Understanding Your Website SEO Audit: An Overview of Critical Areas

Without a doubt, there are countless strategies to perform a Website SEO audit. Whether you are a small business owner looking to optimize your website for search engine performance or an agency attempting to boost your client’s online presence, determining which technique, to begin with is often challenging. Navigating the plethora of options can be overwhelming and difficult, especially for someone not well-versed in SEO. Determining what analytics or insights you should pay attention to can be challenging. Even afterward, it’s only possible to interpret what needs improvement if you are an SEO expert. In this detailed guide, we will provide you with the necessary tools to confidently navigate your SEO Website Audit and provide you with various options for improvement.

SEO can be intimidating, but it can consume less than countless hours crafting content and refining keywords. As SEO specialists, we aim to assist clients in improving their online presence, not draining time.

You don’t have to do everything to get a favorable outcome. Focusing your attention on critical aspects and high-quality content can provide you with the desired SEO results in much less time. 

Our guide reveals the ultimate checklist for businesses that want to make an impact in the world of SEO. If you use this as your go-to guide, you’ll begin to see results within as quickly as a couple of months. 

You want to ensure every piece of content on your website is optimized for the best SEO possible, including your messaging, graphics, and images. Does your website meet all of these requirements for SEO?

What is a Website SEO Audit & How Can You Get One?

An SEO website audit is a vital part of website optimization for businesses. This sort of audit is a thorough evaluation of your site’s performance and making adjustments specifically for search engines. With an audit, you can analyze various technical aspects, such as quality of content, user experience, diagnostics, and backlink profiles, to determine areas for improvement. Conducting an official and thorough website audit can be highly beneficial for your business, as it helps to identify and address problems that may be hindering your site’s performance in search engine rankings. By doing this, your company can better understand your SEO performance and implement intelligent decisions to improve its online presence. 

You can get a detailed, in-depth analysis of your website by SEO and Web Development experts, entirely for free, right here.

Edge Digital can also provide a more detailed and in-depth analysis with data-driven suggestions and adjustments.

How is an SEO Audit Scored?

What Score Should I Aim For? What is considered “good enough”?

Score Rankings:

85-100: Great job! Keep it up. But continuously optimize all parts of your website.

75-85: This score is okay but still needs improvement. It may appear alright, but here is where most sites score. By scoring below 85, you are dragging your site down in the rankings, making it much harder to stand out and build an online presence.

50-75: Your site needs to be improved sooner rather than later. Your score is much lower than most sites, making your brand disadvantaged. The longer you wait to make changes, the worse and worse your site will perform.

Below 50: Stop what you are doing and get your website fixed ASAP! You need to catch up on tons of potential business.

Even if your SEO Audit score is a 99%, we recommend maintaining your content and implementing constant adjustments. However, anything about 85% would be considered a “good” score. Any score lower than that is under the “Needs Improvement” category and should be analyzed and optimized immediately.

Your SEO Audit Checklist

Content

⬜ Are you avoiding significant shifts in design and layout?

URL

⬜ No underscores? 
Underscores don’t perform as well on Search Engine results pages. Google recommends using a hyphen (-) instead of an underscore (_).
⬜ Is it SEO-Friendly?
Make sure your URL is clear and concise. It should also always include your main keyword(s) under 70 characters.
⬜ Blacklisted URL?
Always include security protection to avoid any blockings or issues like this.

Titles

⬜ Is it less than 70 characters?
⬜ Is your primary keyword included in each title?
The title of your page is intended to be a short and informative description of the page content. 

Images

⬜ Does each image have alt text with relevant keywords?
⬜ Are all images adequately sized? Not doing so can slow down your site.
⬜ Does each image file have keywords present in the file name?
All of the visuals on your website should have an alt tag. It would be best to write short, though compelling, descriptions of each image while efficiently implementing the keywords. Use smaller file sizes and types with explicit width and height attributes. Not doing so will increase your site load time, losing more potential customers. Make sure you are using hyphens instead of underscores here, too. 

Headings

⬜ Are H1, H2, & H3 tags present?

⬜ Are H1tags used as the primary section header?
⬜ Are H2 tags used for secondary headings?
⬜ Are H3 tags used for hierarchy?

Why should I add proper headings structures?

Heading tags provide structure for search engines to read through your website more effectively. This means that more significant numbers of people will be encouraged to go to the page that best answers their questions or addresses their pain points. 

Ensure you are constantly incorporating the most relevant keyword and covering the main point of the content. Be descriptive, and ensure your headings are all following a hierarchy. 

Homepage

⬜ Does your homepage have at least 1,500 words of content?
⬜ Is your primary keyword included in the first 100 words?
Google places great importance on content. For the best possible chances of appearing high in the search engine rankings, pages should have at least 1,500 words. Enhancing the amount of content can significantly improve visibility.

How can I add more content (up to 1,000 words) to my site?
First, consider writing and publishing regular long-form blog posts. However, you must make sure that your landing pages contain good-quality content. If you need help with what kinds of things to add to your website, it is recommended that you reach out to an SEO Agency, such as Edge Digital, that hosts a team of skillful SEO copywriters who can quickly get more content onto your site.

Keywords

⬜ Are you utilizing Keywords everywhere throughout your site?
⬜ Are keywords used in the first 100 words of content?
⬜ Are keywords mentioned in your headings?

How do I find a practical or helpful keyword for my brand? Are my current keywords good enough?
There are thousands of tools out there that can help you determine which keywords your brand should be focusing on. For example, SEMRush allows you to use their Keyword Magic Tool to show you insights on your preferred keywords, like how popular and how many people search for them, so you can make intelligent decisions about where your business will perform best.

Mobile Optimization

⬜ Is your website mobile-friendly?
⬜ Are you prioritizing your mobile site speed? Does it load in under 3 seconds?
⬜ Are you deferring offscreen imagery?
⬜ Are you checking to make sure your content fits into the smaller screen?
⬜ Is your text on mobile large enough to read?
⬜ Are you using plugins that are compatible with mobile?
⬜ Are your links too close together?
⬜ Is a FB Like or Share button present and visible?
⬜ Are your social profiles, such as Facebook or Twitter, also present and visible?

Don’t just optimize your desktop website – you must also prioritize your mobile website. Over half of all Search Engine traffic comes from mobile, so guaranteeing your website is optimized for mobile is critical. Studies have shown that sites must load in under 3 seconds for optimal performance. Every additional second of loading time increases the bounce rate tremendously. Mobile users expect things to load faster, so prioritizing mobile speed is necessary. Your mobile site cannot load any longer than 3 seconds, or you are losing out on many potential customers.

Technical/Coding

⬜ Has all unsupported technologies been removed?
⬜ Did you validate your HTML code?
⬜ Are you deferring offscreen imagery?
⬜ Have you minified Javascript?
⬜ Is your Meta description present and containing Page Titles and keywords?
⬜ Does your sitemap exist?
⬜ Are you avoiding multiple-page redirects and large network payloads?
⬜ Is all unnecessary CSS removed?

Are you regularly checking your website’s coding? Don’t just build your site and forget all the backend parts. Your site’s coding is one of the most crucial components for appearing in more search engine results pages. Suppose you are not an expert in Website Development. In that case, selecting a company like Edge Digital is highly recommended to dig through your technicalities and optimize to earn you the best performance.

How do I fix errors in the technical areas? How important is improving the backend technicalities? Would it make a noticeable difference?
The short answer is yes; it would make a noticeable difference to you and your website visitors to optimize your technical areas. As mentioned throughout this guide, websites’ backend and specialized parts often need to be noticed the most. If you aren’t a website expert, you probably think what you can’t see won’t hurt you. That is not true in this case. Overlooking the optimization of your technical diagnostics is a huge mistake. Once these areas are optimized, you will see a huge impact in your website’s overall performance and efficiency.

Diagnostics

⬜ Are you prioritizing page speed?
⬜ Does your desktop website load in under 4 seconds?
⬜ Does your mobile website load in under 3 seconds?
⬜ Is your text-to-HTML ratio between 25-70%?
⬜ Are you paying close attention to your server response time?

How can I speed up my website quickly? Is there a product or service you guys offer that can do this?
Unfortunately, website speed can not be increased by clicking a button or with one particular service. The best option is to work with our SEO team so they can comb through your coding and technical diagnostics. Your slow site speed is likely coming from something in the background that is unable to be seen by the average person.

Are you also ensuring there is someone paying attention to the diagnostics on the backend of your website? Like coding, these things aren’t as evident to a user, but they’re just as important, if not even more.  Check your website load speed here.

Getting Started

If you are not a Web developer or SEO expert, it is highly recommended again that you work with a Web Development and SEO Agency, such as Edge Digital, to guarantee the continuous efficiency of your website. Those interested can reach out to us here.