A Complete Step-By-Step Guide To Perform An SEO Audit For Marketers

Step-by-Step SEO Audit Guide Tailored for Marketers

SEO audit can be a crucial part of your website that a marketer should never ignore. It ensures your website is optimized for users and search engines. When you conduct a detailed SEO audit, it helps identify strengths, opportunities, and weaknesses for improvement. Through this, your website can encounter higher search engine rankings, better conversion rates, and increased traffic. 

In this guide, we will be discussing the steps to perform an SEO audit and when are the times when you should perform an audit.

What Does SEO Audit Mean?

SEO is essential for businesses to thrive in the online world of websites. When you understand how SEO audits work and what your business needs, an SEO audit is an essential step in harnessing SEO’s marketing power. 

Businesses perform SEO audits to identify certain outcomes and build strategies to gain new ones according to the findings. Whether you have a small business or an established one, a content marketing audit is important for every business’s growth strategy. 

An SEO audit can be very critical for a business's marketing and visibility performance. Here are some of the quick benefits of performing an SEO audit.

• Through SEO auditing, you will obviously find SEO weaknesses. 
• If you are a marketer doing your own SEO, you will need to perform an SEO audit to measure the effectiveness of the work done on the site. 
• It will help in tracking the progress of keyword ranking.
• You can also find competitors and identify what keywords they use, strategy, backlinks, and mobile sites. 

How to Perform an SEO Audit for Marketers

Here is a simple guide that marketers can follow to perform a general or quick SEO audit of their website for better marketing.

1. Check If Your Site Is Indexed

Indexing is the process through which search engines explore your website and store it in databases so that whenever a user searches, the website is retrieved. You can type “site:yourdomain.com” in Google search to know whether Google indexes your website. It will show a list of the pages that have been indexed. If you do not see any results, your website might be blocked from indexing.

2. Identify All Content Assets

Once you have your goals set, the next step is to determine the content assets on your website to do a content SEO audit. This will include meta title, description, visual assets, headings, and more. You can use Google Search Console or any third-party tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc, to crawl and index the pages. The gathered data must be organized in a spreadsheet or utilizing a content audit template. 

3. Measure the SEO Performance

Once you have listed all the web content pages, the performance of each website must be evaluated to determine where your content is currently ranked. You can do this by measuring different key performance indicators, some of which are:

• Organic Traffic: This is among the critical metrics that you should measure for SEO success. If your webpage is getting higher organic traffic, this means more conversions. 

• Keyword Rankings: You should check where your content pages rank for their primary keyword. This procedure will help you to identify the current performance of your page. Moreover, you can also determine which ones must be optimized. 

• Backlinks: Having backlinks for your website content helps build authority and trust. It is good for achieving better rankings. Get the backlink data for each of your content pages and determine which ones are performing well and which ones are not.

4. Implement an Action Plan

By now, you should have your goals, determine the content assets, and organize them into a template or a spreadsheet. The next phase will be to review each page manually and choose the right action plan for each content on the page. When it comes to this phase, you have four options to choose from. It includes:

• Keep: If your webpage content fulfills the performance goals as expected, then keep it. 

• Update or Refresh: Change the content when it is not meeting the goals or it is outdated.

• Consolidate: Combine similar content pages into a definitive one.

• Delete or Redirect: Remove the page if it does not have any backlinks, organic traffic, or value.

5. Monitor and Measure Progress

Once the SEO content audits process is fulfilled, the work is not done. This is a continued process that must be done periodically. It is especially if you wish to achieve higher conversions and traffic. You will have to set goals, tweak the content, measure the performance, and see whether it is producing these modifications. For guidance on promotion channels, the best place to advertise a business can also support your marketing goals.

When to Perform an SEO Content Audit?

It is also important to understand when you should perform an SEO content audit. It will help you achieve better results in the long run. The following are the different scenarios where content audit SEO must be performed. 

1. Your Website is New

If you have built a new business website, it is recommended to perform content SEO auditing before you launch it. When you perform an early audit using SEO audit tools, it will ensure consistency and quality. It will also check whether it aligns with your brand objectives. It will enable pinpointing issues such as duplicate pages and thin content before they become bigger problems.

2. Website Redesign and Revamp

Performing an SEO marketing audit before redesigning your site will help you evaluate the existing content. Moreover, it will help you decide which content must be retained, determine content gaps, and figure out which content must be updated to fulfill the newer marketing strategies. You can also get the help of a professional SEO service for website redesigning and revamping if you do not have enough knowledge. 

3. Website CMS Upgrade and Change Structure

If you are planning a site CMS upgrade or changing the website’s structure, a content SEO audit will help you understand the current situation of your site’s content within the CMS. You can identify the potential URL changes and how the content will be migrated into the next CMS and structure. When you follow an SEO audit guide, it can be beneficial during this phase. After the upgrade process, it is important to ensure that all content has been migrated with no issues.

4. Rewriting and Refreshing the Content

Website content over time can lose its relevance and become out-of-date whenever the info gets updated, user intent evolves, or search engine algorithms change. In such scenarios, the content has to be determined and updated to keep it competitive. 

Conclusion

Performing an SEO audit is a crucial process to enhance website rankings, improve user experience, and drive organic traffic. When you use the right tools and follow a structured approach, you can determine and fix SEO issues effectively. In this way, it will keep your website competitive in search rankings. Make sure to perform the SEO audit using the right steps. Moreover, you should also know the times when your website would need an SEO audit for better performance and updates.