How to conduct a website audit

1.  Run your website URL through a site audit tool

Before you get started, you will need to find a website audit tool. There are lots to choose from, include SEMRush’s Site Audit Tool (best for those with more technical experience) and HubSpot’s Website Grader, which can help to analyse how your website is performing. Another tool, SE Ranking's website audit, will evaluate every SEO metric, such as indexing, security, crawling, indexing, usability and any tech errors which will prevent your website from ranking highly in search results.

Whichever software you choose, it will test how your site is performing and give you specific recommendations to help improve it.

2. Identify SEO problems

Your website audit tool will help you identify any SEO problems. A good SEO audit is crawl-based, which means it should simulate the way Google crawls your pages. It will see all the issues related to those pages in the way Google would see them. Some issues are quite easy to fix, while some may require a more complex solution.

There are a huge number of SEO-related issues which can affect your rankings on search engines, including meta descriptions, image alt-text, keywords and headings. Issues with any of these will have a negative impact on your SEO and rankings.

An audit will help you assess all of the content on your website, including blogs, product pages and more. The audit can help you identify whether your content is ranking well in search engines and if your SEO is reflected in your traffic numbers.

3. Carry out an SEO assessment

You need to audit the content you're publishing to make sure it's actually solving your visitors' problems. Here, the tool you use can give you guidance, but getting a fresh pair of eyes on your content can also help.

Consider your website content from the point of view of your target audience:

• Did this information answer all my questions?
• Does it give me all the resources I need for this topic? 
• Do I know what to do next?
  
  

With good SEO, you should always aim to leave the reader with immediately actionable next steps – whether that is a clear CTA (call-to-action) or links to resources.

4. Follow on-page SEO best practice

There are three types of SEO:

• On-page SEO are the elements which are on your webpage, which allow search engines to crawl and index it. It is called ‘on-page’ because it can be seen by visitors on the page!
  
  
• Off-page SEO includes social media and external linking.
  
  
• Technical SEO is more of the behind-the-scenes stuff, which you may need external help with – like site speed, mobile readiness and structured data.
  
  

On-page SEO tells Google and other search engines all about your website and how you provide value to visitors and customers. It helps your site be optimised for both search engines and human eyes.

You should make sure all your webpages are following on-page SEO best practice.

On-page SEO is completely in your control. There are a lot of elements to it. The more of them you optimise, the more you will increase your traffic and conversions. Prioritise the elements which are most important to you in reaching your business goals.

The on-page SEO elements are:

• Keyword research
• Visual content (copy and pictures)
• Page titles
• Headers
• Meta descriptions
• Image alt-text
• Structured markup
• Page URLs
• Internal linking
  

5. Check for indexing problems

If pages aren’t indexed in Google’s database, Google can’t rank them.

To see whether your pages are indexed, check for issues directly in Google Search Console.

Head to the Pages report under the Index section. This will show you a graph of all pages based on their indexing status. 

It will also show you a list of reasons why pages haven’t been indexed. Go through these reasons and check the pages which are covered by the reasons.

Remember, it is actually normal to have some URLs which aren’t indexed. You only need the ones you want to rank in search results to be indexed.  

6.  Analyse internal links

Internal links are a key part of an SEO audit, as they have an important role to play on your website:

• They help search engines crawl your site
• They help visitors navigate around your website
• They help to direct link equity (a search engine ranking factor based on the idea that certain links pass value and authority from one page to another - may also be called authority or link juice) to the most important pages
  
  

A good audit tool will list any issue relating to internal links and information on how to fix them. It will pick up on pages which don’t have enough internal links (so you can point more internal links to them) and pages which have good internal links, so you can use them to distribute link equity to other pages.

7. Benchmark against your competitors

A good SEO audit should help benchmark your website against your competitors. Some audit tools will give you the option to compare your domain with your competitors. This will show whether you are doing better than them or lagging behind.

Key areas to focus on are:

• Authority score: the overall quality of the domain on a scale of 1 to 100 (based on factors including backlinks and search traffic)
• Organic keywords: how many keywords your competitor ranks for
• Organic traffic: how much organic traffic your competitor receives
• Referring domains: how many different domains link to your competitor’s domain (this provides a more comprehensive picture for comparison than the overall number of backlinks)

8. Highlight missing keywords

To audit your content for on-page SEO, carry out a keyword analysis:

• Use an analytics tool to review your keyword performance. Which keywords are giving you the biggest gains in leads and traffic?
• Are you creating enough relevant content to target those keywords on your website?
• Review basic on-page SEO elements including URLs, copy, page titles and meta descriptions. Make sure keywords are included where relevant (but don’t stuff your content with irrelevant keywords because that will have the opposite effect!).
  
  

Carrying out an SEO audit is an opportunity to look at the keywords your competitors target – and most importantly whether you are missing out on any opportunities.

A good audit tool will allow you to compare your site with your competitors and highlight any keywords relevant to your business which are either missing (your competitors rank for them, but you don’t) or weak (your competitors rank more highly for them than you do).

This will highlight any keyword opportunities you may have missed out on, so you can optimise them to improve traffic and conversions.

Focus on the pages which bring the most conversions and the keywords which are most important to your business.

9. Carry out an SEO link audit

An SEO link audit processes the links pointing to your website to find any issues or opportunities in your backlink profile. (A backlink profile is the collection of links from other websites which direct visitors to your site. There are good and bad backlinks.) Evaluating these links will help you optimise your site to rank for your target keywords.

SEO link audits consider the URL source, domain and anchor text to see if value is being passed to your website. This will gauge how much a link is helping or hurting your website's visibility in SERPs (search engine results pages). Links from well-known, respected websites are much more valuable than links from smaller sites.

To conduct an SEO link audit, gather all of your link data, using Google Search Console:

• Enter your domain and click on Links to Your Site under Search Traffic
• Download the latest links and create a link audit spreadsheet
• Manually evaluate your links, considering factors like anchor text, page content and IP address or use a tool like Ahref's backlink checker to analyse the value of the links

10. Create a website audit report

Your website audit tool will create a report which clearly states the issues found on your site and how to improve them. This will allow you to start making improvements – or for a team member or outside agency to make them on your behalf.

Conducting an SEO audit can be a time-consuming process, but with the right tools, it can make a real difference to the performance of your website – and increase conversions and sales.

When you start your audit, you will want to know how well your site is performing and how it compares to your competitors. A good SEO audit will give you the answers to those questions and a starting point to make changes to optimise your website.

If it all seems too complicated, it is worth using an outside company like Cotswold Web to do the work for you. We have all the expertise and access to the latest tools to optimise your website to make sure it really converts.