Would you like to know how to do an SEO audit of your website? Well, as you know, understanding the internal and external status (popularity) of your page is essential to be able to make the most appropriate decisions for the business.
SEO audit is essential to make business decisions and will guide you to improve the positioning of your website. Through it, we will determine the most important errors and those that we have to start solving first that is, those priority ones that most affect the performance of the web.
An SEO audit allows us to establish an action plan in which the tasks to be carried out and their priorities are perfectly reflected. Something very common is to find a project that has countless errors (mixed content, redirect loops, multiple h1s, pages without Meta title, etc.).
The job of the SEO consultant is to achieve the project objectives in the shortest possible time. To do this, you must determine the order of actions to be taken. Well, throughout this article, I discuss the most important aspects that must be reviewed in an audit.
How to do an SEO audit?
Before delving into each of these concepts, I tell you what the pillars or fundamental aspects that should be reflected in an audit are to me:
- Tracking
- Indexing
- Content
- Popularity
- Checklist to do an SEO technical audit
In the following lines, I tell you the main errors that you should detect when doing an SEO audit:
SEO Audit: Are you making tracking crawlers easier?
Facilitating the crawling of your website to search engines is one of the SEO principles. For this reason, when carrying out an SEO audit, you should check that the following files exist, that they are correctly uploaded and that they do not contain errors:
Robots.txt: That file we use to indicate which parts of our site, we don’t want bots to crawl. When doing an SEO audit, check that there are no errors, that is, that it is uploaded correctly, that it is located at the root, that no internal resources (CSS or js) are being blocked or that it does not contain errors.
Sitemap or sitemap.html: This file helps search engine spiders to crawl a website more efficiently. You must verify that it is optimized, that is, that it includes only those URLs that we want to position.
Sitemap.xml: Check if it exists and if it includes those pages with a positioning interest.
Control indexing
Indexing refers to the pages of a website that can be accessed by users through queries.
Not all crawled pages are indexed. They can be discarded and not uploaded to the index if they do not meet certain search engine requirements such as poor or thin content, duplicate content, etc.
To find out if a url is indexed, you should check it through the “URL Inspection” section of Search Console. When we enter in the browser: site: misitio.com all the URLs that have been tracked will appear, not the ones that are indexed.
A high number of pages on our website must be indexed and available to users through an SEO audit. We must determine which ones we want to be available.
What pages do we want users to find since there is a positioning interest (information, attraction, sale, etc.)?
For example, it is not convenient for users to reach the “thank you for contacting” page through organic searches.
Analyze the content
In this section, we must take into account the following aspects:
Keyword density
We must work each URL based on a keyword. But, you must bear in mind that in addition to search engines, we write for people. Therefore, do not over-optimize the texts, that is, do not overuse the main keyword. In addition to not being natural, it is a penalizable practice (keyword stuffing).
Detect cannibalizations
This occurs when the search engine does not know which URL of a website to classify for a specific search intention. Cannibalizations will not occur if you work based on a content plan prepared by keyword research. Each keyword you work with must serve a specific search intent and be attacked from a single URL.
Duplicate content
This problem can arise, for example, in e-commerce, when there are several products in which only one characteristic such as flavor or color varies, but the content is practically the same. It is important to know the percentage and cause of this problem.
Canonical label
It is used to indicate to Google what URL we are interested in positioning if there are two or more very similar. A good practice is to assign each URL the canonical tag to itself. We will not assign a canonical tag to a URL to itself, but to the one, we want to position when it is cannibalized with one or more URLs.
Canonicalization of content
When you do an SEO audit, it is important to crawl the web and analyze what content is canonicalized. One of the best tools is Screamingfrog. As mentioned in the previous point, if the application of this label is not to avoid cannibalizations, we must correct these errors.
Hierarchy of headings
HTML headings are essential for SEO positioning. They indicate to the search engines the topic that is discussed in each URL. For this reason, they must be optimized and ordered, as if it were a book.
Web popularity
Although we normally refer to SEO off-page, the internal popularity of a page is essential when we talk about the popularity of a website. Carrying out a correct internal linking strategy allows us to give greater strength to pages that we consider relevant or that we want to position.
External popularity refers to what is relevant to the search engine on our website: backlinks from other sites. In this section, we must analyze the naturalness of our link profile, the thematic relationship, the percentage of harmful links or the type of anchor used.
Positioning analysis
Another necessary practice to do an SEO audit is to analyze your positioning, number of positioned keywords, their importance, etc. The analysis of web traffic is also essential to be able to make sound decisions.
The figure of the SEO consultant is essential when carrying out an SEO audit. There are countless errors, aspects and applicable solutions. Each case must be analyzed and contextualized.
