Do you want to improve your website traffic? Do you want to rank your site for the keywords that matter the most to your business? Are you looking for ways to increase your business conversions? If your answer is yes…conducting an SEO Audit is crucial.
Since you are spending time and money on your website, it becomes important to perform a regular SEO audit. In order to get your website rank for the target keywords, you need to make sure it is properly optimized according to search engine norms.
Not sure where to start? In this guide, I’ll walk you through how easily you can conduct an SEO audit for your WordPress website.
Table of content
What Is SEO Audit
Performing an SEO audit simply means to evaluate a website on the basis of various factors to analyze how it is performing in SERPs, i.e., Search Engine Result Pages.
This allows you to put light on the issues or pain points that need to be improved in order to boost your page’s search engine performance.
Analyzing the SEO audit report helps you in many ways. You can compare yourself to competitors to find where you are lacking and why they’re performing well. Moreover, you can also identify what changes are required to improve your website performance.
Also Read: The Science Behind a Spotless SEO Strategy Creation
SEO Audit Strategy For Your WordPress Website
Before making any changes to your site, you’ll require a proper strategy for SEO audit that guides you on how to proceed with on every step. The audit will cover your keywords analysis, technical aspects as well as off-site SEO of your website.
Here is a complete SEO checklist you must follow properly:
1. Technical SEO Audit
Using the right tools in your hand, you can perform a technical SEO audit quite easily on your site. Just follow the steps mentioned below:
- Updates to the algorithms are ever-changing. Check for the latest algorithm updates declared by Google or Bing and identify whether you are following all the best practices or not.
- Improve Page Titles and Meta Descriptions. You can use SEO tools like Screaming Frog to identify the missing titles and descriptions for your site.
- Make sure canonical URLs are properly placed.
- Your website speed should be highly optimized.
- Include your keyword in your title and in first 100 words
- Add proper external and internal links
- Use LSI keywords in your content.
- Make sure images and videos are well-optimized
- Track your ranked keywords. You can use tools like SEMrush or Moz.
- Analyze your backlinks. Although backlinks are important but not all backlinks! If not done in the right way, it may harm your website ranking. Use the Ahref tool to gain better understanding about the backlinks on your website.
- Fix broken links
- Optimize your important web pages for Featured Snippets
Also Read: Best WordPress Online Fundraising Plugin
2. Identify Crawling Issues
Think of a situation when you open up a web page and it says…Oops! Page Not Found 🙁
Sometimes, it says…502 Error; Bad Gateway!
What if this happens to your site too? You might end up losing your potentials leads or customers. Hence, identifying crawling issues is a must.
Follow these best practices:
- Make sure the crawl budget of your site is properly optimized so that Google bots don’t invest their time to index irrelevant pages on your website.
- Find out the web pages that are important for you but Google has not indexed yet. The “Index Coverage” report in Search Console will provide you a list of all those pages that are marked as “noindex”.
3. Analyze Website User Experience
If your site visitors are navigating throughout your website freely without any technical issues, that means your site has a great user experience. If it is not, then it’s a problem for you.
Therefore, you need to find out the improvement areas to make your site navigation-friendly for your site visitors.
Also Read: How To Build A Micro-Community Website
4. Mobile-Friendly Websites Are Must
Most of the Google searches come from mobile devices. Therefore, you have to roll out your website for the mobile-first indexing of Google algorithm. It says that Google will use the mobile version of your site for mobile searches as well for desktop searches.
Make sure your website is responsive for mobile. You can use this mobile-friendly tool provided by Google itself to test if your site is responsive or not.
5. Analyze Organic Search Traffic Report
Head over to Google Analytics account and navigate to the organic traffic report. Find if it is trending in the right direction or not.
6. Competitor Analysis
Find your top competitors and do thorough research on their SEO strategy. Find their top ranking keywords, their backlinks, top-performing pages, and so on.
This way, you can easily find out the pain points of your website and create a better strategy to outrank them on SERPs.
SEO Auditing Tools
There are many such SEO Auditing tools in the market that makes your task easier. You can take help of the following SEO auditing tools:
- Google Search Console: It gives you a thorough analysis of every aspect of your website and how it is performing in Google search results.
- Google Analytics: You can view all the relevant metrics of your websites to analyze its performance and other key areas for real-time, user-behavior, conversion, and acquisition of site visitors.
- SEMrush: An SEO tool that offers complete analysis for keywords, marketing insights, competitors’ research, and more.
- Screaming Frog: It is a website crawling software that can be downloaded on your desktop. It provides information related to the broken links, website redirects, page titles & meta data, duplicate content, robots & directives, site architecture, and more.
- Moz Pro Crawl Test: This tool provided complete details about you website health and detect issues and recommend fixes if any.
- Ahref: This is another SEO tool that comes with keywords explorer, site explorer, content explorer, and rank tracker tools.
- Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest provides a complete list of errors that are hindering your site from ranking on the top among search results.
- Pingdom: It is a website monitoring software that combines real user and synthetic monitoring to troubleshoot your website problems.
Also Read: Top WordPress Forum Plugins
WordPress SEO Plugins
Since you’re using WordPress, it is recommended to use SEO plugins to analyze your website performance from time to time.
Here is a complete list of WordPress SEO Plugins that will help you improve your website ranking.
And, here is something more for you:
Now It’s Your Turn!
So, this is how you can perform an SEO audit for WordPress website. Now, it’s your turn to apply all these best SEO practices. Leave your comments below if you have any queries or want to share your cool tip for SEO auditing strategy.
Stay tuned!