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SEO Audit for Entrepreneurs with one single tool

Do you remember when was the last time you checked the technical status of your website?

If you haven’t done it before, it’s been several months since your last review or you are soon to modify the design of your website, here you can find everything you need to know about how to audit your website and increase your online presence and performance.

SEO Audit
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Table of Contents

Why audits are important for websites

Performing a technical audit of your website provides you with a report on what is wrong with your website from the point of view of search engines and human visitors. In addition to that, such reports allow you to see how you can improve your website.

The bottom line is that by regularly auditing your website, you can keep your business aligned with Google’s best practices, as well as increase the overall performance and search visibility of your website.

Let’s take a look at some specific reasons to audit your website.

Your visitors can’t navigate the site the way you’d like them to. When you look at your website every day and know your way around, it’s easy to overlook problems that prevent new visitors from finding their way through your website. You can overlook problems with 404 pages, directives with no index, orphaned pages/lack of internal links and dozens of other problems.

Your website is not technically optimized. This is a big part of your SEO success, as it covers a wide range of problems including sensitive content, image alt text, missing metadata, security issues with HTTP, header usage, broken links, mobile responsiveness, duplicates and more.

Your website doesn’t load fast. We all know that the modern user doesn’t have time to wait for your website to load. If your pages take more than 3 seconds to load the first rendered content, you will probably see a drop in traffic and, if you run an online store, you will have a lot of abandoned carts. In addition to affecting conversions and user behavior, loading speed also affects SEO. With the introduction of Core Web Vitals in the summer of 2021, page experience became a big ranking factor, considering loading speed, responsiveness and visual stability, among other things.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that auditing your website and fixing the issues you discover in the process is a great way to ensure that both search engines and people fall in love with your website.

When entrepreneurs need to run an audit

Doing SEO for your website is a long process, with many changing parts, that doesn’t happen overnight. So if you want to audit your website every day, chances are you’ll be frustrated that you’re not seeing big changes.

However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t audit your site regularly. In fact, it’s worth doing it at least once a month, if not every week. After all, with the right web auditing tool, all you have to do to know the status of your site’s SEO is set up a schedule according to your needs, and automated audit reports will be automatically sent to your inbox.

Some important and obvious reasons to audit your site include:

  • Transition to a new domain or CMS
  • Website redesign
  • Site structure and redirect updates

But you never know when a profitable page will accidentally stop indexing or become a 404. If something isn’t working as originally intended and the end result is taking a big hit, you’ll definitely want to know about it.

To discover problems like these, you should monitor your site daily or at least weekly, regardless of the size of your business.

If you have people working on optimizing your website, whether it’s an agency, a freelancer or your in-house team, you may want to check their progress once a month to make sure everything is going as planned. Comparing audit reports can be helpful, as it highlights how each issue has improved or worsened.

Finally, in addition to auditing your own website, you can also take a look at your competition to get an idea of what to aim for. By analyzing several of your digital rivals, you’ll be able to adjust your strategy and set realistic goals.

Regardless of how often you decide to audit your website, it’s important to have a strategy, along with a checklist of what needs to be done. That way, you’ll be able to save a lot of time and can focus on the core of your business.

How to perform a SEO audit

Now that we’ve answered the why and the when, let’s focus on the how in terms of auditing your website for technical issues. Let’s use the SE Ranking Web Audit tool to see how an automated audit can help you.

So, once you’re on the platform, the first thing you should do is add your website as a project. Make sure you specify your target keywords, the search engines and regions you want to track, and you can also point out the websites you’ll be targeting in the search.

Unless you disable the option, the system will automatically audit your website as soon as you finish adding it as a project. The system will inform you by email, so you don’t have to wait.

Next, find your website in the list of projects and go to Web Audit.

SE Ranking

Now that we are in the Web Audit tool, let’s detail the technical aspects it analyzes (so that there are no problems with search engines), user experience (so that people want to interact with your site) and content-related verification.

Technical aspects to be taken into account in audit reports

When accessing the Web Audit, you will first see the Summary page which provides a brief overview of the technical status of your site. On the left side, you can access several detailed reports.

SE Ranking SEO Audit

Summary

In addition to providing the overall status score of your website, you can also find out how many pages the tool found and crawled, how many URLs were found, the Core Web Vitals metrics of the site, as well as the main issues and their distribution by category.

Also, you can check your domain metrics, such as its expiration date and Domain Trust score, find out how many pages are not indexed, the HTTP status codes of your pages and much more to get a complete picture.

Problem Report

For more specific information about technical problems with your website, go to the Problem Report to see what problems were encountered and on which pages.

SE Ranking Web Audit

In addition, you can learn everything about each problem and you can easily find out how to fix it. Also, to make it easier for you to understand where to direct your efforts, you can use quick filters to search only for critical errors, warnings and advisories.

SE Ranking is always evolving to keep up with search engine updates. So if new issues arise, the tool will be sure to audit your site against them, as is the case with Core Web Vitals.

SE Ranking Web Audit 2

All Web Audit issues are conveniently divided into 19 categories, namely:

  • Website Security
  • Crawling
  • Duplicate content
  • HTTP Status Code
  • Title
  • Description
  • Usability
  • Website speed
  • Textual content
  • Redirects
  • Internal links
  • External links
  • Location
  • Images
  • JavaScript
  • CSS
  • Mobile Optimization
  • Performance
  • AMP
 

This is useful if you need to focus on a specific issue and not on one page of your website. That way, you can concentrate your efforts on solving a problem like loading speed and then gradually move on to issues that are not as important to your website’s performance in search.

Crawled Pages

If you want to focus on a specific URL of your website, go to Tracked Pages.

SE Ranking SEO Audit 2

Here you will see all the pages that were found in the audit and you can drill down into the issues that could be preventing your pages from ranking high in searches. Various filtering options also give you the freedom to find the exact pages and issues you need.

User experience issues

Let’s say you have an online store where you sell custom designed clothing. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people will go to your website every day to find the product they are looking for. They review the options, add items to the cart, start checking out and then abandon it.

Something is wrong and you start to investigate. What is getting in the way? Are other sites experiencing similar problems as well?

SE Ranking User Experience Check

Again, auditing your website can help you find problems that force people to leave your website. With Web Auditing, you can:

  • Make sure your pages are correctly structured.
  • Check that all important pages can be accessed with just a few clicks from any page
  • Identify pages that are not linked to the website, also known as orphaned pages.
  • Verify that the mobile version of the site is optimized and loads quickly
  • Measure Core Web Vitals that are essential for a user-friendly website
  • Find all images and make sure they are not too large and have a title along with alt text.
  • Analyze JavaScript and CSS files to make sure they are not the cause of your problems with website visitors.

It is extremely important that your website runs like a Swiss watch so that nothing gets in the way of people wanting to get information or, more importantly, make a purchase.

Security

Today, you can’t afford to have a website that is not secure for your users and visitors. There is too much at stake with everyone sharing their data to make it easy to browse the web and interact with websites.

SE Ranking Security

The Web Audit pays close attention to website security by:

  • Checking the expiration date of your security certificate.
  • Making sure to see if your security protocol is up to date
  • Looking for discrepancies in the certificate name
  • Verifying that your encryption algorithm is up to date
  • Indicate if there are any HTTP URLs in the XML sitemap
  • Check that the site has HTTPS encryption, rel=”canonical” from HTTPS to HTTP
  • Identify redirects from HTTP to HTTPS and vice-versa
  • Check for mixed content issues

Tracking problems

Every business owner wants to make sure that all the pages they worked on and optimized for search end up in Google’s index. The Web Audit makes sure to point out any problems that prevent the search giant from indexing your pages.

SE Ranking Tracking Issues

Among other things, the Web Audit tool:

  • Checks if the XML sitemap is missing or too large.
  • Checks for non-canonical or non-indexed pages in the sitemap
  • Makes sure your robots.txt file can be found and contains the XML sitemap
  • Check the use of HTML frames
  • Check if your URLs are easy to use and not too long
  • Identify if your HTML and HTTP headers contain noindex or nofollow
  • Analyze canonical strings
  • Verify that robots.txt, noindex, nofollow or X-Robots-Tag do not block anything desired

HTTP status codes

Every time you visit a website, your browser sends a request to the site’s server. That server then sends a response to the browser’s request with a code consisting of 3 digits: the HTTP status code. Think of these codes as a conversation between your browser and the server.

SE Ranking HTTP Status

To ensure that the conversation runs smoothly, Web Audit closely analyzes everything related to HTTP status codes. Specifically, the tool:

  • Checks for 4XX pages, 3XX redirects, 5XX pages in the XML sitemap.
  • Points out canonical pages and URLs with HTTP status codes 3ХХ, 4XX and 5XX
  • Ensures that internal and external links do not produce HTTP status codes 3XX, 4XX, 5XX
  • Identifies image and hreflang status code problems
  • Breaks down JavaScript and CSS files in terms of their status codes

Basically, your website pages should ideally return the 200 OK status code, and if this is not the case, Web Audit will be sure to inform you so that you can access it as soon as possible and make sure your pages are working properly.

Check the content status

In addition to making sure that search engines can understand your website and pages, and that people are not confused by your website design, you also need to optimize your content.

Of course, much of content optimization is meant to help Google better understand the content on your page so it knows how to rank it and what search queries to display it for. However, having optimized content also helps people absorb it more easily.

SE Ranking Content Check

SE Ranking Web Audit helps you with that too, as it flags any duplicate content to help you avoid keyword cannibalization.

In addition to that, the tool takes textual content seriously and shows problems including:

  • Low word count
  • Missing, excessively long or multiple H1 and H2 tags
  • Identical titles and H1 tags
  • Problems related to page titles and descriptions
SE Ranking Content Check 2

Track progress by comparing audit reports

Putting two web audit reports side by side quickly shows you what progress has been made in the technical configuration of your website. For starters, it gives you the data you need to understand what has changed over time.

SE Ranking SEO Audit Report

Simply look for a green or red number next to a parameter in the most recent audit report to get a quick snapshot of the situation and understand if the necessary progress is being made.

Monitor page changes

With the help of the integrated Page Change Monitor tool, you can track changes made to HTML code, titles, descriptions, keywords, canonical and alternative URLs, H1-H2 headers, robots.txt files, crawl status and links on your top performing pages, or any other.

The best part is that you are automatically notified about such changes.

SE Ranking Monitoring

This lets you know exactly what is happening with important pages and notifies you if your colleagues, supervisors or even a client modify them.

Checks on-page SEO for specific pages

In addition, you can take advantage of SE Ranking’s On-Page SEO Checker tool to find out how well a specific page is optimized with your target keyword and SEO in general. It can be accessed through the top horizontal menu which contains tools that are not linked to projects.

SE Ranking SEO On Page

The On-Page SEO Checker is similar to the Web Audit, but focuses heavily on making sure that a specific page is optimized for search. In the on-page report, you can get much more information about the content of your page and how well it is prepared for readers and search engines.

SE Ranking On Page SEO Checker

Now it's your turn

By scheduling regular audits, you can improve your website throughout the year.

Doing so will help you increase your site’s search rankings and show it to more people. If you get into the top 10 and people like what they see because you meet their search intent, you will generate higher profits.

Feel like your business strategy needs some work? Sign up for a free 14-day trial with SE Ranking today and get a Web Audit report in minutes!

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