The SEO Audit Process & Technical SEO Audit To Boost Your Google Rankings

If we're talking about video editing presentation websites, the promotion, auditing, and link-building part are a little more complicated. You also need to know your strengths and weaknesses. In this blog post, you will learn the true importance of SEO audits and technical SEO audits. What it is and why it is so crucial to your website results.

An SEO audit influences the success of a website, be it a presentation website or an online shop with thousands of products. The audit is an important part of the website optimization strategy, which we know as SEO strategy or, more specifically, SEO strategy for Google (because Google is and will remain the most popular search engine). Most websites have no SEO optimization (or optimization is done superficially), so the results in terms of online visibility are almost non-existent. 90.63% of websites fail to attract visitors from Google searches, and 5.29% of them attract 10 visitors per month or less. The 2020 study by Ahrefs analyzed about 1 billion pages.

Technical SEO Audit is part of the overall marketing strategy.

The success of an online optimization campaign is also influenced by the other techniques used, such as general sales techniques, AdWords advertising, and social media presence. Auditing is vital for a modern online business, as it can identify a website's weaknesses, fix them and then place the website at the top of Google searches.

The objective of the technical SEO audit done by GAMIT https://www.link-building-strategies.com/ is to address issues that can improve the quality of websites for both users and search engine crawlers. The audit covers all the important things that modern websites and web applications need. From reviewing website architecture, and code, to analyzing the technical issues and organic performance, so with this audit, you make the most of what you already have.

What is an SEO audit? 

An SEO audit is a complete analysis of a website, which will reveal all the elements that can be improved. Once this checklist of elements is obtained, the next step is to build a strategy and then implement it https://www.link-building-strategies.com/how-to-create-a-perfect-seo-strategy-through-an-seo-audit/. The audit is not just about keywords. Because a proper audit not only analyses keywords, but also elements such as URL, title, meta title, and meta description. Then, with this "tool" we examine off-page elements, and technical parts of the audit aspects such as sitemap, usability, loading speed, backlinks, and so on.

Results of an audit

The audit detects, as I said, the weaknesses of a website. Opportunities can then be detected and, with the right implementation, an organic increase in website traffic can be seen. Compared to other marketing methods, search engine optimization takes more time to show results. But once achieved, they are long-lasting.

For the online business owner, this means a website that is closer to the eyes of the target audience, which, through quality content and accessibility, will be able to trigger purchase intent and retain existing customers.

What is the role of the audit?

The main role of an audit is to identify all the vulnerabilities of a website. The audit will detect irrelevant keywords for the website and suggest important ones that will help the website to be more search engine friendly. An exhaustive analysis: will identify the position of the website about its competitors; will analyze competitors' strategies, thus providing a complete picture for optimization procedures; also will provide concrete answers and help the website owner to better understand how search engines work and their impact on his business; discover development opportunities and provide pertinent advice on how to achieve them; provide a better structure for the site's overall promotion strategy.

When is an audit necessary?

An SEO audit is recommended before starting an optimization campaign. Many specialists think that it is sufficient only before the start of the campaign. But the analysis is essential throughout the campaign as well. But there are cases, such as an online shop where technical changes are constantly taking place, where the audit should be carried out periodically. The right time for an audit is when you want to launch a new website. It is also necessary when a successful website starts with a properly technically optimized platform. And do not forget how important is an audit when you're redesigning or migrating, because a migration done incorrectly will most likely lead to decreased organic traffic and loss of visibility. Website migration can include rebranding processes (domain change), transitioning to a secure version of the website (HTTPS), changing the platform (content management system - CMS), and any redesign action. When you experience an unexpected drop in organic traffic - Google has now reached ±3000 algorithm updates per year, 2-3 of which are major. A drop in rankings or traffic may signal that Google has changed something and your website no longer meets the search engine's requirements. When you think you can generate more traffic to your current website this is the main destination of the technical SEO audit service. We make sure Google understands your website, so you can get more out of what you've already built.

Which tools are needed for an SEO audit?

Various tools are used in optimization to analyze websites. These vary from one marketing company to another, depending on the preferences of the specialists. The audit essential tools are a keyword planner, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEM Rush, which is used to analyze keywords and find out the volume of organic searches in Google Search; a tool for monitoring the progress of the SEO campaign, such as SEO Monitor, which provides the information needed to make promotional decisions and adapt the strategy in real-time; a "spy", such as Screaming Frog (on-site audit tool), which analyses a website in terms of links, images, meta elements, and other errors; a tool that analyses the general state of the site, by default, the organic traffic already generated by the site in Google, such as Google Search Console or Google Analytics. Among the tools, some are free, such as Google Search Console or Analytics. Others require considerable investment, so the price of an audit can sometimes be seen as too high (it includes not only the expertise of the specialist but also the cost of the tools used to design the audit).

What should the SEO audit contain?

1.Full SEO audit

The audit has some mandatory steps, although there is no standard audit formula. Without them, the SEO analysis would not fulfill its purpose. One of the most important is indeed keyword analysis. Their correct identification is vital in the process of generating traffic to the site. But let's talk a bit more about it!

2.Keyword analysis

Identifying relevant keywords is always the first step in conducting an audit. At this stage, the scope of the website, the nature of the products/services, and the competitors' pages are taken into account for accuracy. Also, if the website is an old one, irrelevant keywords are analyzed and discovered.

3.Competitor analysis  

Establishing the main competitors is essential for a website audit that wants to achieve its goals. This step aims at discovering the most relevant competitors, usually the top 5, especially their actions (external links, organic and paid traffic). By detecting the main strategies used by these competitors, a better strategy can be devised, with a good chance of getting the site to the top of Google searches.

4.On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the stage that involves the analysis of technical SEO audit aspects (site architecture, site speed, mobile friendliness) and content aspects (readability and UX, well-targeted content).

5.Keyword Mapping;

• main meta elements (title and description);
• homepage and menu links, contextual links
• quality and size of the content (product descriptions, category descriptions, blog articles);
• accessibility (robots.txt, HTTP status codes, 301 redirects);
• indexability (indexing errors, number of indexed pages);
• ranking factors (form of URLs, identification of those URLs that generate duplicate content).

This analysis identifies and corrects practically all the problems that could influence site traffic, visitor numbers, and satisfaction.

Off-page SEO

This is the stage in which the backlink profile is evaluated (number of links to the site, number of pages with the most links, anchors used in articles), the backlinks of the main competitors are checked and internal links are improved. It also discovers and fixes 404 errors, evaluates link-building options, and performs outreach.

Why leave the audit to a specialist?

Many people claim that they can do the SEO audit themselves. But things are not that simple. To go through all the steps outlined above and use the optimization tools effectively requires experience. So, those who want to take up this challenge will find themselves faced with countless questions, will spend a lot of time researching, and, given their lack of experience, are likely to fail to achieve the desired results. SEO means practice, years of work, various strategies tested on different sites, and constant information about changes in the digital environment (for example, constant information when search engines announce an update). Thus, the online promotion campaign should always be left to a specialist, a person who has the necessary know-how to carry out an accurate and complete analysis.

An SEO specialist will provide:

• explanations simply and transparently;
• information about a website's weaknesses and solutions to fix the problems detected;
• proposals for improving the site, as well as useful recommendations in the development of the overall marketing strategy;
• more security, as it will meet a set deadline;
• much shorter audit implementation time, as you will be in constant communication with the programmer in charge of making changes to the website.

Another study conducted by Ahrefs, also in 2020, highlights that only 5.7% of active web pages manage to attract visitors from organic searches within the first year of publication. The study analyzed Google search results for 2 million keywords. Whether your website is an online shop (Prestashop, WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify) or a presentation website (WordPress, Drupal, Blogger), its development must take into account a coherent SEO strategy in terms of investment of resources. SEO is the best medium (6 months) and long-term investment for an online website.

To get a website to the top of the Google search engines to help you with an audit and also with a detailed technical SEO audit, a well-designed optimization campaign is necessary. This is always based on an audit. This tool must be used skillfully, by an experienced specialist, so that it can accurately detect, in a short time, the problems and the solutions through which they can be solved.