With sites like Smallbizgenius reporting that over two-thirds of online activities start with a simple search, ensuring that you give yourself the best chance of being at the top of that search engine page can often be crucial. One of the vital parts of this process is running an SEO audit to help you improve your online visibility. So, do you know how to do an SEO audit and avoid the struggles other businesses face?

Below, we offer a guide that will help by providing clear and actionable steps to get you running that first audit on your site. Then, learn how to use it to boost your long-term growth and how what you learn can help you adjust your long-term strategy.

Build yourself a site you can be proud of and create a clear roadmap of your next steps in improving your SEO rankings with measurable results by running your own free SEO audit.

What Is an SEO Audit?

An SEO site audit investigates and returns information on a combination of your site’s technical prowess and page content. 

As this effort can become complex, you must understand some of the vital statistics you will measure and how to use them to set clear objectives or targets. Otherwise, you may not be able to use the results you gather once you finish the audit.

At the same time, be aware that some areas of SEO, including the algorithms search engines use to judge a site’s ranking, are not written down anywhere public. For example, Google considers “E-E-A-T” among the most important factors when ranking your website. These are concepts they use to build their ranking system, however, rather than specific numbers, and stand for:

An audit thus attempts to define how aspects of a site’s makeup and content may appeal to the above tenets and give the site a better chance of appearing in the SERP (search engine results page). For example, FinancesOnline reports that almost a quarter of what drives Google’s ranking algorithm is the trust or authority of the host domain. However, several different stats can feed into precisely what this means for any specific website.

This guide will primarily focus on measurable stats you can use to judge your site. However, the above four elements are also essential to remember as they contextualize each decision you make about improving your site.

Tools You Will Need

Gather the following tools from their respective websites and familiarize yourself with their use.

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• Google Lighthouse

While other search engines exist, WPBeginner reports that Google accounts for 90% of the searches out there, so unless you want to aim at the long tail of another engine, Google should be what you are primarily tracking. However, other analytics tools exist for other SERPs.

Set Clear Goals for Your Audit

Define what you want the goals of your audit to be before you start the process. If you leave it until later, the results you gather may color the goals you create. So, use your company’s larger business goals to define what you want to aim for. For example, you may want to:

• Boost conversions
• Reduce bounce rates
• Increase first-time visitors
• Ensure more return customers
• Grow visibility

Define these as SMART goals to ensure you can clearly determine whether you were successful. Then, your audit can focus on comparing your efforts with a specific target rather than having an undefined or ambiguous goal. Such efforts also allow you to easily develop actionable steps to reach your goals following an audit.

How to Do an SEO Audit Step-by-Step

Using the available tools, you will check for anything that might reduce the likelihood of converting a user. For example:

On-Page SEO

Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider or similar SEO analyzer tools to crawl your site and check for whether the following appear correctly:

• H1 and H2 tags
• Meta descriptions and Meta titles
• Internal and external links
• Appropriate robots.txt files
• XML sitemap
• Response and redirect codes
• Image alt text
• Use of HPPTS security
• Structured data

These site details clearly communicate what value a user would get from each page. As such, you should also ensure your site’s body text uses clear, natural language on every page so that it does not appear like you are trying to abuse search engine algorithms. You should also use primary and secondary keywords to unambiguously communicate each page’s purpose to search engine spiders.

You will also want to ensure you do not have duplicate content or broken links. Duplicate content can cause crawlers to become confused about the core page related to a topic, and broken links make you appear less authoritative or professional.

Backlinks and Off-Page SEO

Where possible, you want to seek out backlinks from high-authority domains relevant to your industry to build up a core set of references to your business. A backlink audit will inform you of how many sites have linked to you externally and allow you to see how visibly you are on the broader Internet.

Using tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, determine both the quality and number of backlinks to your site. They will list your backlinks, including where they link from and to and the general trustworthiness of each page. Over time, you can monitor these to identify trends and opportunities or respond to and disavow links that may harm your SEO.

Organic Traffic and Indexing

Use Google Search Console to see how many people find your site through searches. This data will inform you of the following:

• Your ranking in searches
• Your clickthrough ratio of those who see you
• The most common searches people make when they find you
• How much you are appealing to individuals in your target market

You can then make conclusions as to how effective your site is in gaining organic traffic, for example:

Low appearance numbers: You can begin to draw conclusions about the value or searchability of your site.

Low clickthrough ratio: You may need to consider the relatability or appeal of your metadata.

The Google search console also offers information on how many pages Google has indexed. If necessary, you can request indexing for pages that have yet to receive it.

Measure UX and |Technical Performance

Look at the stats you collect regarding user interaction with your site. Check your bounce rate and see if there are any specific places where you are losing users. Then, focus on people’s experiences in those locations and use that information to recommend changes to boost the number of users you retain.

It is also a good idea to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Use tools like Lighthouse to clearly understand what a mobile user would see when using the site. You may discover that other users experience issues such as missing or misplaced elements or other mobile issues that are not present on a desktop.

When checking the technical aspects of your site, analyze your “core web vitals” to gain a strong baseline of how quickly your site offers a professional experience to users. Three of the primary vitals you will want to watch to check this include:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures how fast your site appears on a user’s computer. You should aim for this to be under 2.5 seconds to ensure people do not bounce away from your site.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) assesses the stability of your intended site layout. The number is higher if sudden shifts in the position of items during the loading process are likely to cause confusion or misclicks.

FID (First Input Delay) displays how quickly a page will respond to user interactions after it starts loading. 

Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse will provide information on all of these and allow you to examine more data on each, helping you find the core reason for any bloated figures.

Reporting Your Audit

Once you complete the audit, ensure you have the information compiled for team members or stakeholders to see. In this report, you will want to include:

• Your findings and clear results
• Issues categorized by severity
• Performance benchmarks for expected results
• Visualizations for at-a-glance feedback

After the report is complete, you can move on to resolving the issues you have listed, with the intent of improving for the next time you make an audit.

Partnering with an SEO Audit Expert

Knowing how to do an SEO audit will give you a better chance of remaining at the forefront of your industry. The clear path to improvement they offer will also make you want to perform them more regularly, uncovering more opportunities to boost your rankings and visibility.

Rose & Cactus SEO offers expert advice and audit services to guide you through the next stage of your business’s growth and empower you in local and global SEO. Contact us for a free website audit and to discuss your website improvement options today.

Laura Pulling Laura is a content strategist, SEO consultant, and lover of quiz nights. She works with global clients to turn great ideas into well-ranked, high-converting content.