The SEO audit is of vital importance to find the possible errors that a website can have. Problems that may be bringing as a consequence that it is not positioning in Google or other search engines. But it is not only about the positioning in Google, in reality a good audit can also reveal the authority that your website has and how pleasant it is for the users who visit it.

First you must understand that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process of continuous optimization and optimization refers to the improvement that is made to a certain website, so that it is visible to Google. These steps will help you carry out a step-by-step SEO audit in a functional way. In it, I will also talk to you about the operation of several tools that could be useful at the time of the audit.

What does SEO do on my website?

SEO determines what problems a web page has from a technical point of view, that is, things like: how functional are its URLs, if the descriptions are their own or are they pointing to the keywords. But it can also identify if the web page has a good loading speed, if the site has damaged links and if it is complying with the requirements of Google algorithm updates so as not to be penalized. 

In this way, the seo audit for your website helps you improve the quality of your website based on Google’s quality guides. One of the main search engines in the world and that if you are visible to Google, you will be visible to the world and your ideal client. But also with SEO you can:

✔Create content with your ideal client in mind and have fresh ideas to create new content according to what your buyer persona is looking for. 

✔Increase your content visibility to give the site more authority. 

How to do an SEO audit?

First before starting you should start to analyze the website from the outside in. That is, how is your external visualization and then go step by step improving the internal shape of the web page to be analyzed. In this way, the first thing you should keep an eye on is your competitors, make sure you know and research them. Your competitors will be all those brands that are positioned in Google and belong to your business. What keywords are they ranking for? 

☑Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to research your competitors and list at least 5 that you consider to be your competition. As an advice that your content is occupying the first place in the search engine. This is achieved, for example, in the Top Pages function of Ahrefs. 

☑Then go to your website and start investigating general indexing problems (difficulties that a page can have that does not allow it to be visible). You can do this using a crawler (tool that measures the traceability of your website) like Dreecrawl. 

☑Then you have to make sure to analyze the structure of the links that the website you want to compete with is using, the architecture of the page and the information that it is sharing. For this, use tools like SEMrush to see what content is in the first place, study their backlinks and identify the opportunities for improvement that your page could offer. 

What follows is to see the category pages of products or services that the web may have. Make sure that all the products have their correct URL according to the category they offer. This part helps a lot to improve the customer’s user experience. 

☑Finally, go to the product detail pages and make sure the descriptions of each product are their own. This helps the page to stand out from other similar websites offering the same product.  

Seo audit example

It is important that you know that with SEO there are no magic formulas and that you must understand that these can vary according to new updates. So do not despair or try to make the same strategies for several clients. Well, one of the things that make SEO Analysts stand out is their personalized strategies. 

✔When opening an account in tools such as SEMrush or Ahrefs, you will be given the opportunity to place a URL of the page you want to do an SEO audit on. Put the exact URL example: Contenttu.com so that the tool gives you an overview of the web page.  

✔Then within the same tool you will find options such as: the problems tab. Where the errors that could be seen on the web page are listed. Pages that have duplicate content, that are not using HTTPS, duplicate H1 tags. In this way, you can suggest that the site become more secure with SSL security, ask the copywriters to improve the H1s so that they differ from each other and ask them to remove or improve the pages that have been duplicated. 

✔After doing an exhaustive search of all the errors that the page on page may have. Go to the crawled pages tab and view the entire list that SEMrush displays with definitions as correct or redirected. Make sure that the pages do not contain errors and you can do it in a personalized way, in this part you can see the status of the outgoing links and inbound links, evaluate the loading time of the page and suggest everything from a URL list.

✔Check the statistics: with this content you will be able to see much better the reasons why Google still cannot read the page clearly. Tools like SEMrush allow you to see a list and graphs with the depth of page crawling, pages with more clicks, among other things. This tab will give you endless opportunities to offer improvements, if you need them. 

✔Finally, compare Crawlers or web spiders. With web crawler like: Dreecrawl . These cyber spiders are bots that belong to every search engine. With this tool you can see duplicate content, redirect and meta tag problems.

How are crawler problems diagnosed?

Diagnosing crawler problems is important because it avoids penalties for low quality content, usually duplicate pages are not so easily visible but not improving that detail can make google bots unable to see the best pages on your website. 

1) First you must enter a tool like scre @ mingfrog or Deepcrawl and put the URL of your page.

2) Then you can visualize at this point the content of the page, things like: that the titles and descriptions have the correct length, that they are not repeated. Because bots can see it as duplicate content. 

3) See if the page has Thin Content or Short Content. This is an error that is usually penalized by Google Panda, considering it not very useful. 

4) Identify if the page has duplicate content and verify that the web pages do not have more than one H1. 

5) Check the pages that have a canonical tag and those that don’t. These are part of an important mechanism that helps to correctly index the pages so that Google can crawl them. 

Conclusions

Always when doing an audit, do not forget to create an adequate strategy where you show the company several options for improvement and always think about the best for its brand. Remember that no strategy should be the same as another! However, I hope that these points can serve as a starting point for you. 

Make sure that all the pages have their meta descriptions and their titles oriented to the best user experience. That is, they provide valuable content about what they will see on the screen. In the same way, try to have unique descriptions goals and remove broken links from the web. It also avoids the 302 redirect and recommends that they change it to 301.