What is an Audit SEO?
It should be the first exercise that we make to any SEO project.
Normally, when we speak of the audit, we are referring to analyze a web site that take time to be in production. But if, before launching a web project, we were always aware of the indications of SEO professionals, we would save many ex-post audits. Above all, changes of structure or architecture that can be translated into migrations complicated and that can generate large losses of visibility in the search engines, so we will suffer falls of traffic important until we recover the positioning prior to the change.
That said, an audit SEO of a website is to detect errors and weak points that do not allow you to have a proper indexing of pages in search engines, and this directly affects the positioning.
With the audit, we will see that the main factors of SEO are being met and that the website is properly optimized or not to position in Google or other search engines.
Performing an audit SEO exhaustive locate improvements which, when applying, we will multiply our organic traffic as any errors will be corrected that prevented position ourselves correctly, and extend the scope of our site with new business opportunities.
The audit SEO is an effective tool because it allows us to know where we are and see what are the problems with the web site. With this information we can draw up a plan of action.
Why do an audit SEO?
The why and the when it is usually performed by an audit SEO can be summed up into 3 main reasons:
- For a decline in traffic of a web page. This hair loss can be sudden or it unfolds slowly. That is to say, we lose visibility in the search engines.
- By not getting the traffic and positioning expected. When after a time, a web project not just take off and achieve the initial objectives, it is more than enough reason to perform an audit SEO and see what may be going on.
- If has never had an audit Although apparently there are no problems, if you have never done a job SEO, before or after you launch a web site of production, it will always be necessary to carry out this type of consulting. Since we can be missing out on growth opportunities and/or may be at risk of penalties manual Google or sharp falls of traffic for any Update of the algorithm, that can affect us not to follow the guidelines SEO.
How to do an Audit SEO?
The most common that we find when we see reports of audits, the errors will be detected in a web site that should be resolved, and other points that require improvement and further optimization. This is typically done with a tracking tool of the web page, alerting them of the errors. But the majority of these reports do not sink deeper, and stay in the detection of technical errors site.
But this kind of tools often fall short and will be the combination with other specialized tools in another type of metrics, which will allow us to have a global overview of the major issues and, above all, of the solutions to implement.
Therefore, to make a successful audit SEO, you should make a comprehensive analysis of the state of health of the ranking of a particular web site. Evaluating aspects of both internal and external, that may be affecting the traffic, the indexability, the visibility, the authority of the domain and, ultimately, negatively affecting the conversion of our project online.
What are the tools we will use in the audit SEO?
Below, we cite the most important tools, although you should bear in mind that there are many others, and which, according to the problems that we can detect, it's sure that we will have to use other more specialized tools (Log Analyzer, SafeCont, ...). But always start from the following:
- Screaming Frog
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- Google Page Speed / GTmetrix / Pingdom
- Sistrix / Semrush / Ahrefs
What are the aspects to be reviewed in an audit?
As advanced above, an audit SEO can be very extensive and will depend on the known issues that apply some actions or others to fix them.
Let's see the main aspects to review according to the analysis group to which it belongs.
When we are analyzing the more technical questions the website we will review the following aspects:
- Sitemap XML
- Create and upload the file robots.txt (this refers to having well-controlled the guidelines that we give to Googlebot).
- Redirects
- Performance / response Times
- Response codes (4xx, 3xx, 5xx)
- Review deployment JS and CSS
- Policy parameters
- Indexing directives noindex)
- Internationalization (hreflang)
- Structured Data
- Attributes of links
- Pagination
The analysis OnPage site related to content (key words) will be reviewed and can we optimize the following:
- Title Tag
- Meta-Tag-Description
- Headers (H1, H2s, H3s)
- Distribution of internal links
- Duplication (URLs, meta-tags, content)
- Policy Canonicals
- Plan quality content (that is to say, that I have Thin Content)
- Image tagging
To analyze traffic, behaviors and detect important factors, we will look at:
- Architecture and Structure of the site
- Impressions
- CTR
- Positioning means
- Distribution of traffic channels
- Traffic devices
- Traffic for sections / directory
- Orphaned pages
- Cannibalization of keywords
- Keywords with the highest volume
- Keywords with the highest potential
As to all of the theme related to the links or the linking:
- Pages are the most and least bound
- Policy texts anchor-and distribution
- Management of external links
- Detection of links-toxic, broken, ...
- Policy attributes (nofollow, UGC, sponsored)
Of course we can extend much more the list, but checking all of these factors and applying the relevant actions will improve the SEO of a web site without any type of doubt.
May arise more points, especially when we detect a focus problem, and we need to deepen it.
To complete the audit you will need to create a Plan of Action with all the tasks, prioritized by importance and gravity. That way, you can keep track of every action, and implementation, their validation, and control of the positive effects of each.
