How To Perform An SEO Audit For Beginners

So, you want to know how to perform an SEO audit for beginners? It’s a good idea to take the time to learn how these audits work. While there are many different types of audits out there, in this article I will give you some guidelines for setting up one yourself. You can use this information as a guide or add it to your own processes if it helps you move forward with other steps in your process!

Understand What An SEO Audit Is?

An SEO audit is a comprehensive review of your website’s SEO performance. It will help you understand what needs to be fixed, and how much time and money it will take to do so.

The purpose of an SEO audit is to determine whether there are any problems with your current online presence so that they can be addressed before they become major issues down the road. This means that if any issues are found during this process, they can be fixed as soon as possible—but not only that: this type of professional analysis helps ensure that any future issues won’t arise because they were missed in previous audits!

There are several different types of audits available out there today:

Figure Out What Kind Of SEO Audit You Need

• If your website is struggling to rank, and you’ve tried the usual tactics like improving content quality and user experience but still aren’t seeing results, then an SEO audit may be the solution for you.

• An SEO audit can help identify problems with your site’s ranking in search engines so that they can be fixed before they cause further issues down the line.

• An effective audit should also highlight opportunities for improvement—for example, if there are certain keywords that aren’t being targeted or used in a way that allows them to rank well on page one of Google or other search engines (such as Bing).

Set Your SEO Goals

Before you can start to optimize your website, it’s important that you set clear goals for how you want them to perform. Your goals should:

• Define your business objectives. What do you want from this website? Are there certain products or services that are relevant to the target audience, and how can they be made more accessible?

• Define your target audience. Who will be visiting this site and why should they care about what’s on offer there? What types of content are most likely to appeal to them (i.e., blog posts vs infographics)? What types of data will help them make better decisions about buying from or using our company in some way (for example, an e-book with tips on how customers can save money at restaurants).

Assess Your Current Traffic And Content

You’re going to want to start by assessing your current traffic and content.

• Understand Your Traffic & Content: The first thing you need to do is take a look at what kind of traffic and content (or lack thereof) you currently have on your site. To find this out, use Google Analytics or another tool that tracks various metrics about how users are interacting with the website. This information can then be used as a baseline for determining whether there are any problems with either one or both categories listed above.

• Find Out What Kind of Traffic You’re Getting: Once you have an idea of what kind of data exists within these categories, it’s time to dig deeper into each area so that we can figure out exactly why things aren’t working as well as they could be doing so far!

Perform A Competitive Analysis

The first step in performing an SEO audit for beginners is to find out what your competitors are doing. This can be accomplished by visiting their websites and looking at the content they’re publishing, or by using a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs (which will allow you to see how many backlinks each site has).

After looking at what these sites have published over time, it’s important to understand how they’ve attracted traffic in the past so that you can adjust your own strategy accordingly. You want to know what keywords they rank for, which ones aren’t working well enough because there aren’t many links pointing back towards them; and then use this information when determining which changes need making on your own website.”

Analyze The Technical Elements Of your Website

You should be able to see what’s going on with your site. If it looks like a mess, then you need to figure out why and fix it. This will help improve the user experience of your website, as well as drive more traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.

You’ll also want to know where people are coming from when they visit the site—do people click through from other pages in your blog or do they arrive at the homepage directly? Are there any internal links pointing back toward other sections within the same page? All of these elements are important in determining how well-optimized your content is for SEO purposes (the technical aspects).

Make Sure Your Site Is Crawlable


Now that you’ve completed the first step of your audit, it’s time to check if your site is crawlable.
• To do this, go to www.crawlability.com and enter your URL into the box under “Crawlability Score.” You should see a score between 0 and 100; anything higher than 90 is considered highly interactive and would be great for search engine optimization purposes (if you want more information on why this is important, read our article on ranking factors).

• If there are any issues with your site being crawlable (for example missing robots meta tag), contact someone who can help with fixing these issues before they become too big of an issue!

Evaluate Your Site’s Architecture

Website architecture is the layout and structure of a website. It’s important to know how your site will look when it’s viewed by users and what information they can find on it.

There are many types of website architectures, but we’ll focus on three:

• Single page application (SPA) – An SPA has only one page with content, which means that all pages are merged together into one file and served via HTTP requests. This makes for faster-loading pages with no unnecessary code in between them or anything else that slows down loading times. However, this type of architecture isn’t as flexible because it requires all pages to be loaded before any other code can run so you might have issues if you need certain features from another page before loading everything up front like Ajax calls or AJAX requests being made from one location

Identify Unnecessary Code, Such As Thin Content Pages, Broken Links, And Too Many Redirects

• Identify unnecessary code, such as thin content pages, broken links, and too many redirects.

• These are the most common issues that can affect your website’s rankings in Google’s search results.

• You should be able to identify these problems on your own by inspecting each page individually and looking for red flags like:

• Too much content per page – If there is too much text on a single web page (more than 10% of total words), then this may affect rankings because users prefer shorter content over long ones.

• Broken links – If you have a lot of broken links within your site, it could mean that visitors aren’t able to find what they’re looking for when they click on those links because they don’t exist anymore (or were never created). This can also lead back to thin content problems mentioned above since users won’t be able to go anywhere else until they fix these issues first!

Examine Your Web Page Load Speed

Your web page load speed is the time it takes for your site to display a complete, fully functional version of itself to users. The faster your website loads and the longer it stays on its screens, the better chance you have at ranking higher in search engines.

To measure how fast or slow your site is loading:

• Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Chrome Extension (https://www.google.com/webmastercentral/tools/insights) or WebPageTest (https://pagetestcdnhostedapkdownloadscom/)

• To run WebPageTest manually, download WP Test Free from https://www.webpagetestappsitecom/. Once installed open up WP Test Free then click “Start Test” in order for it to begin running tests against different websites within its database collection; this takes about 30 minutes depending on whether or not there are any errors with them being detected during testing (which would raise suspicion). optimization techniques etcetera…

Verify Your XML Sitemap

If you want to be sure that your website is being crawled by search engines, you should create an XML Sitemap. This will allow the search engines to crawl your site and find all of the pages on it.

To create an XML sitemap for your website:

• Go to Google Search Console and click on “Crawl” in the navigation bar at the top of the page under “My Sites”.

2a) If there are no errors in Google’s indexing status report (shown here), then there’s nothing else necessary right now—you’re ready! Just click Save Changes when prompted; this will store all URLs indexed by Google into one place so they won’t get lost if someone else updates them later on down the line without knowing about this process beforehand.”

Analyze Your Website’s Backlinks

Backlinks are a good indication of how well your site is doing. They can be used to improve your SEO and they can help you determine if you need to make changes to your website.

There are two types of backlinks: dofollow and nofollow. Dofollow links point directly to the page on which they appear, so when someone clicks on them, their browser will take them straight there without any other navigation required (like clicking through multiple pages). On the other hand, Nofollow links do not lead directly to an existing page on another site; instead, they’ll send users somewhere else entirely–usually off-site–and require users’ browsers first to go through multiple hoops before arriving at their destination.[3]

You should carefully analyze all external sources that link back to your site (including directories like Google Directory or Bing Webmaster Tools), both for their quantity as well as quality.

Conclusion

If you’re not sure how to do an audit, there are several tools that can help. You can use Moz’s SEO Audit Tool and SEMRush to analyze your site. This will show you any errors or issues on your site that might be causing problems for users, like broken links or 404 errors. I recommend using this kind of tool every few months so that you don’t forget about them when it comes time for another audit!

Written By
Sahil Goyal

Sahil Goyal is a Digital Marketer, Trainer, Public Speaker, Growth hacker, and Consultant. I have experience in building and implementing strategies focused on Performance Marketing, User acquisition & retention, Budget planning & execution, App store optimization, and Media buying largely for small to medium-sized businesses. I have previously worked in well-known B2B and B2C startups.