Performing an SEO audit of a website is not easy. You need to check for various things in order to get the exact report for the SEO. It determines the important factors by which the website is ranked. Below are some of the things you need to check for an SEO audit.
Identify the Errors in Crawl
This is the first thing that you need to do understand and check out the errors you can see while crawling. You can run a crawl report that will tell you everything you need to know about the crawl errors. You can see the crawl results in Google console. You will also what are the warning and the errors. These errors are generally caused if that particular page blocked by the Robot.txt file. You can check the report to get the exact information.
Sitemap
Sitemap plays an important role in SEO. You will need to check various things in order to do your SEO Audit. An XML sitemap is one of them. Every website needs a sitemap. Using sitemap Google and other search engines can crawl the results of the websites easily and rank the page accordingly. A sitemap is an XML page that contains all the links of the websites. When you have a sitemap for a website, it will be easier for the search engine to crawl the results. Therefore, it is essential to have a sitemap for a website. This should be checked while you are performing an SEO audit.
Mobile Friendly Test
A website needs to be mobile friendly to rank better in search engines. This can be checked using the Google mobile-friendly test available in Google webmaster tools. Moreover, to ensure you can check if the website has AMP page. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Page. It removes the elements which take too time to load. This is because 70% of the total traffic is Mobile visitors. Google and other search engine take these things very seriously. Therefore, if the website is mobile friendly, it will have a higher chance of ranking compared to the one which is not mobile friendly. Also, it would be best if the website has an AMP version available.
Load Time
The next thing that is most important for SEO is the loading speed. You need to check the total loading speed of the website. There are various tools available that will help you to determine the exact load speed of the website. These tools check the website from a different location and browse that helps you to determine the exact speed of the website. This can’t be done manually because there might be many factors that effect. Along with this, you can’t determine when the page is fully loaded. Therefore, you will need to take the help of a tool.
HTML Elements
This is one other thing you should take into consideration while performing an SEO audit for your website. You need to check for various HTML elements. This includes checking the H1 and H2 tags, checking all the images for ALT tags, and other similar things. All of these things matter a lot in Search Engine Optimization. Each of these things should be inserted in an SEO audit report. You need to check the total images that do not have ALT tags and mark them aside. This will help the SEO executive to add the tags. There are many companies for free website SEO audit.
Keywords
The main thing about any website is the content of the website. Content is the king. While doing an SEO audit of a website, you need to check all the text on the home page. The total number of times a keyword is repeated will determine the keyword density. The most repeated keyword should be the one which is website related to. If your website is about Search Engine Optimization, SEO or similar keyword should be the most repeated keyword in the text.
Title and Meta Description
When you perform a Google search, you will see some of the text right below the link of the website. This text is called meta description, the website should have a custom meta description and the length of the same should be in between 160 to320 characters. Along with this, the title of the page should be in viewable limit. All of these things will not only increase SEO but will also encourage the visitors to click on your link.
Error pages and HTTPS
The other thing that you will need to check in the SEO audit is the total number of error pages. Search engines hate it when there are error pages shown on the website. You can either redirect the error page to the working link. A page with errors won’t be ranked by Google. 301 or 302 redirects can be used in the place of 404 errors. This will redirect your users to a particular link saying the post or page is updated. The other thing is HTTPS. Make sure the website has HTTPS enabled when you are checking the website. In a recent update, Google made it clear that websites with HTTPS will be given more priority.
These are the most important factors that affect SEO. All of these should be checked properly and inserted in the report once the SEO audit is done. There are various tools available to check all of these things. You can also do some of the things manually.