Performing Daily SEO activities could be a mess, but when you need to find out what went wrong in your SEO strategy, it could be the biggest headache of your Digital Career. These problems are solved when you perform an SEO Audit for your domain so that nothing is stopping you from topping the SERP(Search Engine Result Page). If you are looking for an SEO audit it is assumed that you understand SEO and, if not then read our article How to top the Google rankings without backlinks and then come back here for the audit part.
What is a Technical SEO and How is it useful to perform an SEO Audit
Technical SEO is the practice of improving the technical aspects of the websites like, JavaScript usage, count of CSS file or any other issue related to website development which could impact the speed of your website.
SEO Audit is generally performed on three battlefields:
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Technical SEO
We will help you understand all and make you audit your website like an expert.
SEO Attacks: Noval Digital Crime
Backlinks are just loved by marketers and they strive for the number of backlinks pointing towards the site. But, they forget about the SEO Attacks which are carried out with the help of backlinks. Don’t know about SEO Attacks? Let me help you out
Initially, we need to understand how the whole SEO thing works? Search engines have bots known as crawlers to keep on visiting websites and update the links, content. While doing so, the quality and quantity of the backlinks are analysed to come out with the Domain Authority(SEO score) of your website.
Now Google works in wonderful ways and, penalises you if your backlinks are available on websites which are spam, fake, or contain irregularities.
Say, if someone posts the link of your website on the porn site, your credibility in the eyes of Google will go down and, your rankings would also come down.
Track your Backlinks for “BLACKLINKS”
These “BLACKLINKS” are responsible for taking you down; you must be doing everything right still one aspect of not being cautious could trouble your digital endeavour. If you are here, it means your problems are going to get solved when you perform an SEO audit.
Let’s start with the list of tools useful to perform an SEO Audit:
- Google Search Console
- SEM Rush
- Aherfs
- Majestic
- Moz
The easiest and the foremost option is using GSC (Google Search Console) for tracking all the backlinks and exporting them in an excel file. GSC won’t offer every link as you may see in the screenshot:
Now you need to use SEM Rush, for doing so, Enter the Site Domain → Backlink Analytics → Backlinks → Export. Please keep in mind to select “All links” option.
Do the same for other tools too, otherwise using two tools would help you detect the conspiring backlinks.
Once you have exported the backlinks then merge them in a single excel file and remove duplicates.
Now you need to spend some time and click on every backlink to see if it is:
- Spam or irregular?
- Offering free backlinks?
- Present in the comments section?
- Relevant to your business?
- Porn site (If you are not a porn site)
Please check the Domain Authority of these sites and always go for the one with higher DA. Look for “follow” and “no follow” and allow the “no follow” links as they are not crawled by the bots.
Once you decide the spamming of backlinks then you disavow the entire domain using “domain:” directive, instead of just a single URL (Just to be safe for future)
Solve URL and broken Links issues to perform an SEO Audit
Google Search Console could be useful for detecting the crawling status of each webpage. For performing this use to your Gmail account and access GSC with the same.
Once you are there, Click “Coverage” on the left panel to see the issues:
The above snapshot has a link with Redirect issues, these issues make you pay the significant price in terms of rankings as Google would never want to show “404 Page not found” error to its users.
Go to your admin panel and fix these issues with better redirecting and solve HTTPS/HTTP contradiction issues (It happens when some webpages use HTTP and some use HTTPS, it is advised to maintain the consistency).
Recheck your Sitemap
We assume you must have submitted your sitemap to GSC, if not, follow these steps:
- Sign in to GSC
- Select your domain
- Click on ‘Sitemaps
- Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps
- Enter ‘sitemap_index’
- Click Submit
If you don’t have a sitemap, you may use the Yoast SEO plugin to generate the same from the dashboard.
Optimise your Website Speed (Onsite SEO)
Your site loading speed is an important parameter for deciding the position of your domain, it is advised to keep it below 2 seconds but if you can decrease it even further then go for it.
How to improve the site speed?
Start by checking the link performance (Mobile and Desktop) and analysing the links to improve the speed, here’s how to do that in Google Search Console
Click “Core Web Vitals” on the left and then click “Open Report” to see the full report and export it in excel. The same should be carried out for both Mobile and desktop so that you may fix these issues concurrently.
Optimising Script, CSS and Media
Analyse the size of images on the website and see if anything is above 1 MB. If yes, then it’s a red flag for you. Even if you are not a developer and can’t understand a CSS file or the JavaScript, we can easily make you understand how to detect the problems.
Go to Page Speed Insights and enter your domain here:
Once you have entered the domain, there will be a detailed screen which will tell about your loading screen, your score and the suggestions to improve the experience.
We are here to tell you how to understand the issues, we will take up solving them, some other day.
In the above snapshot, the domain gets the score of 26 which is quite bad for the rankings.
It also shows that ” Core Web Vitals assessment is failed” which will make you visit Web Vitals and improve the performance.
Now coming back to your results, these are some important things which help you define the user experience
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): It calculates the loading time. To improve performance, LCP should be less than 2 seconds.
- First Input Delay (FID): Calculates interactivity. To improve performance, FID should be less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Calculates visual stability. To improve performance, FID should be less than 0.1.
Looking at the above results it must be your principal task to improve the page speed as when it loads for the first time, it takes a lot of time. In the above case, only 9% of times your page loads well and fails to satisfy the users in other cases.
Now let’s dive a bit deeper
The above result is for Mobile, the same could be analysed for the desktop too. We examined the results for the whole domain, you may also do that for a specific webpage and resolve the issues with better judgment.
Now that you have these results in front of you, you may increase the site speed by optimizing code and your media.
Audit your Content: Content SEO
Now that you have done all the technical stuff we will ask you to do some less technical work for analyzing the content.
Make it a rule to never include the articles of less than 800 words in your website as the word count less than 800 words seems less informative and Google turns towards elsewhere for the same keyword.
To analyse this with ease, go to Screaming Frog Website and download the free/paid version.
Now you would be able to crawl your website and come out with the count of text on each webpage. Please remember, this would be a rough figure as these applications also count the words written elsewhere like your menu, toolbar, footer etc.
Look for Duplicate Content
Google penalises you heavily for duplicate content as the quality of content seems to go down. There are several ways to check the duplicate content but we suggest Siteliner.
Once you are there and you have entered your domain, within 3 to 4 minutes your whole website would be crawled and the results of duplicate content with other health parameters would be displayed.
The above infographic would give you a rough idea, you may click the link on the right to study the full report and come up with the solutions. It is suggested to keep the duplicate content less than 10% and the common content should remain less than 20% so that you have at least 70% unique content on the website.
Sometimes the duplicate stuff comes from the /author/ pages and needed to be ROBOTS.TXT blocked for optimisation.
Optimizing the Title and Heading tags
Now that you have done everything, we reach at a tiny step to improve your title and other tags used in the blog.
Here also you may use the Screaming Frog to come out with the analysis of your tags, you get to know which headings are small, large or need SEO optimisation.
It is always advised to use single H1 tag and multiple H2 tags for the headings which you needed for SEO content.
Other headings from H3 to H6 are also useful for improving the readability of your blog.
The Endnote
We have made it is easier for you to rank above in the search results by resolving all the issues found and, following the best practices of SEO 2020.
If you do all this correctly, you will certainly win the digital battle for greater productivity, revenues, ROI and ultimately the most precious “organic traffic”.