How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024 (Best 21 Steps)

How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024 – Performing a comprehensive SEO audit is an essential task for any website looking to optimize its online presence. A thorough SEO audit can help identify areas of improvement and opportunities to increase your site’s visibility in search engine results.

However, conducting a complete SEO audit might seem like a daunting task with its many steps and technical considerations.

That’s why we’ve prepared this detailed guide that breaks down the process into 21 manageable steps.

By the end of this post, you’ll have a clear understanding of what a thorough SEO audit entails, the importance of conducting one, and how it can enhance your website’s performance.

Steps For Comprehensive SEO Audit:

Plan Your Audit – Determine focus, timeframe, goals, and resources needed.

The first step in planning your audit is to determine the focus. Are you auditing a specific department or the whole organization? Focus on areas that have been problematic in the past or those with the highest risk. Next, establish your timeframe. Depending on the scope, an audit could take a week to several months, so set a realistic schedule early. 

Set clear, achievable goals for what you hope to accomplish with the audit. This could range from improving operational efficiency, ensuring compliance with specific standards, or identifying potential risk areas.

Lastly, make sure you have the right resources. This project requires a competent team, a sufficient budget, and the necessary auditing tools. Remember, the audit’s goal is to bring value to the organization, so it’s worth investing in the right resources to do the job effectively.

Research Your Site – Analyze architecture, URLs, technical issues, and metadata.

In the research phase, begin with analyzing your site architecture. Identify how your site’s pages are interconnected and if the navigation is intuitive for users. Look for broken or ineffective internal links that disrupt the user experience or hinder SEO. 

Next, scrutinize the URLs of your site. Good URLs should be concise, meaningful, and accessible from unnecessary parameters. They should also follow a consistent structure that reflects your site’s architecture.

Moving on to technical issues, run a comprehensive site crawl to detect any possible errors. This could include 404 errors, server errors, or problems with your site’s responsiveness on different devices. Also, check the loading speed of your site, as it significantly impacts user experience and search engine ranking.

Finally, examine your site’s metadata. This includes meta titles, descriptions, and keywords for each page. Ensure that they are optimized for search engines, accurately reflect the page’s content, and are enticing enough for users to click through. Regular audits of your site’s metadata help maintain its relevancy and increase its visibility on search engine results pages.

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On-Page SEO Checklist – Optimize titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal links

When optimizing your site’s on-page elements, start with the titles. They should be compelling, include your focus keywords, and be under 60 characters to ensure complete visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). Moving on to meta descriptions, though they don’t directly contribute to SEO, they influence click-through rates. Write unique, relevant descriptions for each page, incorporating keywords naturally. Limit them to 160 characters for complete display on SERPs. 

Next, optimize your site’s headings. The H1 tag should effectively communicate the page’s main topic and include your target keyword. Use H2-H6 tags for subheadings, which should be logically organized and provide a clear structure for your content. 

Internal linking is another crucial element of on-page SEO. Links to other pages on your site can guide visitors to more relevant content, increasing the time they spend on your site. Use descriptive anchor text for these links, and make sure it provides a clear idea of the linked page’s content. Be careful to use internal links sparingly, as excessive linking can look spammy and potentially harm user experience and SEO. (How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024)

By optimizing these on-page elements, you can improve your site’s visibility and user experience and ultimately drive more traffic to your site. Regular review and updates to these elements are necessary for maintaining their effectiveness in the ever-changing digital landscape. Overall, a comprehensive on-page SEO strategy is crucial for the success of your website. 

Content Audit – Identify topics, gaps, and opportunities to expand or refresh pages

A content audit involves an in-depth examination of all the content on your website. Begin by identifying the key topics that your site covers. It’s essential to clearly understand your core topics to ensure that your content aligns with your organization’s goals and audience’s interests. 

Next, identify any gaps in your content. This could be a topic that you need to cover sufficiently or at all. Analyzing your competitors’ content can be a helpful way to identify such gaps. 

Once you’ve identified potential gaps, assess opportunities to expand existing pages or refresh outdated ones. This could mean adding more detailed information, incorporating relevant keywords, updating statistics, or enhancing the overall readability of your content. 

Refreshing your content provides value to your audience and signals to search engines that your site is actively maintained, which can positively influence your SEO performance. 

Remember, a content audit isn’t a one-time event – it should be conducted regularly to ensure your content remains relevant and effective in achieving your SEO goals.

Site Speed Analysis – Check page speed, page weight, number of requests

Site speed significantly impacts user experience and search engine ranking, making it a critical aspect of SEO. Begin by checking your page speed, the time it takes for your site to display a specific page’s content fully. Various tools, such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights, provide a detailed analysis of your page’s loading speed and suggestions for improvement. 

Next, assess the page weight, which refers to the total size of a page, including all its elements like images, videos, scripts, etc. A high page weight could slow the loading time, especially for users with slower internet connections. Use optimization techniques like compression, caching, and image optimization to reduce the page weight. 

Finally, check the number of requests a page makes. Every element on a page – script, image, or stylesheet – requires a separate HTTP request, and too many requests can slow down the page. Utilize methods such as minifying and combining files and employing lazy loading for images to reduce the number of requests. Regular site speed analysis ensures an optimal user experience and improves your overall SEO strategy.

Link Analysis – Assess backlink profile and opportunities to build more authority links

Analyzing your backlink profile is a critical aspect of SEO, as inbound links from external websites (backlinks) can significantly impact your site’s search engine ranking. Start by comprehensively reviewing your existing backlinks using tools like Google’s Search Console or specialized SEO software. Note the quantity and quality of these links and the anchor text used.

Next, evaluate the authority of the sites linking to your website. High-authority backlinks can improve your domain’s authority, boosting your search engine rankings. However, low-quality or spammy links can negatively impact your SEO efforts, so disavowing them promptly is crucial.

Finally, identify opportunities to build more high-authority links. This could involve guest blogging, creating engaging content that others naturally want to link to, or building relationships with other relevant, high-quality websites. Remember, link building should be a strategic, ongoing process focused on quality rather than quantity to ensure the best results for your SEO performance.

Technical SEO Checkup – HTTPS, redirects, crawl ability, rendering issues

The technical health of your website is a crucial element of SEO optimization. Start by checking if your site uses HTTPS, a secure version of HTTP. Google prioritizes sites using HTTPS in search rankings, and it helps protect your user’s data. If your site isn’t using HTTPS, consider switching for improved security and SEO performance. (How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024)

Next, evaluate your website’s redirects. Redirects send users and search engines to a different URL from the one they initially requested and can be used to prevent broken links when pages are moved or deleted. However, excessive or incorrect use of redirects can harm your SEO, so ensure they are implemented correctly.

Crawlability refers to a search engine’s ability to access and crawl content on a page. If a search engine can’t crawl a page, it can’t index it; therefore, it can’t rank in search engine results. Make sure your site is easily navigable with a well-structured sitemap.

Lastly, check for rendering issues on your site. Rendering refers to how a user’s browser displays your website’s resources. If a web page works correctly, it could positively impact user experience and SEO. Use tools like Google’s Fetch and Render to see how search engine bots view your page.

Regular technical SEO checkups will help ensure your website runs smoothly, offers an optimal user experience, and is easily discoverable by search engines.

Local SEO Factors – GMB Listing, Citations, Local Content Relevancy

1. Google My Business (GMB) Listing – A critical first step in local SEO is to claim and verify your local business’ Google My Business (GMB) listing. Maintaining an up-to-date GMB profile can boost your business visibility and credibility on Google Search and Maps. Ensure the listing includes your business name, address, phone number, business hours, and relevant categories. 
2. Citations – Citations refer to instances where your business is mentioned online, particularly in online directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, and TripAdvisor. Consistency is vital when it comes to citations. Ensure your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are accurate and uniform across all listings. Regularly monitoring your citations can help improve local search engine rankings.
3. Local Content Relevancy – Creating locally relevant content can significantly enhance your local SEO efforts. This could be blog posts about local news, events, or resources pertinent to your local audience. Your content should include local keywords, title tags, and meta descriptions. This helps establish local relevance and improves your site’s visibility for local search queries. (How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024)

Remember, optimizing for local SEO is a continuous process that necessitates regular updates and audits. By focusing on these factors, you can enhance your local presence, drive more organic traffic, and build stronger relationships with your local audience.

Voice Search Optimization – Ensure answers are shown for relevant conversational queries.

The rise of smart speakers and voice assistants has made voice search optimization a critical element of SEO strategy. Your content should be structured to answer conversational queries accurately and succinctly for effective voice search optimization. Start by identifying potential questions about your business, product, or services that users might ask voice assistants. These are usually long-tail keywords formatted as complete questions. 

Next, create content that directly answers these questions. Consider formatting this content as a short paragraph or a list, as voice assistants often prefer these structures. Using structured data markup can also help search engines better understand the content and context, increasing the chances for your content to be chosen as a voice search result.

Aim to optimize your content for featured snippets, often the source of voice search results. This requires offering high-quality, authoritative, concise answers to commonly asked questions in your content. Furthermore, ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as many voice searches are conducted on mobile devices. (How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024)

By focusing on these tactics, you will be better positioned to take advantage of the growing trend toward voice search, thereby improving your overall SEO performance.

Schema Markup Implementation – Apply Relevant Schemas to Pages for Rich Results

1. Identify Appropriate Schemas – First and foremost, ascertain which schema markups are most relevant to your website’s content. Websites can utilize a variety of schema types, including ‘Person,’ ‘Organization,’ ‘Product,’ ‘Review,’ ‘Recipe,’ and many more.
2. Schema Markup Tools – Use schema markup tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to generate structured data in a user-friendly way. Choose the schema type, highlight elements on your website, and assign them to data types.
3. Add Markup to Page – Once you’ve generated the schema markup, embed it into the HTML of your webpage. This should be done for each page where relevant information is present. 
4. Test Your Markup – Utilize Google’s Rich Results Test tool to verify your markup. This tool ensures that Google can read your structured data and is error-free.
5. Monitor Performance – After implementing schema markup, regularly gauge its performance using Google Search Console’s Enhancement reports. These reports help monitor how your pages with schema markup perform in search results.

By implementing schema markup, you can provide search engines with more precise information about your content, allowing them to deliver more detailed and rich results to users. This improves your website’s SEO and enhances user experience by providing more informative search results.

Keyword Research Refresh – Validate Target Keywords, Add New Opportunities

1. Validate Existing Keywords – Start by auditing your current keyword strategy. Determine which keywords are driving traffic and conversions and which are not. Use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to gather data on keyword performance. Pay close attention to changes in search volume, competition, ranking, and relevance to your content.
2. Identify New Keyword Opportunities – Regularly updating your keyword list can help capture new market trends and changes in search behavior. Use keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or SEMrush to discover new keywords related to your business. Look for long-tail keywords, which tend to have lower competition and higher conversion rates.
3. Competitor Analysis – Analyze your competitors’ keyword strategies to uncover potential keyword opportunities. Tools like Ahrefs or Moz can provide insights into the keywords your competitors are ranking for.
4. Keyword Optimization – Once you’ve identified new keywords, strategically incorporate them into your content. Remember to optimize title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and the body of the content. 
5. Monitor Keyword Performance – After updating your keyword strategy, continuously track keyword performance to assess the effectiveness of your efforts. Adjust your plan as needed based on this data.

Remember, keyword research is not a one-time task but a continuous process. Regular refreshes can improve your website’s SEO performance, boost organic traffic, and keep your content relevant to your audience’s search queries. (How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024)

Competitive Analysis – Benchmark Ranking, Content & SEO Efforts of Top Competitors

Competitive analysis forms an integral part of an effective SEO strategy. It starts with identifying your key competitors in the digital space. These could be businesses that rank higher for your target keywords, dominate market share, or offer similar products or services. Once you have identified these competitors, analyzing their SEO efforts is crucial. 

This analysis should include evaluating their keyword strategy, ranking, backlink profile, and content quality. Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz comprehensively view your competitors’ SEO performance. These insights help identify opportunities for improvement and enable you to benchmark your performance against them. 

For instance, a competitor ranks better because of a solid local SEO strategy or a more engaging blog section. Additionally, assess your competitors’ user experience, site architecture, and speed, as these factors directly impact SEO. 

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Remember, the goal is not to copy your competitors but to understand their strengths and weaknesses. This understanding can guide your SEO strategy, helping you prioritize efforts yielding the best results. By consistently monitoring your competitors, you can stay ahead of trends, adapt to changes in the market, and ultimately outperform in search rankings.

Analytics Review – Entry & exit pages, goal completions, referral traffic sources

In digital marketing, analytics review is pivotal in shaping successful strategies. Explicitly focusing on entry and exit pages can provide significant insights. Entry pages are the first point of contact between your website and a visitor. Analyzing these can help you understand what initially draws visitors to your website, allowing you to optimize these areas further. Conversely, exit pages are the last pages a visitor views before leaving your website. High exit rates suggest a lack of engagement or issues with your page. (How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024)

Monitoring goal completions is another essential aspect of analytics review. Goals can be defined based on your objectives, such as form submissions, purchases, or subscription sign-ups. Tracking these completions can clearly show how well your website is achieving its intended purpose.

Lastly, understanding your referral traffic sources is vital. Referral traffic informs you about the websites directing visitors to your site. This can help identify which partnerships are most beneficial or where your backlinking efforts are most successful. It also aids in identifying potential new opportunities for collaborations or backlink generation. Remember, a comprehensive analytics review can offer invaluable insights to shape and refine your digital marketing strategy.

Conversion Rate Optimization – Identify & Fix Bottlenecks Hindering Goal Achievement

1. Identify Potential Bottlenecks – Analyze your website data and customer journey to spot potential conversion bottlenecks. These could be a complicated checkout process, slow page load times, poor design, or unclear messaging. Tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, or Crazy Egg can provide insights into where users might drop off.
2. Hypothesize Solutions – Once you’ve identified potential issues, start crafting hypotheses for improving these problem areas. This could involve simplifying navigation, enhancing product descriptions, or improving page load speeds.
3. A/B Testing – Implement these solutions and then conduct A/B or multivariate testing to compare the performance of the new design or process with the old one. Tools like Optimizely or Google Optimize can assist in this testing process.
4. Analyze Results and Implement Changes – Analyze the results of your tests to determine which solution worked best. If a solution has improved the conversion rate, implement it across the site. If not, refine your hypothesis and rerun the test.
5. Monitor Performance – Continuously monitor performance even after making changes. User behavior and market trends can change, so watching these metrics ensures your site remains optimized for conversions. (How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024)

By methodically identifying and fixing bottlenecks, you can enhance your website’s conversion rate, ultimately improving the ROI of your digital marketing efforts. Remember, conversion rate optimization is an ongoing process that requires regular analysis, testing, and refinement.

Monitor Keyword Rankings – Track Progress of Target Terms & Adjust Strategy

1. Track Keyword Rankings – Using SEO tools such as Google Search Console, SEMrush, or Ahrefs, regularly track the search engine rankings of your targeted keywords. This will help you understand whether your SEO efforts result in improved rankings.
2. Analyze Performance – Assess the performance of your keywords over time. Look for any patterns. Are there keywords that are consistently ranking well? Are there others that have seen a significant drop in rankings? This analysis can provide valuable insights into which strategies are working and which might need revision.
3. Adjust Strategy Based on Performance – You may need to adjust your SEO strategy based on your performance analysis. This could involve focusing on different keywords, modifying your content strategy, or improving your on-page and off-page SEO practices.
4. Monitor Competitor Keyword Strategy – Keep an eye on the keywords your competitors are targeting and their ranking in search results. This can help you identify new keyword opportunities and understand what strategies might drive their success.
5. Continually Refine Your Keyword Strategy – SEO and keyword strategy is dynamic. As the market, competition, and search engine algorithms change, it’s essential to constantly review and refine your keyword strategy to maintain or improve your search engine rankings. 

Remember, monitoring and adjusting your keyword strategy based on performance is crucial for successful SEO. It helps you stay competitive, identify new opportunities, and consistently align your efforts with your business goals.

Outreach Campaign Planning – Prioritize links, influencers to contact, assets to share

In the domain of outreach campaign planning, it’s crucial to prioritize your processes effectively. Begin by identifying and prioritizing the high-value links that you want to obtain. These can be determined based on the site’s domain authority, relevance to your industry, and potential for traffic generation.

Next, identify the influencers who can impact your campaign most. When selecting influencers, consider their reach, engagement rate, and the relevance of their audience to your brand. Prioritize contacting influencers with an audience demographic that aligns closely with your target customer base.

Finally, carefully consider the assets you want to share in your outreach campaign. These assets should be high-quality and relevant and attract the attention of your chosen influencers and their audiences. Be it a comprehensive guide, an interesting infographic, or a captivating video, ensure that your assets are compelling and provide value to their recipients. Remember, the success of your outreach campaign hinges on the strength of your planning and prioritization.

Update Sitemap and Robots.txt: Ensure crawlers can access all new and updated content.

Regularly updating your sitemap and Robots.txt file is crucial to ensuring web crawlers can access and index all new and updated content on your website. The sitemap serves as a roadmap of your site for search engines, highlighting the structure of your site and the essential pages that need to be crawled. Consider using a dynamic sitemap that updates automatically as you add new pages to your website.

The Robots.txt file, on the other hand, guides web crawlers on which parts of your site to crawl or not to crawl. It’s essential to ensure that this file doesn’t inadvertently block critical pages or sections of your website from being accessed by search engines. Reviewing and updating this file helps maintain the visibility of your content in search engine results.

In summary, maintaining a current sitemap and Robots.txt file is essential to search engine optimization. This ensures that search engines can access, index, and rank all valuable content, improving your website’s visibility in search engine results.

Accessibility Check: Validate compliance with standards like WCAG

1. Accessibility Check: Validate Compliance with WCAG. Ensuring that your website is accessible to all users, including people with disabilities, is a legal requirement and a mark of good business practice. To check your website’s accessibility, validate your site’s compliance with standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
2. Tools such as WAVE, AXE, or Lighthouse can help you conduct these checks effectively. These tools can identify accessibility issues related to color contrast, image alt text, form labels, heading structure, etc. By addressing these issues, you can ensure your website is accessible to a broader audience and enhance your user experience. Remember, an accessible website is the key to a broader reach and higher customer engagement.

Test Site on Mobile: Optimise for small screens using mobile-first indexing

Optimizing your website for mobile use cannot be overstated, especially in the age of mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing means that Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. This shift towards mobile means it’s crucial to test your site on mobile and ensure it’s fully optimized for smaller screens. 

A mobile-optimized site provides a seamless user experience and contributes significantly to your site’s ranking on search engine result pages. To optimize your site for small screens, focus on responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes, ensure text is readable without zooming, and ensure links and buttons are adequately spaced for easy tapping. Additionally, monitor your site’s speed, as slow loading times can deter users and negatively impact your site’s search engine rankings. 

Remember, in the era of smartphones and tablets, a mobile-optimized website is not an option but a necessity. Putting mobile first lets you reach a wider audience, provide a better user experience, and improve your SEO performance. (How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024)

Measure Impact & Refine – Track ROI from audit using analytics and continue optimizing.

Your SEO strategy’s final but integral stage involves measuring the impact and refining your efforts. This entails tracking the ROI of your SEO audit using analytics tools, which can provide invaluable insights into the performance of your SEO strategies.

These tools help quantify how changes to your website affect your ranking and overall web traffic. Metrics such as organic traffic, page views, bounce rate, and conversion rate can shed light on the success of your SEO efforts.

Moreover, they can identify areas where further optimization is needed. Continual optimization is a pivotal aspect of SEO—you should always aim to improve your strategies based on your collected data. Remember, SEO is not a one-time process but a long-term commitment. Maintaining or improving your search engine rankings requires constant monitoring, adjustment, and refinement.

Ongoing SEO Maintenance – Automate/Schedule Checks to Sustain Improvements Long-Term.

To ensure your SEO strategies’ long-term success, automating and scheduling regular checks is essential. This helps sustain your improvements and provides opportunities for further optimization. SEMrush or Moz can automate keyword tracking, backlink analysis, and technical SEO audits.

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Scheduling regular checks for issues like broken links, slow loading times, and content updates can help maintain the health of your website. It’s also important to regularly analyze your website’s analytics to monitor performance trends and identify areas of opportunity.

Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. By automating and scheduling SEO checks, you maintain your current SEO status and lay the groundwork for continuous improvement and long-term success in your search engine rankings.

Conclusion

Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit may seem daunting initially, but breaking it down into manageable steps makes it quite achievable. By following these 21 steps, you can thoroughly scrutinize every aspect of your SEO, identifying areas of strength and highlighting areas that need improvement. (How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit 2024)

Remember, an SEO audit isn’t a one-time process but a continuous practice that helps keep your website in tune with Google’s ever-evolving algorithms. So, keep these steps bookmarked, and periodically revisit your SEO strategy to ensure it’s always at the top of its game. Happy auditing!

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                                                                                                                              Written By Chandrama Vishwakarma