An SEO audit will help you assess your site’s performance. It will identify your strengths and weaknesses and allow you to develop a plan for improvement.
An SEO audit will also keep you up to date with industry trends and best practices. It will help you understand what your competitors are doing, so you can outperform them.
1. Analyze Your Competitors
A professional SEO audit is a close, detailed review of your website to determine how well it plays with search engines. It identifies your strengths and weaknesses compared to competitors by examining on-page factors (content, keywords, backlinks) as well as off-page elements (social signals).
To conduct an SEO audit, you’ll need a variety of tools to analyze your competitors’ SEO strategies, including Google Search Console, Google Analytics, page speed tools like GTMetrix and Google’s PageSpeed Insights, industry trends, and more. You’ll also need a professional SEO to help you identify technical issues and get them fixed.
SEO audits are essential for every business with an online presence and can give you a leg up on the competition. Whether you’re an agency or a business owner, a professional SEO audit can provide valuable insights into your competitors and help you improve your SEO strategy. Learn more about the importance of conducting regular SEO audits here.
2. Determine Your Competitors’ SEO Strategy
To make the most of an SEO audit, it’s important to understand your clients’ primary competitors. This will guide you in analyzing their content, keyword, and backlink strategy. You can use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to do this research.
You’ll also want to look at your competitors’ title tags and meta descriptions during your competitor analysis. These are what search engines display in their results and can help users decide which site to visit. Optimizing these with keywords can help boost your page rankings.
You’ll also need to take into account the overall structure and architecture of your competitors’ websites. This can include their logical grouping of pages, use of taxonomy and navigation, and the number of “do-follow” links (which tell Google’s search crawlers to continue following the link) on each page. A thorough SEO audit will uncover all these aspects of your competitors’ websites, allowing you to take note of what they are doing right and implement best practices on your own website.
3. Analyze Your Competitors’ Content
The content of your competitors’ websites should be an important part of your SEO strategy. This includes their blogs, website architecture, and the keywords they’re ranking for. You can use tools like Ahrefs or Moz’s Backlink Explorer to determine where your competitors are getting their links from and to identify any low-quality or irrelevant links.
During your audit, it’s also important to check your competitors’ titles and meta descriptions. These appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) and give users and search engines context about the page’s topic. The optimum description length has fluctuated over the years, but is typically around 160 characters.
A professional SEO audit can help you improve your organic search rankings, decrease your need for paid advertising, and avoid common SEO pitfalls that damage search engine rankings. To ensure you’re making the most of your audit, it’s best to partner with a qualified and experienced SEO agency. They’ll be able to provide a thorough and comprehensive analysis of your competition and conduct a thorough technical SEO audit.
4. Analyze Your Competitors’ Links
A good SEO audit includes a comprehensive backlink analysis. This enables you to discover who is linking to your competitors and also provides you with opportunities for link-building. You can use tools like Ahrefs or Moz to analyze your competitors’ links.
This can help you identify opportunities to boost your own website’s performance by optimizing its title tags and meta descriptions. These provide context to search engines about what the page is about and can help rank your site in the SERPs. Using keyword-rich titles and meta descriptions will help boost your performance.
A thorough SEO audit takes time and effort. While you can perform a basic SEO audit yourself, it is often best to have an experienced professional audit your website. This will ensure that you get accurate results and recommendations that ladder up to your overall business objectives. For example, an expert can assess the impact that a slow-loading page would have on your site’s performance and identify ways to improve it.