Auditing is a must-have for SEO. Why? It’s an SEO audit that helps you determine if there are any obstacles to your site ranking high.

An SEO audit is a process of optimizing your website for search engines. It can help you:

• Find out if your current keyword strategy is working.
• Get new content ideas
• Find and resolve technical issues that could affect rankings
• You can see how visitors interact with the site.
• You must ensure that your website is authoritative.

An SEO audit should reveal the reasons your site isn’t at the top of the SERP. If it’s already there, congratulations! It may also reveal some new opportunities for development if done well. If you’re only planning to launch your website, be sure to follow the website Launch checklist before proceeding with the SEO audit.

This article will guide you through an SEO audit, no matter if you’re a digital marketer in Miami or a business owner.

Step 1. Check your current keyword rankings

The golden rule of SEO audits is to start by assessing where your site stands at the moment.

This step involves tracking keyword rankings, comparing your rankings with your competitors, and checking your progress over time.

It will allow you to assess how effective your current SEO strategy has been. It will allow you to assess the entire competitive landscape and your position within it.

You can check your keyword rankings using two methods: with Rank Tracker or through Google Search Console (GSC). This is the fastest way to check your rankings. To check your keyword rankings, open Google Search Console (GSC) and go to Performance >Search Results.

Click the Average Position button above the chart.

Scroll down a bit. The table will show you your top queries as well as three metrics — clicks, impressions, and position — for each query that you rank for.

These are the data you require. Filters and metrics can be used to identify keywords that are most popular or have the highest ranking. You can check how your site has progressed over some time by going back to the chart. To get a complete picture, I set the Last 12 months.

This chart will display how your site performs, and whether or not it is getting more visibility.

GSC isn’t able to do a comprehensive audit. You can’t even check the rankings of your competitors with it. Let’s look at Rank Tracker, which is a better way to do this. You can download Rank Tracker for free.

Get the software and start creating the project for your site. During setup, connect your Google Analytics or Search Console accounts. You can also specify keywords that you wish to monitor rankings for and select the most preferred search engines.

After you are done, visit the Target Keywords module > Tracking Rankings > Ranking Progress. A list of your ranking keywords and pages, along with their positions on the SERPs, will be displayed.

The Difference Metric allows you to track whether your rankings have changed or not. It’s even easier to track it with the Progress Graph or Rank History features. The info is easily interpreted and visualized.

The Rank Progress module doesn’t provide historical data on your rankings. Your rank progress history will be started after the first audit. The last thing that we need to check is the rankings of your competitors for the same keywords. Click Preferences at top of the dashboard and click Competitors. Click OK to add your SEO competitors.

Here’s what you’ll see: Your competitors’ rankings are right next to yours.

My advice: If you don’t see keywords that you expected to rank for, it could be a sign you haven’t created enough content related to those keywords. These keywords require you to produce more quality content.

Step 2. Audit for low-hanging fruits

Warning! You cannot audit for low-hanging fruit without knowing which keywords your site ranks for. Make sure you don’t skip the previous point.

This stage is where we look for pages that have not been ranking high enough — #10 or lower in the SERPs. These pages are known as the low-hanging fruit by SEOs. These pages require little to no boost to reach the top 10, perform well, and attract a lot of visitors.

My favorite part about finding low-hanging fruit is that you can put in some effort and see quick results. Let’s now see how we can do this. GSC has low-hanging fruit. Go to Performance Report > Pages and select Positions “Greater Than” 10.

In ascending order, place Position. Pages will appear starting at the 10.1 + position. You should check the pages that range from 10.1 to 20,

Next, check out the impressions for these keywords. If you get a decent number of impressions, this is your low-hanging tree. You can also continue your work using Rank Tracker. You can go back to Rank Tracking and set filters for Rank: Less than 10 or More than 20. All pages that require optimization to appear on the first SERP will be displayed.

Look at the number left for each keyword. As the number of searches for each keyword is dependent on your niche, I cannot give you a general figure to use. For some niches, 100 searches per month may seem like a lot. For others, it might be very little.

My advice Once you have identified the pages that require a push to reach the first SERPs, optimize them accordingly.

• Refer to titles and descriptions
• Revise your URL structure
• To remove low-quality pages, you can search
• Detect internal linking errors
• Be sure to use relevant headlines
• Regularly update content

These tasks are not expensive, but they can yield very satisfying results.

Step 3. Audit for new content opportunities

You already know which keywords pages rank for so you can find keywords you aren’t ranking for. This will allow you to optimize or create new content.

This is where you will need to conduct a content gap analysis. This is the process of looking at your content to identify missed opportunities. Your site will be more visible to the world if you use relevant keywords on your pages.

Content gap analysis does not have to be about the competitors, as some claim. Your content can be used to identify content gaps. There are many ways to discover new content ideas. However, I’d like to recommend my favorite — analyzing how your content aligns with your customer journey.

At least three stages are involved in the buying process: awareness, consideration, and purchase. You may have more stages depending on the product/service you offer, so be sure to understand your customer journey and buyer persona. Each stage should have enough content in an ideal world.

Let’s take the example of a website for a coffee roaster. Based on the customer journey stages, I analyzed all pages of websites and created 3 columns.

The Consideration stage, as you can see from the above image, isn’t filled with enough content. You won’t find it strange to see pages describing the features and benefits of the product, as well as reviews, in the Consideration stage.

We conclude that if there are gaps in coverage, fill them. If you have pages that don’t correspond to any stage, it is a waste of time. Let’s now look at the competitors to identify the keyword gap. I’ll use Rank Tracker. Go to Keyword Research > Keyword Gap.

Select the option All Competitors, but not Your Site or Any Competitor, add up to 5 competitions, and then click Search. The list of keywords that your competitors rank for will be displayed.

Analyze the metrics of keywords that your competitors rank for. If you find these keywords valuable and relevant, then target them.

My advice: Try to find a middle ground when choosing keywords from competitors to target. This is a measure that indicates how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword. This is a wiser choice than blindly copying popular keywords.

Step 4. Audit for technical SEO issues

Technical SEO is just as important as keywords. A technical SEO audit is a simple process that checks every aspect of technical SEO on your site. This includes the following:

• Indexing and crawling issues
• Site architecture
• duplicate content
• Internal linking
• Code issues
• Redirect
• title tags, etc.

This step is about ensuring that your site can be accessed by search engines and ranked accordingly.

Although Search Console can track technical aspects, I recommend using SEO Tools. It’s quicker and easier to use SEO tools here, just as Rank Tracker is part of the SEO PowerSuite toolkit.

Let’s start by running a site-wide SEO audit. First, create a project for your site. Next, go to the Site Structure module >Site Audit. The list of existing and possible issues will be displayed. Red marks indicate that a critical issue needs to be addressed.

If you need to inspect specific pages, you can also perform a page-level inspection. Click Technical Audit in the Page Audit module. Enter your URL and keywords.

It will give you suggestions on how to fix each problem it finds. Follow these steps and you will have flawless technical SEO.

My recommendation: For more information about technical SEO, you can refer to the site audit checklist.

Step 5. Audit usability

Search engines are very concerned about user experience. Site usability is an important part of the user experience. You should keep this in mind. This means that you need to know how user-friendly your site is. A usability audit can help you understand your site’s user-friendliness.

This audit checks Core Web Vitals and mobile useability. This first step is to ensure that your website loads quickly and without errors. The second part is about ensuring that your mobile site has no issues that could affect your mobile ranking.

These can be quickly checked out in Google Search Console. Open the Experience report to see the Page Experience insight. This is a summary of the user experience of site visitors.

This section contains general information about both desktop and mobile user experiences. Scroll down to see if Core Web Vitals or mobile usability are broken.

As you can see, I have problems with my GSC and need to investigate each one. To get more information, I can click on any of the sections.

I have a tip: Make certain that there are no intrusive overlays on your pages — these pop-ups obscure your content and block users from reading it. This is also part of usability, but it does not require an entire audit.

Step 6. Audit your backlink profile

Your site’s authority is built by backlinks. Your site will have a greater chance of appearing in the top 10 search results if it has a rich and healthy backlink profile. To avoid search engine penalties and to find new backlink opportunities, you should regularly audit your backlink profile.

You will learn how to perform a complete backlink audit using SEO SpyGlass. This includes assessing your backlink profile, comparing it to your competitors, and looking for new backlink opportunities. Let’s first find all of your backlinks. SEO SpyGlass must be installed and activated to do this. Enter your domain, then click on Get Backlinks. Open the Backlink Profile module, then check Summary to evaluate your overall backlink profile. You will find detailed information about the number of backlinks you have, lost and new backlinks as well as historical data and anchor texts.

Switch to the Backlinks tab for more information about each backlink.

You should pay attention to the number of do-follow links that you have. They are what gives authority to your website. It is also helpful to know the authority of any linking pages/domains. You need to assess the penalty risk of your backlinks. You can find out more about backlink profiles > penalty risk.

You should disavow or remove any links that pose a high risk of penalty (marked in red). That’s important. Let’s now compare the profiles of your competitors. Click Domain Comparison and enter as many competitors as you like. Then click OK to see a comparison table with all backlink parameters.

You will quickly see all of your strengths and weaknesses if you look at them. My analysis shows that my website is a little behind its competitors. I, therefore, need to concentrate my efforts on linking buildings.

This tool can also help you locate backlink opportunities. Click on Link Intersection and click Prospective Domains. The sites linking to your competitors will be displayed, but not you. Yet.

These domains are worth backlinking to. Particularly those that offer do follow backlinks. This is a great tactic.

My Advice: To make your audit more thorough, connect your Google Analytics or Search Console accounts with the tools you’ll use.

Conclusion

An SEO audit can be very time-consuming, and I won’t lie to you. It takes patience and consistency. I hope that you found this article helpful.