Doing a Website SEO Audit is essential for all those who want to do a deep web analysis and determine the things to correct in order to improve your organic positioning in Google and thus be able to scale positions in the SERP’s.

In this tutorial, we will see, not only how to do an SEO audit but also the Website SEO tools that you can use to perform them.

Also (at the end of the post) you can download a free SEO audit template.

So let’s start.

Let’s start with the basics …

What is an SEO audit and what is the objective of making one?

In the first paragraph, we talked a little about the objective of SEO audits, that is, to improve a certain web page by thoroughly analyzing each of its elements.

Thanks to a good SEO audit we can know:

• What are our weak points?
• What things we must correct from our website
• What elements work well and we must keep in that state.

Therefore, an audit is an internal analysis of a website, but it is also an external analysis because all the parties involved in SEO, in general, are involved.

Honestly, in new sites, SEO audits can be quite useless.

However, these services can be very useful for companies that want to position themselves better. Not only useful but also coveted.

It will depend a lot on the volume of the web, but sometimes it can take a hard job.

Many things to evaluate and many conclusions to take.

That is why in this article I will try to give you all the important points that you have to recognize to perform an SEO audit perfectly.

Our objective

The objective of Website SEO audits & Website SEO Stats is to be able to find what are the SEO on-page and SEO-off-page elements that are hindering the organic growth of our website.

In turn, this will not only allow us to correct these errors but we can also find a solution to them.

The SEO OnPage is what we find internally within our website and the SEO Off Page is that we analyze outside of it.

In audits, it is important to keep in mind that these two aspects exist.

As I told you, at the end of the post you will find that you can download a free Website SEO Audit template. In it you will find points that refer to the external audit and other points that refer to the internal audit.

How to do an SEO audit? [Step by Step]

Before starting to list you one by one all the steps you have to follow to perform these audits I need to confess something.

This is an article based on experience and the use of tools (both free and paid).

You can perfectly find free tools to help you perform these audits (and if I know them I will name them throughout the post).

These are the steps I follow to perform a professional SEO audit, I hope they help you and answer your most important question:

Let’s go there!

Indexing of the website

First things first, what pages of my website appear in Google results?

For that, we must go to Google and write in the search engine: «site: dominioaauditar.com».

Here you can start polling for example:

• If the total results reflect the total content of the web.
• If the SEO Titles and meta descriptions are displayed correctly.
• Errors or elements that should not appear.

If you have access to the Search Console of the website you want to audit you can go to the tab: Google Index – Indexing Status.

This graphic represents how many URLs your website has indexed in Google.

In this case, this site has only 26 pages indexed and published.

SEO titles

One of the most important factors of SEO is its titles.

That is why it is essential to control all the SEO titles of each of the pages that exist within the web.

These titles should be:

SEO optimized

The keyword by which we want to position the particular page should be present in the title.

If it is to the left, better, but I understand perfectly that sometimes you cannot absolutely respect all the rules that SEO imposes on us.

Here we have an ideal example to explain what we mean by optimized for SEO.

In this article on how to create attractive titles for your posts, the keyword I am trying to position is: create titles.

First, it greatly favors the fact of putting it at the beginning of the title.

CTR

Secondly, it is optimized to achieve the highest possible rate or percentage of clicks.

3.Keywords

Keywords are one of the fundamental elements of an SEO strategy.

Therefore, in audits it is very useful to know:

• What keywords are being positioned
• What mistakes are being made
• Wasted SEO Opportunities

If you are doing an internal audit and therefore have access to Search Console, you can go to the search analytics tab, there you can see all the keywords for which your website is being consulted in Google.

If you do not have access to the Webmaster Tools (another old way of saying Google Search Console) and you are performing an external audit you can rely on tools such as Sistrix, SEMRush or Ahrefs.

In my case, I love Ahrefs and I think it’s the best SEO tool in the market.

Inside Ahrefs we look for the domain URL to analyze and we go to the «Top Pages» tab.

In this image, we can see the URLs that are receiving more organic traffic and the keyword by which they receive such traffic.

Meta description

Meta descriptions are overvalued by many and poorly valued by others.

The reality is that they have a certain degree of importance. And as it is something that matters, we must take them into account when doing the analysis.

Maybe the website you want to track has too many URL’s and you’re unable to see all meta descriptions.

For that, I recommend Screaming Frog.

This tool is capable of fully analyzing the website you want to audit and gives you absolutely all the details of what it tracks.

Its price is high, but you can perfectly use the trial version to track web content.

Ideally, meta descriptions have less than 156 characters and also include the SEO keyword by which you want to position the content.

5.Optimization of web content

We have already analyzed SEO titles, meta descriptions, keywords, therefore the only thing missing in this regard is web content.

Is web content optimized? What things can be improved at the SEO level?

This is where you can help your customers the most (if you are a Digital Marketing consultant).

Companies and businesses have a much deeper interest in optimizations and conclusions than in the current state of their website.

That is why we must take advantage of it!

The most direct thing is to do keyword research or keyword search to determine: what keywords I am not positioning and what opportunities I am missing.

Generally, this type of analysis, besides being exhaustive, can be very beneficial. Uploading the positions of the audited website is a priority, that’s why we do the audit!

This would be impossible to achieve if we do not help improve the content that is already indexed on the online site.

Google RankBrain and TrustRank

Google works with an algorithm called Google RankBrain.

This algorithm which is extremely intelligent is able to interpret which results get more clicks than others due to the “attractiveness” of its title and the value of its content.

The Google TrustRank or Google TrustRank which means «Ranking of Trust on the site» is an algorithm that the company manages with the objective of combating spam and with the mission of establishing a certain score for each of the pages.

What is that score for and what does it indicate?

It indicates the degree of confidence that a certain web page has.

Image compression

Screaming Frog also throws data on the loading time and also on the contents that are loaded.

Many times pages do not compress images. This leads to the web taking longer to load and therefore leads to the possibility that your site is worse valued in search engines. It also influences user usability.

WordPress, fortunately, has plugins that allow you to automatically reduce the weight of images within the web.

If you use WordPress, I recommend ShortPixel to not only compress your images:

But by means of its Adaptive Images plugin, the images will be adjusted according to the resolution of each monitor on which the image is loaded. This way you will eliminate, for example, the “Serve scaled images” problem that appears in several tools where you can control your loading speed, as is the case with GTMetrix.

Duplicate content

Internal duplicate content is the amount of text you have repeated on more than one page within your website.

Duplicate external content is the content that you literally repeat word for word on your website and that you have in common with another website that is not your property (or that is).

One of the damage factors and why one may be missing opportunities to rank on Google is that of duplicate content.

Logically, a lot of duplicate content hurts the web

9.Backlinks or incoming links

The famous backlinks or incoming links …

Great topic!

The backlinks are a fundamental leg of SEO to this day.

Thanks to inbound links increase our chances of positioning a page on Google. These links transmit web authority from one site to another.

In this case, we see Ahrefs’ analysis of one of the most important websites in Uruguay, of El País newspaper.

We see that they have 10.3 million links from 18,000 and peak domains. Who could have those numbers …

As you will see on the one hand there are the links and on the other the referring domains, that is, the domains that refer to the newspaper.

10.Site speed

First of all, I want to start by telling you something important.

The loading speed of a site is important, but you should not become obsessed with it.

At the beginning of my adventures in the world of SEO, I thought I should have a 100/100 on Google Page Speed, a Google page that measures and analyzes the loading speed of the site you want. You just have to put the URL.

Honestly, the WPO (Web Performance Optimization) is necessary to include in an SEO audit, but it should not always be an extremely large focus of attention. Unless the web loads badly.

What I mean by this is that many times the loading speed cannot be improved in the blink of an eye, and sometimes it is a struggle that is not worth getting into.

Other times, using servers that give a better upload speed solves most problems in this regard.

How to measure the loading speed and what is the best website to do it?

Many recommend the aforementioned Google Page Speed or GTMetrix.

I like to use Pingdom Tools.

To correctly measure the loading speed I recommend:

• Do the test repeatedly and at different times
• Average charging time