If you hired expert search engine optimization (SEO) services such as those offered by this company, https://www.smartstreetmedia.com/san-jose-seo, one of the services that you are likely to receive would be an SEO audit. One of the most important processes involved when optimizing a website, an SEO audit needs to be conducted on a regular basis to ensure that the site is performing like it is supposed to.
An SEO audit can also uncover problem areas that are causing the website to underperform. Regular audits can therefore ensure that your website is consistently performing well, especially in search engine page results (SERPs). The following are the basic steps involved in the SEO audit process.
Technical Evaluation
Technical evaluation is the act of checking your website’s accessibility and indexability. There’s no point putting up a website if visitors and Google can’t access its pages. Analyzing your website’s accessibility involves checking its XML sitemaps, robot meta tags, robots.txt files, its architecture and so on. Checking for indexability, on the other hand, evaluates how easy it is for Google’s crawlers to access and index your website’s pages. Technical evaluation also analyzes and grades your website’s overall user experience.
Checking for Penalties
Another stage in SEO audit is to check if your website incurred any Google penalties as such adversely affects your page ranking. The auditor should find out when and why your website incurred the penalty and then work to resolve the issues to remove the penalties.
On-page Audit
For on-page auditing, the SEO auditor will check your website’s general content. The auditor will analyze the quality of your content and its relevance to the overall purpose of your website. Among the issues that an on-page audit may turn up include duplicate content and keyword cannibalization, which are common problems among bloggers. If your website’s content is devoid of these and other issues, it will earn the trust of Google’s search engines and reward it accordingly.
Off-page SEO Audit
An off-page SEO audit essentially checks how your site’s visitors appreciate your website. The auditor will check if your website has earned shares, gained better links or has a higher or lower retention rate compared to the last SEO audit. The auditor will also compare if its current bounce rate has improved since the last SEO audit. Off-page analysis essentially measures the quality of user experience it gives your visitors and the kind of impression it leaves them with.
Keyword Analysis
Some SEO audits often end with an off-page SEO audit. However, it also pays to carry out keyword research each time. Keyword research and keyword competitive analysis are similar. The auditor should check and ensure that your keyword should hover around moderate difficulty and moderate volume in terms of traffic. To remain competitive, however, it will be best check for high-value keywords regularly to boost your traffic. Keywords are one of the crucial elements that affect your page ranking.
You need to keep in mind, however, that all the stages of an SEO audit as outlined above requires careful data analysis and the process can be both complex and tedious. This makes it essential that you should look for an SEO specialist who has ample experience to audit your site for you.