An SEO audit is an examination of a website to assess its search engine visibility and to improve its effectiveness. According to Search Engine Journal, SEO audits are standard procedures for any website, and they can help understand why a site might not be getting the amount of traffic expected or why sales and conversions are not improving.
Moz, a leading industry source in SEO, explains that the audit involves various steps, including analyzing the website to see how well it can be discovered by search engines and visitors. In the analysis, the auditor looks at the site makeup, its characteristics, and the surrounding competitive marketplace to see how it fare in being visible among other websites and makes a checklist of things that need to be fixed or improved.
The three key components that an SEO audit typically includes are technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. The technical SEO audit looks at the infrastructure of a site, ensuring that search engines can easily access and crawl the website. It includes a review of aspects such as site speed, XML sitemaps, mobile compatibility, and site structure.
On the other hand, on-page SEO focuses on the content on the site, its relevance to users, and whether it is effectively targeting the correct keywords across the website’s pages. This area of the audit will involve an analysis of aspects like title tags, headers, keyword usage, and meta descriptions.
Lastly, off-page SEO focuses on factors external to the website such as backlinks. The review will consider aspects such as the quality and relevance of the sites linking to your website, social media presence, and other promotional activities happening outside the website.
Furthermore, SEMRush believes that effective SEO audits need to be conducted on a regular basis due to the dynamic nature of websites. Over time, websites are subject to changes in content, links, and code which could negatively impact SEO.
To sum up, an SEO audit is a thorough analysis of a website’s ability to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s designed to identify problem areas that need improvement to increase a website’s visibility in organic search results. It’s also a fact-checking process to ensure both the quality of the website and the user experience (UX) it provides.
Sources:
- “What Is an SEO Audit? (+Checklist, Tools & How To Guide).”(2021). SEMRush.com
- “SEO Audit: The beginner’s guide for [2022]”. (2020). Backlinko.com
- “The definitive guide to running an SEO website audit”. (2020). Moz.com
- “How To Do An SEO Audit: A 1 Hour Guide.” (2021), Search Engine Journal.
