Conducting an SEO Audit for Beginners
Due to the ever growing digital market competition, it’s always important to be at the top of your game and know what’s going on around you. SEO is one of the most important and beneficial factors that can help your business be aware and on top of your competition. However, with all of the different details and layers that’s a part of SEO, how is your business going to organize and keep track of your business’s SEO? We have the answer for you!
Conducting an SEO audit for beginners is one of the first steps your business can take to improve. Doing an SEO audit for beginners is not as hard as it may seem. Don’t let the multiple tasks and steps scare you off. With the help of this article, we will help give your business a better idea of how your website ranks and what you need to do to improve your rankings as a beginner.
Table of Contents
Why is an SEO Audit for Beginners Important?
SEO Audit Checklist for Beginners
What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit, also known as a site audit, is a process by which a webmaster or SEO agency audits a website to see how optimized it is for search engines. This includes technical aspects like pagespeed, site structure and mobile optimization as well as content and keyword placement. Tools that are typically used are ScreamingFrog or other common tools like SEMrush or aHrefs.
Basically, an SEO audit is like a check-up on your website to make sure everything is running smoothly and sees what could be improved upon. When search engine crawlers come to your site, it’s important that your website is in tip top shape to help improve your site’s rankings. Because SEO is constantly changing, it’s important to keep up with these changes and update your site accordingly. While you can do smaller audits monthly, having a regular technical SEO audit every 4-5 months should be a regular protocol for your business.
Why is an SEO Audit for Beginners Important?
Imagine writing a piece of content for your site’s page or blog. When the time has come to publicly post it for the world to see, they are restricted in seeing your hard work due to faults in slower site speed or errors on your website. Your bounce rate will increase and all of your hard work will not perform the way you hoped it would. No matter how good your content is, if your site isn’t up to its full potential, you’ll end up losing traffic. This is why conducting an SEO site audit is important for your website.
Doing an SEO audit for beginners is more important when you first start out rather than in 2 years from now. Finding all of the errors and faults through an audit now rather than later can help improve your site’s SEO and digital marketing over time. Finding issues such as meta information, duplicate content, site security problems, or poor mobile optimizations can all be fixed by you. However, without an SEO audit you might never know these issues exist. Bad user experience can be a huge factor that impacts your SEO. Conducting an SEO audit can be the most important tool your business can use to help find and resolve these issues quickly and efficiently.
SEO Audit Checklist for Beginners
An SEO audit can find the issues you’ve been searching to fix. As a beginner, we’ve listed a few things you might want to include in your SEO audit checklist the next time you start one.
Crawling Your Website
For most SEO audits, crawling your website is the first step you would need to take. There are a variety of tools you can choose from such as SEMrush, Screaming Frog, Spyfu, DeepCrawl, or more! The crawler tools help your business find errors such as broken links, poor images, page title issues, and bad keywords. They can also help you identify duplicate content, excess redirects, and unlinked pages.
There are lots of ways in which you can fix these errors. Here are a few of the most common and best practices we recommend:
- Remove duplicate content: Having two pieces of content that are almost identical to each other is considered duplicate content and could dock your website points in search engines eyes. Removing duplicate content helps to better improve your SEO.
- Fix redirects: Redirects can become a huge error when done incorrectly. When your redirects are organized and cleaned up, this helps to better improve your site’s SEO.
- Indexing: There may be a few pages that might not need to be crawled or indexed by search engines. Marking them as restricted for indexing can help improve your SEO.
Fixing issues like these helps your website be prepared for when search engines, such as Google, crawl your website.
On-Page Technical SEO Checks
As a beginner, there are a large number of on-page technical SEO checks that you should keep in mind on an SEO audit. These elements should always be checked on, clean, organized, and always up to date for better SEO.
Page Titles and Title Tags
A title tag is an HTML code that tells search engines the title of a page. This information will be displayed on SERPs. It’s important to have a H1 header on the page along with a title tag present in SERPs. It’s also important to keep these relevant and answer the information within your content.
Meta Descriptions
These are the descriptions a user first sees in a SERP. While these don’t impact ranking directly, they are still extremely important for SEO. You can use tools such as Screaming Frog to help discover information about pages with missing meta titles and descriptions. This can also be found for alt text for images as well.
Have a Clear Hierarchy
When content is key, you’ll want to make sure it isn’t scattered or hard to find on your website. Having a clear hierarchy makes it easy for search engines to find and crawl your website more effectively. It also helps users move through your site easier and don’t have to go back and forth constantly.
Keyword Placement
With any SEO task, keywords are the heart and soul of any digital marketing SEO strategy. Without them, your site would be lost and would be very difficult to find and track. It’s important to have a focus keyword and supporting keywords to help your content succeed. You can include them in your title, meta descriptions, URL, etc.
Check Your Site Speed
Site Speed is one of the most important factors for quality user experience on your website. When your website is slow and unresponsive, users will not give your site any attention to it. With an SEO audit, you can find how responsive and fast your site speed is for your users. When you’re conducting an SEO audit and get to site speed, also take these factors into consideration:
- Speed Index
- Time to Interactive
- First Meaningful Paint
Depending on the scores you receive, you should take action when they are less than excellent or good. People are not as patient as they used to be and are used to getting their information as quickly as they can. With your site audit, you can see how much you need to improve your site speed.
Boost Your SEO
We hope this article helps show that an SEO audit for beginners is more than possible if you’re willing to put in the time and effort. Conducting these SEO audits for your business will also become a huge advantage towards your SEO efforts. If you’re looking for more ways to grow your small business SEO, look no further!
At Boostability, we provide different solutions for small businesses by getting them to the first page of Google every five minutes. You could be next. Learn more about growing your SEO services for small businesses to their fullest potential.
