SEO Audit: How does this work and why is it important?

A few weeks ago we published a blog about search engine optimization ( SEO ). We explained exactly what this term means and gave a few useful tips for improving your content & SEO performance.

This week we go into a little more depth. We stay in the SEO theme, but give you tips about an important part of search engine optimization: performing an SEO audit.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is an investigation into the current performance of a website in the field of SEO. Conducting such an audit helps you map out what is going well and what is not. This naturally results in a nice list of action points that can give your site a good boost.

A few years ago it was still fairly easy to optimize a website for SEO. By simply mentioning the word often, it was already reasonable to be found on this.

Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Google is getting smarter and smarter and taking more and more details into account when crawling and indexing online content. According to BackLinko, there are now as many as 200 factors that are included in this ranking process. Think of small details in the structure and layout of the text, the placement of links, and the amount and placement of certain words.

The better you get at finding and improving all these details, the more often your website will be viewed.

*For convenience, we’re talking about Google in this blog. However, Google is not the only search engine. Pages like Bing and Yahoo also crawl the internet and rank your website higher if your website is correctly and completely laid out.

Why an SEO audit?

As Neil Patel beautifully describes in his blog about the SEO audit: SEO is like an online race.

Have you placed a text that scores well and meets all the requirements of Google? It may just be that within a few months everything will be different. An (often unnoticed) internal or external problem can have a major effect on the score.

For example:

• Google’s algorithm changes
• The competitor is suddenly doing better than you
• A link or other element in your text breaks down

Danger threatens on all sides and you really have to stay alert to keep winning the race. You stay alert by means of a regular SEO audit.

The parts of an SEO audit

The modern SEO audit actually consists of a lot of small steps and checks. However, in general, these can be divided into three parts.

1. The technical operation of a page

Sometimes certain parts of your website don’t work properly without you being aware of this. After all, there is so much content on your pages that it is difficult to manually keep track of whether all links are working, whether all images still work and whether all text is still displayed properly.

The technical audit solves this problem for you by automatically checking all important parts of your website. The minor errors that emerge from the audit are often easy to fix and worth investing some time in. An error-free website is seen by Google as more reliable and of higher quality.

2. SEO elements on the website

The on-page analysis consists of the real SEO aspects of the website. So not so much mistakes, but more elements that are used in a certain way. Think of the structure and layout of the website and of the individual pages

Questions that are answered during this part of the audit are:

1. Are you using the right headlines?
2. How many times does a website visitor have to click to land on a page?
3. Is the text scannable?
4. Which internal links do your texts contain?
5. Are you using enough keywords?
6. Are there no duplicate texts on your website?

3. SEO elements outside the website (backlinks)

Finally, elements outside a website ( backlinks ) also influence SEO. For example, as we described in our previous blog, external links have a strong influence on the findability of a website.

Which websites link to yours? Every link from a good-quality website can also give your website a big boost.

An SEO audit: how do you approach this?

Because there are so many aspects to the success of SEO, it is almost impossible to perform an audit manually. And luckily you don’t have to. There are dozens of handy tools that analyze your website for little money or even completely free. This often only takes a few minutes and provides a large amount of information, especially about the technical functioning of a page.

We, therefore, recommend that you perform the above three parts of the SEO audit automatically.

An automatic SEO audit with an online tool

By using an SEO tool, you can collect enough information about both the technical aspects and the SEO aspects on and outside your website.

Most tools simply ask you to enter your website, after which they automatically print a report for you. Including technical issues, points for improvement on the website, and a backlink report.

When you type ‘SEO audit tool’ on Google, you will come across a long list of possibilities.

Most tools do their job well, but the following three are perhaps the most well-known options:

• SEMrush
• MOZ SEO
• Neil Patel SEO Analyzer

All three tools are good and comparable in many ways. However, at outreach way we use SEMrush.

SEMrush not only offers an SEO audit, but also all other SEO functionalities that we need. So for us a nice all-in-one package. However, Moz and Neil Patel’s tools are also worth a try. So it’s a personal choice.

SEMrush SEO audit

Because we use SEMrush ourselves, we will briefly show you what the SEMrush SEO audit looks like.

For a full audit, we use two features of SEMrush:

1. The technical site audit

The technical SEO audit is perhaps the most important and comprehensive check. By entering your website in the SEMrush tool, you will see a report that includes:

• An overall score for your on-site SEO (referred to as site health by SEMrush )
• Technical errors on the website
• Crawlability (how crawlable is the website for Google)
• Crawl depth (how many clicks does a visitor need to reach certain pages)
• The loading speed of your scanned pages
• The check results in useful action point that you can carry out right away.

For example:

• Fixing links that don’t work
• Reduce the number of clicks for the website visitor to reach important pages
• Make heavy pages load faster

The above check can be performed for free, but under the paid subscription your results are more extensive and you can scan your entire website instead of a limited number of pages.

2. The backlink check

To also include the SEO outside your website in the audit, we recommend that you also do a backlink check. The more strong backlinks you have, the better your SEO performance.

In a backlink report, you can see who is linking to your website (and who is not), what is most often linked to, and which links to your website have been removed recently.

Converting the results into action points takes some thinking, but is worth it. For example, based on the results you can:

• Get inspiration for websites you can ask for a backlink
• Investigating why certain backlinks were removed
• Analyzing which type of content gets a lot of links, to be able to create more of it

An SEO audit every few months

To (continue to) win the SEO race, a regular audit is necessary. Many companies do an audit between 2 and 4 times a year, but we recommend that you do this at least four times a year. After all, it just happened and can yield useful action points.

The FREE SEO audit

Because this month is all about SEO for us, we temporarily offer you a free technical SEO audit.

What does this mean?

Through our SEMrush subscription, we can also help other companies improve their SEO. This way we can analyze your entire website for technical errors and points for improvement, instead of just a limited part (which you will see in the case of a free check).

Quickly leave your details in the form at the top of this blog and you will receive your extensive audit immediately. Totally free. And if you have any questions about this, feel free to send us an email. We would be happy to discuss the report with you (without any obligation, of course).