It is necessary to understand what is an SEO audit and what to expect as the end result out of it before performing a search engine optimization audit (SEO Audit) of your website which is important for many reasons. An SEO audit is a process of evaluating and analyzing how well your web presence relates to best practices you take for your website.

There are many tools available which you can use to perform SEO audit of a website, but the best method is you manually do it by following a proper guide or you can hire a professional SEO Auditor to do the work for you properly. The main purpose of this process is to identify as many issues as possible which are affecting the organic search performance of your website. The SEO auditor helps you to manually review your website and can come up with recommendations of what needs to be rectified and what necessary changes are required so that organic performance of the website in search engines is improved. After his recommendation, create an action plan to solve the identified issues and second, a good SEO audit will keep your website up-to-date with the latest developments in search marketing and will also help to keep your website on top of the competition always. The SEO audit report will reveal all technical SEO issues, website structure issues, on-page issues, off-site issues, user experience issues, content improvisation and opportunities, and lastly competitive marketplace insights. An audit report should be performed regularly, it is just like a health check-up for your website. 

First and foremost thing, an SEO audit should be extensive including all the details. It must polish both structural and content additives affecting your SEO visibility. It must provide a “large picture” view of what's going on in the market currently. Any missing pieces could result in pointless or improper guidelines. Your audit ought to be easy to understand. As a business owner, you have to be capable enough to connect the dots as to how SEO problems are affecting your online visibility, goals, or sales. Any and all recommendations need to be genuinely taken into consideration for your overarching business goals. Sooner or later, your SEO audit pointers need to be actionable.  

There must be a proper route to crowning glory, prioritized with projected effect and effort associated with every recommendation. The output of any search engine optimization audit ought to appropriately convey an easy to follow roadmap to achieve the desired targets. An SEO audit report should not be performed in a haste. It should properly cover the root causes of all the issues affecting the online presence of your website. An SEO auditor should conduct a thorough investigation to make accurate recommendations. A situational analysis should also be performed to point out the areas of prime focus for your website. Read on further to understand the checklist pointers which should be taken care of when you perform an SEO Audit report.  

Google checks involve checking whether your website is related to everything that Google follows. Is Google Analytics installed for your website to provide you with valuable insights that can help you shape different strategies for your business? It helps you study the behaviour of your visitors to deliver better results. Check whether Google search console is set up properly to maintain and monitor your site's presence in Google search results. It helps to check that Google is crawling your site, re-indexing new and updated content, fixing indexing problems and analyze the traffic data for your site. Google cache analysis can check the frequency of when Googlebot perceived your website. Google will crawl your website more often if you regularly update your web pages with new content. Sitemap.xml file should be present for your website. A sitemap file provides information about the pages, and other files on your site and the relationship between them which helps search engines like Google to understand your website more intelligently and crawl your site properly. Through sitemaps, you also get to know whether there are any invalid pages on the website which you can remove it which are not required. 

Whilst scanning for duplicate content material, you’re going to be looking at the identical subsets of your website which you checked out whilst you have been scanning for the thin content material. Some SEOs get riled up approximately replica content material and the website online penalties sites may want to incur as a result. Here is the way you can tackle it: Google is smart enough to recognize whether or not you’re deliberately and maliciously duplicating content material in your webpage to clog the search engine result page along with your site’s URLs. Probably, you’re not. A more likely situation, if you have duplicate content, is that it’s taking place unintentionally. Possibly your CMS (Content Management System) is dynamically producing new pages which can be similar in appearance and that haven’t been manually canonicalized in search console. Wordpress does this with archive pages. 

SEO Audit report highlights on-page factors which will help you boost your rankings. You need to properly check your title tag as it tells Google what your page is all about and is also considered as one of the most important SEO factors. The title tag should be unique for all pages of your website. The title tag should include well-researched keywords with the appropriate length. The meta description is the next important thing after the title tag that shows up below your title tag in Google's search results. The meta description should be well-written which will help you generate more clicks and more visitors from you with good Google rankings. The meta description should be of appropriate length containing relevant keywords and engaging copy. Write proper header tags as they are highly visible on your website to the visitors. Header tags should be well-optimized with relevant keywords. The content present on the website should be engaging enough and should satisfy the searcher's intent. It is good if you incorporate relevant keywords in that content, but make sure you don't force too many keywords. It is recommended to include 300-500 words of content on each page. Make sure the content is unique on all the pages and it should be sufficient enough to rank in Google. 

Website structure is also an important aspect which should be taken care of. Website structure basically means having dedicated pages for every keyword you want to rank in Google. Google focuses on showing the most relevant web pages for any keyword searched by its users. So having a focused webpage for each of your core keywords will make it easier for you to get ranked in Google. Make sure landing pages are perfectly integrated into your website's linking architecture and you have pages for all the services or products you offer and want to promote via SEO. The concept of canonicalization is to make sure that each page loads with only one URL format. It is always better to focus on putting efforts on establishing the authority of one website in Google's eyes. Check properly whether your rel="canonical" tags in place in case if you have an e-commerce website. The URL structure should be appropriately formed. Make URLs brief and descriptive including relevant keywords wherever possible. Just take care that URLs should not be too short and simple but at the same time, it should be understandable to the visitors and avoid stuffing many keywords at a time. 

Web page speed is a vital aspect particularly after Google dropped its Speed Update recently. That is partly because of the increase in mobile searching. All and sundry the usage of mobile to search for things on the internet isn't always going to wait around for a sluggish-loading webpage. Which means the quicker your website is, the more likely Google is to praise you with strong organic rankings. A 404 is a “web page not found” error, typically because of broken links and photos within your website. For example, if a webpage to your website links to a piece of content that has on the grounds that has been deleted, every person who clicks that link will get a 404 error. Contrary to popular opinion, damaged hyperlinks don’t outcomes in site consequences. As content cycles inside and outside, and your web site’s structure changes over time, 404s arise evidently. That stated broken links in places can affect your internal linking structure. They also can be a pain for customers looking to navigate from one page to another. Website audit tools have the capability to perceive all of the 404s within your site. After you pick out, fixing them is an issue of determining how important every hyperlink is on your linking structure and user experience. Have a web page which no longer exists, or which now exists at a new URL? It’s a good idea to ensure all excessive visitors pages which previously linked to that page now 301 redirect to the brand new webpage, or, that they at least are redirected back to your homepage. 

All of these are elements which are really important for planning successful SEO strategies and should be a corollary to your SEO audit and ongoing SEO maintenance of your website.