SEO audit process
Purpose of seo is to drive organic traffic to your website.
SEO procedure as stated by John Tawadros is " inherently iterative ", which means it is the process to be carried out again after a given interval of time. SEO is a long term commitment that requires strategy, planning and implementation to achieve success.
No don’t get intimidated, it in reality if carried out effectively is very simple.
The SEO techniques for optimising your website can be channelled in terms of three primary processes starting right from preaudit for your new website/business to monthly reports and then reaudits. Activities involved in these processes are described below.
PREAUDIT
Mongering a new business/product is often the most crucial and expensive step a company has to confront with. For SEO agency, this means to start catering the objectives and goals of their respective clients and get complete understanding of the company.
So before starting any Search Engine Optimisation , first of all go for pre-auditing a new website or an old one, that you are considering to execute your SEO strategies on.
Basic steps that needs to be considered while doing preaudit are
a. Project Checklist
A checklist should provide you with the information as to what is holding back your websites organic performance. General summary of the steps to be carried out at this stage:
Website account setup and Benchmarking : Set up your sites account with the tools that you find useful for tracking and valuating your set to set process of SEO as per the requirements. These tools could be Google Analytics, SEO profiler, SEO moz, Clicky, KISSmetrics, Piwik, Screaming Frog and Google Webmaster (to keep cover over security issues,crawl errors, index issues and more).
301 redirection : When a website address is changed to new address, then you will enforce 301 redirect from the old URL to new one. You can make use of Redirect Checker or other such tool to ensure that all of your websites redirects are Search Engine friendly.
Check canonical issues : Canonicalization in SEO is quite similar to 301 redirect, except here instead of redirecting you’re stating that multiple webpages are one and same. So to make sure you are not having any issues, check for http:// and https:// along with www. and non www. versions of your website. Also, verify the duplicate content in index on other sites. You can use Copyscape tool for this. Screaming Frog tool can also is used to manipulate this issue.
Mobile Friendliness : Do a mobile search for your key brand and landing pages to find out whether your website or landing page has a mobile friendly design. You can make use of Mobile-Friendly Test tool to get this information.
Robots.txt : Robots.txt is an important part of SEO which defines the web pages which need to be crawled and indexed by search engine bots and which do not. Check whether any crucial site has not been blocked by mistake and off-course, most important see that robots.txt file exists.
Sitemap.xml : Sitemap.xml contains list of necessary website pages that the website owner wants to be crawled by search engines. Verify that this file exists, if not then create one XML sitemap and submit it to webmaster tools and make sure it contains the names of all the sites that are to be indexed by search crawlers neatly structured (Look for domain.com/sitemap.xml).
SEO friendly URL : Always go for outright and descriptive URL names. You can use seositecheckup to find out if your website URL is SEO friendly or not.
W3C Validation : It is always good and also recommended to keep your website clean and error prone, so that users are at ease to approach your website. For this I would recommend you to use The W3C Markup Validation Service. This tools can check for markup validity of your html, xhtml and such web documents.
Site speed : If your site is too slow to load , then it won’t probably hold users for longer. Thus see to it that the pageload time is minimal. Employ the use of Pingdom tool to find out your page load time. Make use of optimized photos, documents and videos as much as possible.
Broken Links : Broken link are the website links that no longer exists, this may lead to the lose of valuable customers. The reason for this might be wrong URL entered or 404 error. Hence do a thorough check (you can use the tool Online Broken Link Checker) to validate whether there are any broken links in your website.
Inbound links / Domain : Often you use inbound links in your articles to send users to other relevant content/pages of your website. Thus it is necessary that these inbound links are working correctly and are error free. You can use inbound links checker tools like webseoanalytics and ahrefs to study these links.
Insights Pagespeed : Use PageSpeed Insights Tool to scrutinize and optimize the ways to make your site faster and more mobile-friendly.
Dmoz Listing : Dmoz is an open content directory of world wide web links. Try to get listed in Dmoz by submitting your site, while keeping the content of your website as original as possible.
b.Website audit
Website audit is analysing and studying how your website is performing and what’s its ranking among its competitors, before its optimisation is performed. You can use Website Grader powered by Hubspot to find out about this data. Make sure you save these data for future reference and comparison.
c. Keyword Planner
Keywords are generally classified as Generic, Long Tail, Short Tail, Medium Tail. Seek to endure primary keyword as much as possible, along with alternate variations of that keyword. How do you choose keywords? Use Google Keyword Planner to analyse and estimate how those keywords performs from search history.
d. Keyword Baseline
Baseline reports keeps track of client’s keywords and how they rank over time and effect your website. Do the following keywords usage analysis to examine how keywords ranks :
- 1 to 5 Keywords :- For first month try using already ranked keywords purely.
- 6 to 10 Keywords :- In next month add more indexed, positioned and location keywords.
- 11 to 15 Keywords :- Then on the third month tot up Long Tail keywords.
- 16 to 20 Keywords :- This is the most important step carried out in the fourth month where you append general keywords.
e. On-page / Content report
Review content headlines to keep them more engaging. Use Google Trends to stay updated with the content similar to your website. Use different types of content in your websites varying from text to videos to photos on infographics.
NOTE : It is encouraged to use Latent Semantic Indexing(LSI) (search query suggestions shown at the bottom of the search page as “searches related to”) .Note down those LSI and make use of them in your website
First thing Search Engine looks for is Title tag.
Right unique title tag for every page and make proper use of keywords and phrases in your meta description. Keep in mind not to repeat the same keyword again and again. Include at least one image in your content.
f. Link Building
Search for Competitors link profile and see from where they are obtaining their links along with other link providing chances. In this way you can create relevant backlinks.
To seek the competitors backlinks, you can look-up to SEO Profiler tool. Take part in forum discussions and answer the questions related to your business.
That my friends is the sum-up of SEO Preaudit. But keep in mind that these are just few basic suggestions for search engine optimisation.
Preaudit is done only once for new website of a new client and then monthly audits are carried out for existing client’s websites to generate monthly reports. Reaudit which is quite similar to preaudit except for one step( i.e, website account step-up stage) is performed twice or thrice a year.
From the above information we might conclude that SEO audit is needed and necessary to obtain long term prosperity of our website.
Now moving further we’ll see what all factors constitute the monthly audit reports which I will explicate in my next blog. So, don’t miss it.
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