

http://www.yourdomain.com

https://yourdomain.com

https://www.yourdomain.com

Only ONE of these options should be accessible from the browser.

For the others, make 301 redirects to the canonical version.

Redirects from www to non-www version (and vice versa) rarely cause problems. But on redirects from http to https many sites have problems.

Fix this error in the first place.

We recommend using https:// (both with and without www) because SSL sites rank a little better.

Plus, SSL makes your site safer and increases trust.

At Let's Encrypt you can get a free SSL certificate for your site.

Start scanning your site

Next, we'll do some more manual checks.

But first, let's run a site scan in the background.

The SEO crawler will scan the site just like a Google robot and give you information about the site structure and the current state of SEO.

There are many tools available to perform an SEO audit, such as:

Screaming Frog (£149 per year);

Beam Us Up (Free).

You can use either one.

Find indexation problems with Google

No indexation on Google - no position. None at all!!!

To check your site's indexing, go here:

Google Search Console > Google Index > Indexing Status.

DIDN'T FIND ANY PAGES IN THE INDEX?

If you don't see any results for this query, then the site is in trouble.

It means that Google has not indexed any pages. Therefore, the site will not get search traffic either.

This usually happens because of an incorrect HTTP header x-robots-tag.

To check this, you will have to open the header.php or .htaccess file or server access log file.

Check ranking by brand

Type your brand name into Google search.

Unless your site is very young (or the brand name is a very generic phrase), it should rank at the top of the organic results.

If your site ranks below the first, it's likely that Google thinks another site is more relevant to that brand query.

This is one of the problems you'll face when using a common word as a brand name. Ranking for it will be difficult because most people won't be very happy to see your site when searching for a "branded" word.

How to solve this?

Branding and linkbuilding.

This means you'll need to:

mine powerful branded links;

run PR campaigns (get mentions and links from major well-known websites);

get mentions in business directories;

List your website on Google Business;

Create and maintain pages on the major social networks.

Once this is done, your website will start to gradually move up in the rankings.

Remember, the first place is occupied by the one that best fulfils the user's search queries.

If the majority of those who type in a "branded" query are searching for your business, Google will start to demote other sites and boost yours.

But what if your site isn't in the search results?

If you've fixed your indexing problems (and you should fix them!), that's a sign of serious problems. Such as algorithmic or manual filters.

We suggest checking Google Search Console to see if there are any filter messages there.

Check the basic optimisation manually

HOW TO FIND THE MOST IMPORTANT PAGES ON A WEBSITE:

When we say "most important", we mean the pages that get the most organic search traffic.

If you used the Ahrefs Site Audit tool to scan, you can easily find them here:

Site Audit> Project > Internal Pages > Sort by Traffic.

Go to the homepage of the site in your browser and right click to view the source code of the page.

Quickly check some basic internal optimisation points.

To make it easier, let's ask a few questions:

Is the title tag good enough? How clickable is it?

Does the page have a meta description? Does it make you want to click on it?

Is the H1 tag present in a single instance? Is it well optimised?

Are subheadings (H2, H3, etc.) used correctly?

Note that the meta description does not directly affect a site's ranking.

However, a well-written, enticing meta description will help you get more clicks.

Assuming that CTR (clickability) is a ranking factor (it probably is), meta descriptions can indirectly affect a site's position in the rendition. In other words, a good meta description increases CTR, and this can have a positive impact on ranking.

Imagine that this is the text of a contextual advert.

A good meta description should contain the main UTP of your product or service.

For example, the meta description of an online shop can include such items as "FREE shipping", "Return Guarantee", "Lowest Prices", etc.

What about subheadings?

Subheadings are needed to logically break up the content on each page. It's also a great opportunity to place additional keywords and phrases on the page.

Try not to use generic phrases ("more details", "more information", etc.) in subheadings

Examine the page issues in the scan report

By now, the crawl report in the Site Audit should be ready, unless you have a HUGE site.

It's time to dig deeper and fix other important internal optimisation issues.

Site Audit > Project > Internal Pages > HTML Tags.

This will have a full list of the issues found in the scan.

Filter them in order of priority, the most important ones at the beginning.

We recommend fixing all Errors first before moving on to Warnings and Notices.

To make sure you don't miss anything, check out the Social tags, Content Quality and Outgoing Links reports.

Make sure the site (and its pages) load FAST

It's long been known that site speed is one of the many ranking factors in Google.

We, too, found a small correlation between load speed and Google position in our study of over two million pages.

And even without research, it is clear that a user will prefer a site that loads quickly.

Therefore, it is never unnecessary to take care of a fast loading site.

Optimise pages that are slow to load.

Check for structured data errors

The next step is to make sure that the structured data on the website is designed correctly.

To understand the types of structured data, check out Google's guide to structured data.

Content types that benefit from implementing structured data include:

Testimonials;

Product information;

Events.

Basically, you can mark up any type of content (just don't spam it!)

To test existing structured data, use Google's structured data testing tool.

Paste the URL you are going to test and click "Run Test". Google will check the structured data for errors.

Analyse organic search traffic

Obviously, the goal of any SEO audit is to figure out how to increase traffic to a website.

But first, let's look at the site's current success.

To see the big picture, let's run a few reports in Google Analytics.

First, let's look at the site's current organic search traffic.

Make sure you're moving in the RIGHT direction

Google Analytics will tell you how much organic search traffic a site is getting.

But it doesn't report on search visibility.

To check them, let's use Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Site Explorer > Enter domain > Browse.

Select the Organic rendition tab and look at the Organic keywords block.

If this graph is going down, it means that overall your site's visibility in search is dropping.

This can happen for many reasons (outdated content, Google filter, etc.)

Find and fix incoming (and outgoing) broken links

Non-existing pages (and links to them) on a website consume so-called "link weight".

You need to find and fix them as soon as possible.

To find pages that do not exist go to:

Site Explorer > Pages > Top Referring Pages > filter by "404 not found".

To see which of the non-existent pages are being referenced the most, sort the results by RD (Referring Domains).

Go through the list and correct errors if you need to.

This may require:

replace content;

redirect a non-existent page to an existing page with the same subject matter;

leave a page with a 404 server response code (for pages that do not have backlinks).

You should also make sure that there are no broken links on the site.

They make it inconvenient to use the site and lower PageRank.

It is better to remove or replace them.

Check for "missing semantics"

What is missing semantics?

These are keywords that your competitor is ranking for and you are not!

At AVSEO, we can provide you with a convenient report on missing semantics to help you move your site to the top of the search results.

Conduct a full content audit

This last step may sound a bit non-obvious.

That's because you often have to remove a lot of pages at this stage.

So how does this help increase search traffic?

In short: lots of low-quality (or ineffective) pages can drag down an entire site.

Find ineffective pages that attracted little or no search traffic;

Improve them, if possible, and republish them;

Otherwise, remove and redirect (301 redirect) URLs to pages of similar subject matter.

It is worth checking if the site does not have pages optimised for the same keywords.

This phenomenon is called "keyword cannibalisation".

Ideally, one page of the site optimise for one query.

A method that works well is to combine several posts optimised for the same query into one super article.

A full audit is similar to an investigation and takes much longer (from several hours to several days, depending on the size of the site). But search engine optimisation courses from AVSEO are a great way to dive into SEO and get an idea of the state of a website.