As the best practices and procedures of SEO changes over the time, therefore it is a must for the businesses to conduct periodic assessments to decide whether adjustments need to be made or not. In case a business site is not optimized properly for search, then you will surely miss out a significant amount of traffic from the search engines as well as from the prospective clients.
Auditing a site is one of the things that the majority of the businesses don’t do unless they take the help of a professional web developer, web designer or SEO expert. In fact, the majority of business owners are clueless about how to do Website audit before SEO, or just alone the SEO audit. But without auditing the sites for SEO, the businesses can actually miss out different online opportunities and they can also violate the policies of Google and hurting the scope of ranking against the competitors.
As part of deciding the total efficiency of your site, the website audit must be checked to ensure that the site is properly designed keeping the visitors in consideration. The overall navigability and the design of the site should correspond with what the visitors would come to the site to seek out. Besides, this will depend largely on the individual business.
So, it can be said that website audits are highly beneficial and a must before starting a large scale website redesigning or SEO project. Auditing the site can decide whether the site is properly optimized or not to achieve the business goals and if not, then how can it be improved to increase the performance. In most of the cases, you may need a technical brain to know how to do Website audit before SEO, whether it is an outsourced party or someone from your in house IT team. Now let’s have a look at the things that you must check in to learn more about how to do Website audit before SEO:
1. The Technical Assessment
This is the foundation of any successful SEO audit. The technical assessment involves checking various backend elements that affect how search engines crawl and index your website. It’s often best to involve a web developer or IT specialist, as this can get quite technical. You can also use SEO audit tools like Screaming Frog, SEMrush, or Google Search Console to help with this phase.
Here’s what to review in a technical audit:
- Site speed and performance: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to evaluate load times.
- Mobile-friendliness: Check if your website is fully responsive across all devices.
- Crawlability and indexability: Make sure search engines can crawl and index your site without errors.
- Broken links and 404 errors: Scan for and fix any dead internal or external links.
- Sitemap and robots.txt: Ensure these files are properly configured and submitted to search engines.
- HTTPS status: Ensure your site is secure and uses an SSL certificate.
- Canonical tags and duplicate content: Make sure your site avoids duplication issues that may harm SEO.
Even though technical and content audits may sometimes overlap, their shared goal is to enhance user experience and search engine visibility.
2. The Content Assessment
Once the technical groundwork is laid, the next step in your website audit before SEO is analyzing your content. This includes every type of content on your site—landing pages, blog articles, product pages, and even your homepage.
Here’s how to perform a content audit:
- Start by listing all website pages: Use a sitemap generator or website crawler to extract all URLs.
- Check keyword targeting: Are your pages optimized with the right target keywords?
- Evaluate content quality: Ensure the content is original, relevant, and valuable to your audience.
- Identify thin content: Pages with very little useful information should be improved or consolidated.
- Check for duplicate content: Avoid having the same or very similar content across multiple pages.
- Review meta tags: Ensure every page has a unique and optimized meta title and description.
- Content freshness: Update outdated content to keep it relevant and competitive.
- Internal linking: Make sure important pages are easily discoverable through proper linking structures.
A strong content audit not only improves SEO performance but also enhances user engagement and boosts your site’s authority.
Performing a comprehensive website audit before SEO is a critical step that sets the foundation for successful search engine optimization. By analyzing both technical and content aspects of your website, you can identify gaps, fix issues, and unlock new opportunities for growth. Whether you do it in-house or hire an expert, a well-conducted audit will lead to better rankings, improved user experience, and stronger online visibility for your business.
