Your website might look great and seem to be in working order, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing all it can to build visibility on Google.
A search engine optimization (SEO) audit gives you a detailed look at how each page on your website is performing in search results, helping you understand what might need to be improved or fixed to bring in more traffic and leads.
Search engines like Google update their algorithms often, and your competitors might also be making consistent updates to their sites. An SEO audit is important because it helps you keep up with changes to the way search works as you simultaneously keep up with the competition.
Why Do You Need an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a full review of your website’s performance in all of the areas that can affect how your pages rank on Google and other search engines.
A typical SEO audit will include all of these pieces:
- Technical SEO factors like your website’s speed, how easy it is to use on mobile devices, and whether any links or other elements are broken
- On-page SEO factors like the quality of the copywriting across your website and the strategic use of keywords
- Off-page SEO factors like your backlink profile and how your site’s authority is rated
The combo of these three main areas gives you a reliable way to fully check on your website’s health and make sure it’s performing the way you want it to.
Why Is an SEO Audit Important?
Search engines sort and rank billions of web pages. If you want Google and other search engines to be more likely to pick your pages over others when serving results to searchers, your content needs to be well-written, technically sound, and designed and developed correctly.
Seemingly tiny issues, like broken links or photos that load slowly, can push your site further down into the pile of results, giving you a lower chance of ranking in an already competitive space. This is why regular SEO audits matter so much for your site.
An audit shows you problems that you most likely wouldn’t catch on your own, giving you a clear checklist of items that might be standing in the way of your ability to rank. Audits also protect the investment you’ve already made in your website. It’s not worth much to you if it isn’t working correctly, and finding and resolving any issues can help you get the ROI you’re looking for.
How Do You Perform an SEO Audit?
SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush have built-in site auditing features that can help you quickly find and fix technical, on-page, and off-page SEO issues. These tools condense all of this info into a comprehensive report, giving you clickable links to the parts of your site where the problems are located.
The Padula Media SEO team uses SEMRush to audit our clients’ sites along with our own. The tool is thorough, well-designed, and well worth the monthly subscription.
Auditing On-Page Content
Using an SEO auditing tool like SEMRush, look for issues on your pages like outdated content, low word counts, and missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. These are all essentially low-hanging fruit on an audit; they are easy to find and relatively easy to resolve.
Here’s a quick checklist of everything to check here:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Header tags (H1, H2, H3)
- URL structure
- Keyword usage
- Content quality
- Content length
- Duplicate content
- Internal linking
- External linking
- Image alt text
- Image file size
- Readability
- Authorship
- Broken links within the pages
Some of these areas spill into the realm of technical SEO, especially image optimization and fixing broken links. Many aspects of SEO fall somewhere between the realm of technical fixes and general content updates.
Auditing Technical SEO
The technical part of your SEO audit will mainly focus on issues that aren’t directly related to the content itself. Issues here can affect your site’s security, the ease with which search engines crawl and index its pages, and anywhere where something doesn’t load the way it should.
Here’s a general checklist for technical SEO fixes:
- Make sure you have an XML sitemap that only includes the pages you want Google to index (show in search results)
- Make sure you have a robots.txt file that includes any specific instructions you want to give crawlers (you can also publish an llms.txt file that serves the same purpose for AI agents)
- Resolve any issues with URL structure
- Check for pages that aren’t indexing but should be
- Fix any additional broken links that aren’t just on one page (these are called sitewide broken links)
- Look for pages that send back 404 errors
- Make sure your site is fast and renders correctly on mobile (this can be a complex and multifaceted issue that calls for help from a web developer)
- Remove any duplicate pages
- Check on structured data/schema markup for pages that should have it
There are more tasks that might come into play as part of a technical audit, but these are some of the most important starting points. They’re also where you may benefit the most from working with a reliable SEO agency.
Auditing Off-Page SEO
This part of the audit process is a bit more nuanced, because it relates to how your site is linked on other sites across the internet. Backlinks can be very valuable for SEO because they let search engines know that your site is being used as a resource for other sites, but they can also be difficult to earn.
Working with an SEO agency is the best way to audit and improve your off-page SEO. An agency can connect you with the most helpful potential sources of links, including local directories, chambers of commerce, sponsors, and other organizations that can boost your domain authority with an earned backlink.
As a disclaimer, we never recommend trying to solicit backlinks yourself. This can lead to you wasting money on spammy or questionable links that can hurt the integrity of your site in the eyes of Google.
Get an Expert SEO Audit and Clear Next Steps
Auditing your own site can be exhausting, and you’ll quickly find yourself in the weeds if you don’t have an existing SEO background. It’s a task that we recommend outsourcing to a trustworthy SEO agency.
The Padula Media SEO team carefully audits every client site as part of our onboarding process, and we pride ourselves on keeping every site in our roster on a regular re-auditing schedule. We pay close attention to on-page, technical, and off-page SEO so that our clients have the best chance of ranking and bringing in leads from their sites.
If you think your website might not be living up to its potential, schedule a call with us today. We’d be happy to walk you through the process and give you clear recommendations for next steps.