SEO audit, also known as a website audit, thoroughly evaluates all factors influencing a website's ranking in search engines. Conducting an SEO audit provides a comprehensive insight into a website and its competitive landscape.   

This blog delves into the key components of an effective SEO audit. We'll explore the world of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO and how these elements contribute to an organic search growth strategy. 

Understanding SEO Audit 

SEO audit is the first step to creating an actionable SEO plan with measurable results. An effective SEO audit gives you the insights to formulate a powerful SEO growth strategy, helping your website rank well in search engines. 

An SEO audit is like a health check for your website. It involves a detailed examination of all the factors that affect your website's visibility in search engines. This includes on-page factors like content and meta tags, off-page factors like backlinks and market-level data, and technical factors like site speed and mobile responsiveness. 

A common misunderstanding regarding SEO audits is that they only look at technical aspects. This is because many SEO audit tools only tell you about the technical issues to fix.  

An informed SEO audit should also investigate your SEO strategy, how your design and layouts, and content pages impact your performance, the opportunities for improvement, and what strategies should be implemented to improve the search engine visibility for your website.  

Key Components of an Effective SEO Audit 

Organic Competitor Analysis  

Begin the audit by conducting an organic competitor analysis. This will give you a good idea about how your competitors are performing in the organic search presence, their strategies, keywords, and what are the gaps.  

It is probably worth noting that actual organic search competitors might differ from competitors you may know of or offline competitors. 

 
There are four key areas we look at when doing a competitor analysis. 

1. Your organic competitor positioning.  

 

SEO Competitive Positioning Map can give you an understanding of how you are tracking, compared to your competitors. However, you need to select the right competitors to get relevant analysis. 

2. Competitor Common Keywords and Gaps 

 

Every circle represents the total number of keywords on a competitor’s website ranking anywhere on Google.  The proportion of common keywords is represented by the overlap between the circles, these are the keywords over which the businesses are competing against each other. 

This is how you can gain an inside into the keyword gap and fish for content opportunities.  

 

3. Competitors’ Traffic Trends & Organic Traffic value 

 

 

Understanding your competitor's organic traffic value (the amount of money spent on Google ads to generate the existing organic traffic) is a key aspect when developing your own strategy.  

However, it’s not all about the organic traffic. Sometimes competitors with less traffic have the highest traffic value because they are ranking for high value keywrods. 

 

4. Organic Impression Share Analysis  

You can analyse your organic impression share like the Paid Impression Share or Market Share. This will give you a greater understanding of how you compete with your competitor’s category levels when carried out in addition to looking at keyword-specific levels.  
 
 

Factoring all these considerations into your research will help you gauge your competitor’s organic search environment to formulate a better SEO strategy.  

On-Site – Technical Analysis  

 

 

On-site technical analysis is the most common ways of carrying out an SEO audit. It brings to light the areas of technical improvement on your overall website.  

Technical websites are common, therefore, it’s important to set up monitoring tools and regularly fix technical issues as they arrive – to ensure it doesn’t impact the SEO performance. 

Areas worthy of in-depth analysis include crawl ability, crawler budget and URL structure analysis within the technical analysis.  
 
Below is a snapshot of our SEO technical audit checklist that we use to audit our clients websites. The complete list analysis the website again 119 measures. 
 
 

 

Below is the list of essential measures, that must be reviewed when auditing the website for SEO. Each of these can be expanded into finer measures when carrying out an in-depth audit.  
 

1. Canonicalisation	11. Content
2. Crawl & Index Management	12. Heading Tags
3. Multilingual	13. Videos
4. Redirect Management	14. Images
5. Broken Links	15. Structured Data
6. URL Structure	16. Google Webmaster Tools
7. Internal Linking	17. Analytics
8. Error Handling	18. Page Speed
9. Sitemaps	19. Social
10. Mobile Optimisation