How To Complete An SEO Audit For Your Sites

Completing an SEO audit is no longer a task for experts only. It is not a simple undertaking; but thanks to a myriad of free tools and information available on the subject, practically any of us can conduct an SEO audit of our websites.

How To Complete An SEO Audit For Your Sites

Along with high cpc keywords and seo tips and most importantly methods to increase page rank,It is important to know the reasons for conducting an audit before beginning. Many believe the sole purpose of an SEO audit is to reveal problems with the website. However, this is not entirely true. The purpose of an SEO audit is to find issues that need correcting in order to boost search engine rankings. Remember, “SEO=Search Engine Optimization”. This is the goal.

As with any project, a plan should be formalized first. Conducting an SEO audit is a large and in depth project. Just “diving in” without a plan is unwise. Define your objectives. Identify what you want to learn from the audit. Then, approachitfrom a variety of angles in order to achieve sufficient data for analysis.

There are several types of SEO audits. Select the best audit type for you, based on what you want to learn about your website. You may want to conduct more than one. Some businesses conduct one large SEO audit comprised of all the different types available, which are:

• The Competition Audit
• The Semantic Audit
• The Social Media Audit
• The Technical Audit

After you have selected an audit, follow these three steps to conduct it:

1. List and prioritize the most important factors you want to examine.
2. Use the appropriate tools to uncover any existing problem areas.
3. Determine the changes required to correct the problems.

Now that you know the steps to follow, let’s focus on each separately. We will use the competition audit for an example.

The Competition Audit

Knowing your competition is key if your goal is to achieve high search engine rankings. Your competitors are the businesses with websites ranking highly for the keywords you are using. When you analyze your competitors, you will be able to determine whether or not you have the ability to outrank them. If you find that your competition is too great, you may decide to move to a local market or to another niche altogether. However, if you find that you are a viable competitor, you must learn which improvements to make in order to gain rank in the SERPs.

#1 List and Prioritize the Most Important Factors

The first step is listing and prioritizing the most important factors you want to analyze. What exactly are these factors? They are the aspects of your competition’s website that affect its performance. This list may include:

• overall strength
• influence
• trustworthiness
• most shared and/or liked content
• number of social shares
• link quality
• link source

Determining your competition’s overall strength should be your first objective. Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) are reliable indicators of why pages rank higher in search results.

Next, determine how influential and trustworthy your competitors’ websites are. Find out your competitor’s most shared and/or liked content and the number of social shares they receive.

What about their links? Are they more valuable than yours? Are they well deserved? Where did they originate?

All of this information and more can be discovered by using the appropriate tools.

#2 Use the Appropriate Tools

Below is a list of useful competitive audit tools and the tasks for which they are useful.

• Link Detective — shows where links originate
• Majestic SEO — checks link profiles and anchor text distribution
• Open Site Explorer — reveals useful information about website links
• SEMrush — extracts all keywords a site ranks for
• Social Crawlitics — crawls a website and retrieves the number of social shares per page

Use the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) metrics in Open Site Explorer (OSE) to retrieve information about your competition’s overall strength and why their pages rank higher in search results.

Use Majestic SEO to determine a website’s influence (Citation Flow) and trustworthiness (Trust Flow) relative to other sites which rank well for trustworthiness.

Use Social Crawlitics to find out your competitor’s most shared and/or liked content. Social Crawlitics can crawl a website and display the number of social shares per page.

Use Open Site Explorer (OSE) to get information about your competitor’s links. Input the link data from OSE into Link Detective to get even more link data.

Use SEMrush or an anchor text retrieval from Open Site Explorer to determine the keywords the competition is targeting.

#3 Determine the Required Changes

Once you have retrieved all the desired information about your competition, you need to understand how and why their websites scored higher than yours. Analyze your strategies in relation to theirs to determine what they do differently. Figure out where your website is weaker and fix it. Implement the necessary changes to give your website the edge. An excellent strategy for improving your search engine rankings is to deploy tactics similar to those being used successfully by the competition

Repeat these steps to conduct any type of SEO audit whenever you deem necessary to keep your website at the head of the ranks.

Written by Diane Hale. She is a writer and a freelancer. She loves reading, travelling and shopping. 

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