How To Effectively Perform An SEO Audit

So you want to learn how to effectively perform an SEO audit on your business website? Let me show you how!

Before we get started, I’ve also written this post on Medium.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it’s vital for making sure your business website is getting the best chance possible when it comes to discoverability.

When people use search engines like Google, SEO is what enables the search engine to recommend your website above the rest. This is amazing as it means people are more likely to visit your website and purchase your products/services.

SEO audits should also be done regularly as SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” type operation. It requires continuous changes and improvements. This is because most search engines update their algorithms regularly, so what worked 2 months ago might not work today.

With that all being said, lets jump in!

Before you even start improving the SEO for your website, you want to set some clear goals so that you know if you’re heading in the right direction.

Try to limit your expectations and pick 2/3 of the main areas you want to improve. Some suggestions are below:

• Cart conversion rate
• Impression click through rate
• Time spent on site
• Site speed
• Mobile device optimisation
• Broken links
• Back links
• Orders booked
• Monthly revenue
• The list really goes on and on….

I think this is a good time to mention that there’s little point to all of this unless your business actually benefits. And the last time I checked, you didn’t pay your employees with back links. You need to know how your SEO efforts are benefitting your business financially.

There are a ton of tools out in the wild, some free and some paid. I would recommend first with RankMath SEO, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and AHref’s site audit.

I use every single one of these tools to track how my website performs for every aspect of SEO. I won’t show you how to set these up in this post, so feel free to reach out if you need more information.

For this, think of everything that you don’t see when browsing a website. Such as the crawlability of your website, site speed and sitemaps.

The main areas to cover would be: sitemaps; site speed; mobile compatibility; broken links and HTTPS. Let me explain these a big more below!

Sitemaps are super important because they are used by search engines to “crawl” your website. From the data gathered, the search engines then “grade” your website. This is still a fairly hidden practice, and the exact metrics and algorithms used are known but we can make some simple assumptions.

Make sure your sitemap is up to date and accessible to website crawlers. If you don’t have one, then search engines might ignore your website entirely, leading to no organic search result rankings.

The best resource I’ve used for this is the Google PageSpeed tool. It scans your website and provides both the issues and solutions.

The reason I love this tool is because it also gives you suggestions on how to fix the issues that come up, and these often get quite advanced and in-depth. I wouldn’t aim for a perfect score, but showing green for most metrics is a very good start.

This is a very short section and it basically boils down to this: “Make sure your website looks fantastic on mobile too”.

I’ve seen so many websites that look great on desktops or laptops, but awful on mobile. And it’s usually because they were created by someone one a laptop that didn’t think to check the mobile version of the site.

This is fairly simple for small websites, but can quickly become a monumental task for larger websites. The aim here is to fix or remove any links that are broken.

The links could be broken for a number of reasons, most commonly being that the destination resource is no longer available. Similar to when a YouTube video is taken down or made private: the link no longer works.

Lastly for technical SEO, is HTTPS. This stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure and it’s responsible for making sure the data sent to and from your device and a website is encrypted and secure.

Not really something that’s important for a blog, but for banking websites or online stores this is vital. Making transactions or transmitting sensitive information over an insecure connection is akin to shouting your credit card number over your fence to pay the gardener.

Modern HTTPS now uses TLS, the improved method over SSL and is secured using a certificate on the website.

For this section, think about what is actually in the website content such as posts, tags and the overall structure.

It goes without saying, but if visitors find your content engaging, useful or just valuable then they will come back for more and stay with you longer. Which is why it’s so important to keep the content you post to your website to a very high standard.

If visitors click on your site and then quickly leave, search engines will take this in to account and possibly flag your website as not useful or helpful.

In the same breath, you want your content to be original and not solely AI generated. AI generated content has been thwarted by detectors that quickly ignore your website.

Including relevant titles, headings and image descriptions all work together to make the purpose of your content clear.

You want to be concise enough for visitors to read, but elaborate enough for visitors to find it useful.

A big no-no is having all your content in H2 headings for example. Headings should be used as just that, to point out a new chapter of your content.

Linking to the other related content you have on your website helps to build authority. Otherwise called “Topical Authority”. This is a measurement of how well trusted your website is for a particular topic.

If you have 1000 posts on the history of the slinky, and a single post on how to make money online, then it’s less likely that the 1 different article will get picked up by search engines. Maybe that’s a bad example because trying to rank for “How to make money online” is a very tough keyword to rank for indeed.

So now you know what you want to improve and how to improve it, you can finally take action.

As mentioned before, you should be tracking the changes to your metrics regularly to see what works best for you. I’ll leave a list to the most helpful resources below:

Purpose	Tool
Used to improve SEO on your website directly. It’s enabled better content writing, technical settings and visibility to search engines.	RankMath SEO
Used to track the traffic going to your website. It offers useful metrics such as impressions, visitors and time spent on the website.	Google Analytics
Similar to Google Analytics, this allows a deeper view into how Google sees your website. Including sitemaps, excluded content and page experience scores.	Google Search Console
This third party tool allows your to scan your website to provide useful information for the keywords you rank for along with similar information from Google Search Console.	AHrefs Site Audit

Well that’s it, you have everything you need to plan, execute and track your SEO changes. If used wisely, these can significantly improve the performance of your website.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments section below!

Enjoy! 🎉