Ranking on Google is an important thing for any website. 

It doesn’t matter if you have a blog or not. 

Every website has some content on it. 

And if your content isn’t properly SEOed… 

Then you may not even rank at all. 

Which means when potential customers Google the services you offer… 

They’re not going to find you. 

And that’s bad for business! 

Doing a SEO audit will fix that. 

What Is an SEO Audit? 

An SEO audit is an analysis of your website’s search engine ranking factors. 

The purpose? 

To see where you can make improvements and get your site to rank better. 

The comprehensive deep-dive of an SEO audit can shine light on issues that you didn’t realise were there. 

And the first step to improving is finding those little opportunities where you could do better. 

This isn’t just for actual SEO, though. 

You could uncover gaps in your content, technical issues, and even UX problems. 

Different Types of SEO Audits 

An SEO audit isn’t just about checking that your site is ranking. 

There are multiple types of SEO audits, and the best one for you depends on your goals. 

Contrary to popular belief, SEO isn’t just about your blog content. 

For the best results, you should do all of these SEO audits together. 

SEO Content Audit (On-Page SEO) 

This is what most people think of when they consider SEO. 

The content. 

Most often, blog content. 

In this type of audit, you’ll evaluate your content to check for: 

• Accuracy 
• Updates 
• Quality 
• New additions 
• Keywords 
• Formatting 

As you run through your content, you should also be checking for opportunities to optimise your page for: 

• Google Featured Snippets 
• “People Also Ask” section 

Fixing issues here means refreshing or updating the information in your content, adding extra content if necessary, or restructuring your content to add the above sections in. 

There’s another element to this, though: 

The information on the backend of your web pages. 

• Meta descriptions 
• Meta titles 
• Image alternate text 

Off-Page SEO Audit 

Off-page SEO involves anything linked to your content that isn’t actually on your website. 

In other words, your links. 

Are you linking to high-quality, high-authority websites? 

And are authoritative websites linking back to you? 

Having these links between your site and high-authority sites gives Google an indication that your website is also of top quality. 

Which can boost your ranking. 

To improve your off-page SEO, you’ll need to have a solid link-building strategy. 

Technical SEO Audit 

This kind of SEO audit has to do with performance metrics. 

Speed, security, and user-friendliness come in under this umbrella. 

These all have to do with your actual website and not your content. 

But they’re still relevant for SEO.

Bet you didn’t know that the backend affects your SEO too! 

During this audit, you’ll identify issues that affect your site’s speed and security. 

These could be things like: 

• Switching from HTTP to HTTPS 
• Installing an SSL certificate 
• Reducing or eliminating spam 
• Streamlining code 
• Indexing your website 
• Eliminating redirects 

When Should You Do an SEO Audit?

Regularly! 

SEO audits need to be done on the regular to catch anything before it becomes a problem. 

So if you’re thinking about doing one… 

It’s probably a good time to do one. 

If you haven’t done one before or you haven’t done one in a while, you might need to do a pretty comprehensive one first up. 

But once you’ve taken care of the initial issues, every subsequent audit becomes easier and faster. 

Not sure if you need one right now? 

The answer is yes if you see any of these signs: 

• Organic traffic is dropping 
• You have a high bounce rate 
• Your conversion rate is dropping 
• You’re not ranking well on Google 

To stay on top of things, you should aim for at least one SEO audit every quarter. 

What Else Can an SEO Audit Include?

We’ve covered the basics above, but SEO audits can also include things like: 

• Keyword research to find more appropriate ones 
• Paid advertising insights to make the most of your budget 
• Competitor research to ensure you’re staying competitive 
• Industry trends and news that could affect you 

What Tools Do You Need to Do a SEO Audit?

You can go through everything manually on your website. 

But it’s going to take forever… 

And it will be easy to miss stuff. 

Thankfully there are SEO tools out there that will help you to audit your site effectively and as quickly as possible. 

• SEO Software: Most have a site audit tool that will provide you with excellent insight (try Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush). They also offer keyword research tools and backlink tools. 
• Google Search Console: Offers tech fixes, keyword auditing, and reindexing once you’ve made changes. 
• Google Analytics: Keeping an eye on your analytics gives you an indication of what result your changes are having on your website. 
• Google PageSpeed Insights: Identifies and helps you fix technical issues on your site that are causing it to slow down. 
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Crawl up to 500 URLS for free and the tool will do the analysing for you. 
• SEO Report Card: Compares your site to competitors for insight on what you can improve. Also assess speed and the user experience of your site is. 
• Majestic: Allows you to see which websites are linking to you so you can improve your backlinking strategy. 

How to Do An SEO Audit Checklist 

Want to do your own SEO audit to improve your rankings? 

Here’s a quick overview of the most effective steps to take after you’ve run your site through an SEO audit software. 

1. Set Goals 

There’s no point in doing this if you don’t know why you’re doing it. 

Here’s where you should analyse your site and see what the actual problem is. 

Are you not getting traffic? 

Is your bounce rate too high? (above 45%) 

Analyse your traffic and do a speed test. 

Once you know what the problem is, you know what you’re looking to improve. 

2. Check for Duplicates of Your Site 

If more than one version of your site exists, Google can get confused. 

Here’s how it can happen. 

Your site can exist in more than way: 

• https://yourwebsite.com 
• https://www.yourwebsite.com 
• http://yourwebsite.com 
• http://www.yourwebsite.com 

When you’re on the website, you may not notice anything. 

But to Google, these are four different versions of one website. 

This means you could be penalised for a duplicate piece of content. 

All you need to do is redirect three of those to the other one. 

So no matter which ones you type in… 

You land on only one URL. 

Like this: 

• https://www.yourwebsite.com —> https://yourwebsite.com 
• http://yourwebsite.com —> https://yourwebsite.com 
• http://www.yourwebsite.com —> https://yourwebsite.com 

That way, only one site is indexed with Google and there’s no confusion. 

3. Keyword Research 

Keyword research is always a good idea. 

Topics and trends change more than you think. 

If you’re still using the same keywords you were a year ago… 

It’s worth a bit of new research. 

The only exception really would be if you’re a local business and your search term is something like “plumber New York”. 

You can’t really change that! 

But if you’re an SEO content writer, for example… 

You may want to check up on terms like: 

• SEO content 
• SEO copywriting 
• Search engine optimisation writing 
• SEO writer 

To see which ones seem to be performing the best. 

It’s also a good idea to do a bit of research on blog post keywords. 

If you want your content to be evergreen, you need to keep up with the most likely search terms. 

Pick a keyword research tool and check them out. 

You also want to check for keyword cannibalisation. 

This is when you’ve got multiple pages on your site competing for the same keyword. 

It might sound like a good thing… 

But it can actually throttle your traffic. 

4. Meta Descriptions & Titles 

Did you know that Google rewrites meta descriptions… 

Up to 62% of the time?! 

That means that, depending on the search time you’re ranking for… 

Your meta description could change. 

Unless you write your own and place it on the page. 

Make sure it contains your page’s focus keyword. 

And it’s not boring. 

You want to inspire curiosity so someone chooses to click on your page. 

Your meta title is another thing you should optimise. 

This is the page title you see when you search for something in Google. 

You want your main keyword to be here too. But it should be short and sweet so viewers can see it in its entirety. 

5. Optimise Your Keywords 

Once your metas are done, you’ll need to optimise your web pages with keywords. 

Even if your existing keywords are still good and you don’t need to swap them out with new ones based on your research… 

You still need to check that they’re showing up enough times and that you aren’t (accidentally or purposely) keyword stuffing. 

This can be a little time-consuming. 

But if you want to rank well, it’s essential. 

You’ll need to do this on both your blog posts and your regular website pages. 

6. Check Content Relevance 

While you’re sorting out your keywords, it’s a good idea to check the relevance, accuracy, and datedness of your content. 

If you wrote a great blog post 5 years ago that had the latest up-to-date stats… 

Those aren’t going to be relevant now. 

And it’s only going to annoy people if they land on your site. 

Find irrelevant and outdated information and refresh it. 

You’ll rank better and you won’t annoy anyone who’s looking for information. 

7. Find Opportunities for Content Rankings 

If you don’t already have them, insert content into your posts that could rank as Featured Snippets or under the “People Also Ask” section on the Google results page. 

You don’t need to do a ton of research or anything here. 

It might simply be restructuring your content.  (You can use a content audit tool to help too).

The key to ranking for featured snippets is to answer the question directly under the headline. 

As you can tell, there is a little more to it that can help you achieve a featured snippet. 

But according to studies, featured snippets get 35% of all clicks for the topic. 

So it’s well worth aiming for one! 

8. Get Rid of Duplicate Content 

This covers two things. 

1. Duplicate keywords on your pages 
2. Posts covering the same topics on your site 
3. Content that’s duplicated elsewhere on the internet 

Multiple posts on your own site covering the same stuff isn’t necessarily bad. 

It can happen if you cover the same topics in multiple formats. 

Or in a lot of detail. 

Almost a third of sites have duplicate content. 

But it can impact your SEO and stop Google from ranking your page. 

Use a tool like the Duplicate Content Checker Chrome extension or Copyscape to check for duplicates. 

Google offers some easy ways to fix duplicate content if you do find any. 

9. Check Your Links 

This step also encompasses multiple things. 

One, if you don’t have an effective internal linking strategy, now is the time to implement one. 

Two, you’ll need to check for broken links and fix them. 

Internal linking can significantly boost your SEO. 

Broken links also need to be fixed. 

When someone clicks on a link in your blog post and it doesn’t work… 

Or it takes them somewhere they aren’t expecting… 

It can cause annoyance. 

And sometimes it’s enough for them to make a mental note to not come back to your site! 

It’s an easy fix, though. 

Use a tool like Screaming Frog’s broken link checker to find them. 

Once you know where they are, you can fix them by either: 

• Linking to something else 
• Deleting the link completely 
• Redirecting the link 

10. Check Your Website Speed 

Before you change anything to do with speeding up your site, you need to know how fast it is. 

Do a quick speed check. 

Google PageSpeed Insights should offer potential issues and fixes. 

11. Check Your Website Security 

Analyse your site’s security and fix what you can. 

Not only does this give your visitors peace of mind, but it does for you too! 

• Enable HTTPS 
• Install an SSL certificate 
• Update themes, plugins, etc 
• Use an anti-spam filter 

12. Analyse Competitors 

Most free SEO audit tools also allow you to analyse your competitors so you can see where they may be outranking you. 

Although it’s not a necessary step, it’s worth checking out! 

Once everything else on your site is sorted… 

You can start focusing on how to outrank your closest competition. 

Final Thoughts 

It’s not difficult to do an SEO site audit. 

It can be a little time-consuming, but every step is worthwhile. 

If you’ve been struggling to rank… 

Not getting traffic… 

Or seen your bounce rate increase… 

Then an SEO website audit could be the key to boosting your site again.