How to Perform an SEO Audit in 2021

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It’s important to perform an SEO audit on a frequent basis. Only in this way can you check how well your website is performing and drive more revenue to your business.

If you are new to SEO services and you’re looking for a step-by-step process to perform an SEO audit in 2021, we have got you covered. In this article, we look at the simplest and most effective methods for performing a complete audit to improve performance.

Conducting an SEO audit is not as complicated as it sounds. However, you need to have a basic knowledge of how search engines work. So follow the points below to perform a quick audit.

Check for Google Penalties

The first thing you need to check with your SEO audit is whether your site has any Google penalties. This is because you might have unknowingly violated the guidelines. It happens sometimes, and Google imposes a penalty or a manual action that affects a site’s SEO performance. To check this, log into your site’s Google Search Console and navigate to the Security & Manual Action tab.

If there is any type of penalty or manual action, you will see a message from the Google team about the issues. If you notice that there is some kind of penalty, you must fix it as soon as possible. Then submit a review request from the same message. Once you have fixed the issue, Google will re-crawl your website to check whether the issue has been resolved or not.

Utilize an SEO Audit to Determine Page Visibility

It’s vital for a website to have all its pages indexed properly on Google and other search engines. Moreover, it’s easy to perform this test manually right from the Google search tab. All you have to do is type <site:yoursitename.com>. Then you can check how many pages Google has indexed. If you notice that some of your site’s pages are not present on Google search results, check the status in the Google Search Console.

In the URL inspection tool, you can enter the URL to check whether the page is indexed or not. Then, if Google shows that the page is not indexed, you can request manual indexing and get the page indexed within a few days. Thereafter, it’s a good practice to keep a track of all the pages that are indexed and which are not.

Be Sure to Include a Comprehensive Technical Audit

Next, it’s time to conduct a comprehensive technical audit on your site. This will uncover all your site’s issues. You can use any crawling tool to check if your website’s linking structure is healthy. If you find that there are multiple 404 pages and too many redirects, you must take immediate action to resolve them. Otherwise, these small glitches spoil the customer experience and increase your site’s bounce rate.

Several free online tools will help you quickly run a technical audit. This will keep your website’s performance robust and intact. All the crawling and indexing issues will come under the technical SEO audit.

Include an On-Page SEO Audit

On-page factors play a major role in boosting your site’s SEO and bringing more organic traffic to your site. On-page factors include meta tags optimization, keyword optimization, content audit, and overall performance of individual pages. Make sure everything is optimized according to SEO standards to gain the maximum benefits.

Be it title tags, meta descriptions, keyword density, or internal linking—all these factors matter while conducting the on-page SEO audit. You can use a good SEO tool to check on-page factors and perform the necessary changes to improve your site’s performance.

An Off-Page Audit Is Important, Too

An off-page audit matters, too. This is because it will help you understand how well your campaigns are performing for your business. The first thing you need to check is your site’s backlink profile. Filter out all the toxic and low-score links from your site. You can use Google’s disavow tool to remove those links and keep your site’s profile clean.

Also, check if any of the external links have broken and now direct readers to a 404 page. If you find that some external links are broken, you can either contact that website owner or you can remove the link from your article. Doing so will help you to reduce your site’s bounce rate.

Stay Ahead of the Competition with a Full-Scale SEO Audit

These are the top ways to conduct a full-fledged SEO audit in 2021. Conducting regular audits will keep your website ahead of your competitors. If you don’t have an in-house SEO team, then hire a professional SEO agency. They will get you going with a faster turnaround time.