Each SEO Company has to complete audits year-round to ensure all goals are being hit. Audits make sure that the best strategies, tactics, and practices are being used company-wide and that processes are the most efficient they can be. With search engine optimization auditing tools and a clear, streamlined process, you can ensure your SEO auditing plan is effective.

What Are SEO Audits? 

SEO audits are not just for SEO companies; they’re for any businesses that use search engine optimization as one of their tools in internet marketing. SEO audits can be performed internally to ensure the company is performing optimally SEO-wise. They can be performed on the company’s clients to ensure the company is doing its best for the client. 

SEO audits look at everything from website structure issues, gaps in content, and technical issues. A typical SEO marketing audit looks at the following categories:

• On-site SEO: On-site SEO includes elements of your actual website and may consist of title tags, headers, internal links, and content.
• Off-site SEO: Off-site SEO includes the parts of your web page that customers can’t see but are scrolled by Google. This has to do with page speed, broken links, backlinks, and redirects.
• Content strategy: Content strategyconsiders keywords within your content to up your page rankings in Google. This includes service pages, blogs, or guides.

While these are the main SEO categories, multiple elements make up each category. When an SEO company conducts an audit, they review numerous factors within each section.

Tools to Use to Help you Audit your SEO Company

SEO tools can help speed up the time it takes to complete an SEO audit. Here’s a comprehensive list of tools and sites you can use to help you perform a proper audit: 

• Google Page Speed Insights: Page speed is an important factor in ranking, as customers won’t wait long for a page to load. This tool tests how fast your website loads.
• Google Analytics: Google Analytics is one of the most important tools for looking at things like your audience demographics, bounce rates, time spent, and the most visited pages on your website.
• Google Search Console: Google Search Console helps you monitor and maintain your website. It notifies you of technical errors, including crawl errors and mobile responsiveness.
• Google Trends: Google Trends helps you identify content needs. It looks at what topics are trending in certain areas worldwide to help you create content that your website visitors want.
• Bing Webmaster: Bing Webmaster is a tool specifically for Bing Search. It helps you identify crawling and indexing errors that could affect ranking.
• SERP Simulator: SERP simulator lets you check how your company’s title tag and meta description will look once they’re actually on Google. The SERP Simulator can help you adjust your meta description as needed.
• Hubspot Website Grader: With the Hubspot Website Grader, you can view some general suggestions as to how you can improve website SEO, user experience (UX), and any technical issues.
• SpyFu: SpyFu helps you audit your competitors. You can use it to determine what keywords your competitors are targeting and even what paid ads they’re using. SpyFu isn’t free but is worth the cost.
• Screaming Frog: Screaming Frog completes a thorough audit of all your website’s pages, helping you identify broken URLs or technical errors.
• Ahrefs: Ahrefs helps you crawl through your site and gives you examples of content underneath keywords you want to rank.
• SEMrush: SEMrush helps you analyze potential backlinks, identify keywords, uncover technical errors, and monitor website traffic. SEMrush is most useful when creating a keyword strategy.
• Moz: Moz is an all-in-one SEO toolbox. It provides you with the tools to complete audits, track rankings, review backlinks, and even do keyword research on your website.

These are some of the main tools, but you can find many other free and paid tools here. With so many SEO auditing tools available, it’s best to experiment with each of them and then make a list of the ones most useful to your SEO company. Assign a favorite tool to each part of the audit to significantly speed up its time to complete audits.

10 Steps for a Successful SEO Audit

Breaking down the SEO auditing process into steps can help organize the process, thus making it more efficient. Here are 10 steps to conducting a successful SEO audit:

1. Deep Crawl your Website 

Before identifying the parts of your website that need improvement, it’s important to know things like page load speed and any errors. Doing a crawl of your website is pretty self-explanatory; you essentially go through all the links on your website and make sure they’re all working and not slowing down your site. 

When crawling your website, you can either use one of the tools listed above or do it by hand. If your website has a lot of pages, an automated tool like SEMrush or Screaming Frog may be more efficient.

2. Fix any Technical Issues During the SEO Audit

Crawling your website should uncover any technical errors that affect your optimization. A few common website errors include indexing errors or slow page load times. Google isn’t a fan of slow pages, so having a slow load time on your site can ultimately affect your SEO. Indexing refers to a process that leads to Google deciding where to place your website in search. 

If Google can’t access your website properly, it likely won’t appear in search results. While fixing any technical issues, it’s also a good time to move your website from an HTTP to an HTTPS if you haven’t yet. The process of fixing technical issues refers to moving your website to a secure place, which is now a requirement. Without an HTTPS, Google is unlikely to display your website, and you could be penalized.

3. Check Mobile Friendliness

More customers are browsing the internet via their smartphones or tablet today. Checking mobile-friendliness also means it’s important to check that your web pages display properly on most devices, including mobile. It also means checking contact forms or embedded tools to ensure mobile users can use them the same way as someone on their computer. 

Checking the mobile-friendliness of a website is easy to complete. You can either manually go through your website using your phone or check your stats on your Google Search Console, which lists the specific things to change to make your website more mobile-friendly. If your website isn’t currently mobile-friendly, you may need to go through and create separate, mobile-friendly versions of each page.

4. Complete a Link Audit for Your SEO Company Website

It’s a good idea to do a link audit to find out what links you currently have on your website, so you can identify new opportunities or fix broken links. You can manually go through your website and click links to determine where they lead. You can also run your website through a link audit using tools like Screaming Frog or SEMrush. 

Check for broken links, which are links that no longer lead you anywhere, and replace them. Take note of how redirects, which are links that forward you from one page to another, affect the user experience. While a few redirects aren’t a big deal, too many of them can harm your SEO. If your redirects aren’t properly working, they’ll display a 404 Error.

5. Identify Link Building Opportunities for Your SEO Company

Once you have a good idea of your website’s current links, you can identify new link opportunities. With that, you can choose to link build using internal links, external links, or a combination of both. For internal link building, simply link older content to newer content under competitive anchor texts. Linking older to more recent content helps users stay on your page while also climbing the ranks in Google.

Another important type of link is backlinks. Backlinks are links that lead traffic from a different website to yours. You can use the same link audit tools to determine what other websites are already leading to your website. Pay attention to the spam score of each backlink. A high spam score tells Google that the link may not be authentic, which can penalize your website and reduce your page ranking.

6. Complete a Content Audit

Content is a very important part of your SEO. Google ranks websites that provide visitors with helpful, relevant content. Conducting a content audit can be a timely task but important. Looking through your content and making sure that it doesn’t have duplicates or low-quality content is crucial to a successful audit for your SEO company. Going through all your content is a process called content pruning, and it makes sure your content isn’t negatively affecting your SEO. 

While some content might not be identical, some can be similar and affect your overall rankings. Deleting content that is no longer ranking can make way for newer, fresher, and more effective content. Make sure all content on your page truly serves its purpose of helping the audience solve an issue or learn something new.

7. Complete an On-Page SEO Inspection

You checked your content; now it’s time to review your pages for on-page SEO. On-page SEO inspection includes evaluating your content for the keywords most relevant to your business. Each page should have a purpose and include the keywords users are most likely to search for when looking for your service. It also means using valuable keywords that customers are likely to search when looking for an SEO company.

On-page SEO inspection also includes checking your page’s meta descriptions and title tags. Meta descriptions are small pieces of content that appear under your search result. A title tag is a code that lets you add a title to different web pages. Both are important in letting Google know what your website is about and what information they can find by visiting your website. Meta descriptions should include the keywords you’re targeting for each page. Your title tag should briefly and accurately describe the title of your page.

8. Check Your Domain’s Authority

Domain authority is your SEO score. The higher the domain authority, the more likely your website will rank for targeted keywords. Domain authority ranges from 0-100, and knowing what yours is, is important in understanding how to increase your score. Link building is one of the best ways to improve your domain authority. Businesses can increase their domain authority by link building with websites with higher domain authority.

Domain authority is a measurement that Moz originally invented. You can use the Moz toolbox to check your current domain authority while also identifying ways to improve your current score.

9. Review Your SEO Company’s Organic Traffic

Another important part of an SEO audit is reviewing your organic traffic and identifying the search terms that lead customers to your website. Your organic traffic refers to people who visit your website organically or search via keywords. By analyzing your organic traffic, you can get a good idea of what search terms people use. You can also use tools like SEMrush to find out what similar keywords users are searching for but aren’t currently finding within your content.

10. Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Learning about your competitors can provide you with an abundance of useful information. Many SEO tools, including SEMrush and SpyFu, allow you to audit your website’s competitors. Competitive analysis can help you learn more about the type of content, the keywords, and the link-building strategies that your direct competitors are using, so you know how much work you need to do to increase your rankings.

These steps to an effective auditing process can help you speed up the time it takes to audit your SEO company website. Search engine optimization marketing companies are often focused on increasing their clients’ rankings, so having a thorough process in place can ensure you’re able to uncover key ranking details about your own SEO company.

The 10 Most Effective Ways to Audit Your Current SEO Company | Best SEO Podcast – Houston, TX