How To Do Manual SEO Audit In 10 Easy Steps? (Checklist and Tools)

Do you own a website? Do you want it to rank higher on the search results page? 

Every website owner or digital marketer aims to drive more traffic to a website. But, there are countless websites in every industry that have made search engines more careful in determining their search engine rankings. 

Consequently, SEO is used for increasing the website ranking involving various elements. It can be challenging to monitor your website’s SEO frequently by auditing multiple aspects. 

In this article, we will tell you how you can do an SEO audit of your website in 10 easy steps and the best tools. 

What Is An SEO Audit?

SEO Audit is a process for analyzing the optimization of your website with the best SEO practices. Firstly, you need to make an SEO plan that can bring results before you measure them. 

The main objective of an SEO Audit is to:

• Identify important gaps
• Conduct marketing analysis of competitors
• Recognize opportunities for improvement in technical SEO, on-page, user experience (core web vitals).
• Get a note of what’s not working

This standard process is like a regular ‘health check’ for a website that benefits its health. Since an SEO Audit comprehensively analyzes a website, that is essential for ensuring its growth. 

Let’s tell you ten easy steps to help you with an audit check. 

How To Do Manual SEO Audit In 10 Easy Steps?

These are ten simple steps to do an easy SEO audit of your website as follow:

1. Building Internal And External Links

The beginning of an SEO audit begins by creating links. It’s essential to ensure the reliability and authority of your website. Link building is all about getting links to your site from other websites that boost the ranking of your website. Consequently, Internal and external links are an essential part of SEO. 

If you are getting no or fewer links to your website, you are losing out on a significant chance to grow your search engine rankings.

Search engines take into account the number of links while ranking a website. At the same time, it helps to attract the right audience to your website from your industry.  

Building Links boosts the website metrics and enhances their exposure. A prime reason Google recommends building Links is to create and improve relationships within your industry. 

Some ways to get Backlinks for your website are:

• Guest Blogging
• Get reviews
• Create engaging content
• Use Public Relations
• Establish relationships with other website owners in your industry
• Find and build broken links

2. Improve Website Structure

Information architecture denotes how information is structured on your website. For instance, your website shall have Home Page, an About us page, a Blog page, services, and a contact us page. It can further have sections like:

A. Home Page

• Introduction of the company
• Products and Services
• Testimonials

B. About Page 

• Company Journey
• Team Members

C. Blog Page 

• Blog 1
• Blog 2
• Blog 3

D. Services Page 

• Service 1
• Service 2
• Service 3
• Service 4

E. Contact us Page 

• Address
• Contact number
• Email I’d
• Social media Links

This site structure enables search engines to know the most significant pages of your website. Consequently, it influences the pages that can rank at the top.

When you grow and increase the number of pages on your website, it becomes confusing for the user and search engines. So, the site structure is a way to organize all those pages. 

 Four ways to improve your site structure 

• Have a simple top-level navigation
• Use easy and simple URLs
• Take influence from industry leaders
• Ensure consistency

3. Remove Low-quality Content

Thin or low-quality content is on-page content with little or no value to the readers. It can be stolen, automatically generated, or other content that is not useful. At the same time, it can include content with keyword stuffing. Google has a special algorithm called ‘Panda’ that deals with such content. 

It’s not going to help your SEO. Instead, it can decrease your chances of getting placed on the Search engine results page. Search engines like Google reject this content. For instance, a 300-word Blog on a complicated topic is of no use to the reader as it cannot provide value. 

The majority of the time, long-form content is appreciated by search engines. Also, it gives more chances for linking and keyword use. Search engines always prefer high-quality SEO- optimized content that shall be useful to their readers. 

Best Ways to avoid Thin content 

• Write atheist 300 words or more
• Don’t overuse keywords
• Use a variety of keywords
• Do readability check

4. Recognize And Eliminate Plagiarized Content

Google and other search engines are smart enough to identify plagiarized or paraphrased content. Also, it can differentiate between intentional and unintentional plagiarized content. There are two different kinds of duplicate content:

1. Internal duplicate content
2. External duplicate content

Search Engines issue penalties or take down sites with such copied content. For this reason, website owners always stress original and unique content.

It decreases your page rankings as the search engine chooses the website with original content for top ranking. Given all these factors, you must identify and eliminate plagiarized content from your website. 

Some ways to remove duplicate content from your website are:

1. Avoid intentionally copying content
2. Use a plagiarism checker
3. Use links to the original content
4. Add H-tags
5. Create original URLs

5. Check Keyword Use

Keywords are terms or phrases that users enter to find a particular piece of content. Also, it tells the search engine about the content of your website, which determines its rankings.

When you add keywords to your website, users will find the page in the search engine results when they type their particular keyword. The objective of SEO is to drive organic traffic to your website, and keywords play an essential role in it. 

It is important to optimize all your website pages with keywords. This will make your pages rank organically higher on the search results page. But you need to avoid keyword stuffing. 

How to find the ideal Keywords for your website content? 

1. Make a list of topics
2. Think about keyword ideas as a user
3. See for related search terms
4. Use keyword research tools
5. Check the selected keywords for volume, relevance, and authority
6. Add a mix of keywords
7. Naturally include keywords in your content
8. Check the keyword density

6. Optimize Meta Tags

Meta tags provide information about the contents and highlights of a web page to the search engine. Google takes note of Meta Tags for indexing, crawling, and ranking a page for SEO. 

Since it appears directly on the search results page, it gives the reader an idea about the website page’s contents in a few words. Consequently, the websites use it as a promotional element too. 

Since Google displays the first 40 words, you can add target keywords in the Meta tag. It can combine keywords, descriptions, and calls to action. Your Meta Tags must be unique for each page and include a relevant content description. 

7. Update Your Page Frequently

Another important step for SEO is fresh content. Google and other search engines give preference to fresh content. They aim to provide fresh and useful content to the user. Consequently, you will see that most top-ranking sites in any search query will have recent content. 

For this reason, the sites that are regularly updated get a better ranking. Firstly, you must update your website’s top or most important pages. Secondly, the pages that can rise in the SERP can be updated. It drives more traffic and sales to your website. 

Ways to keep your web content fresh:

1. Update information on posts that drive good traffic
2. Delete outdated pages
3. Merge similar posts
4. Use google trends to take a nite of popular keywords and add them to your content
5. Use active voice

8. Keep A Check On The Page Run Speed

A quick page loading speed is essential for both SEO and driving traffic. If your website’s page run speed decreases, it affects user experience. Users generally stay for less than 15 seconds on a website. So, when your website does not load quickly, the user will leave and check other sites. 

An important reason for it is that a majority of mobile users do searches. If your website loads faster, the search engine rewards it with a good organic ranking.

You can frequently check your page run speed with page speed analytics. Moreover, you will get recommendations on improving the page speed. 

Some factors that influence your web page speed are the installed plugins, themes, the number of videos and images on the site, and the coding script. It impacts the page loading speed of the website and increases bounce rates.

As per an interesting fact, the increasing page loading speed from 1 to 3 seconds increases the chance of a bounce by 32%. 

How can you increase the speed of your website Pages? 

• Choose the right website hosting solution
• Compress website images
• Decreases page redirects
• Enable browser caching
• Use a content delivery network
• Remove unimportant plugins

9. Identify Errors

You might have come across websites that show a 404′ page not found. So, you leave the site and check for another one. It happens due to errors or broken links. Users will see an error if any part of your content is deleted from the website page. It won’t make you liable for a penalty. 

But, it can be problematic for your site structure, making it difficult to move from one page to another. Several site audit tools can help you identify the errors behind ‘404’ on your site. Consequently, you can fix those errors or broken links. 

10. Take Note Of Index Issues

Whenever you search online, the search results come from its index. The index is a collection of countless web pages from different websites. A few pages of every website are indexed in search results. 

Consequently, you need important and useful pages for the audience on your website. Don’t add pages that may not be useful to your visitors, which can negatively impact SEO.

You can go to the site Audit and check the Indexability report. In that, go to the “Noindex page” warnings. Google will not index the pages with these warnings; you will have to remove them or edit them. 

Apart from these, you need to check a few things: 

• Core Web Vitals: Google identifies the user experience of a website by analyzing the core web vitals. It includes analyzing the page’s load time, interactivity, and content stability. It’s based on Chrome User Experience (CrUX) data.
• Broken Links: Broken links are never good for a website. If you have broken links on your website, you need to eliminate them. You can go to the ‘Internal pages’ section in the audit suite and click ‘broken.’ You will get several broken links on the site and can remove them.
• Sitemap Issues: Sitemap is a list that includes the pages that you want the search engine to index from your website. So, avoid choosing redirects, non-canonicals, or dead pages that can negatively impact you.
• On-Page Elements: All your indexed pages must include on-page like titles tags, meta descriptions, and Htags. You can check their issues by going to the ‘Issues’ tab in the content report.
• Mobile Friendliness: Most search engine users search from their mobile devices. For this reason, Google has added a mobile Friendliness factor for indexing. To check the mobile Friendliness of your website by going to Google Search Console. There you can see whether any URLs have problems that affect mobile usability.

These are ten easy steps for a quick SEO audit for your website. Next, let’s talk about the top SEO audit tool for it. 

Top 5 Best SEO Audit Tools For Your Website

Many tools can help you in performing your SEO audit efficiently. Some of the top SEO audit tools are:

1. Google Analytics

The leading search engine Google has its SEO audit tool Google analytics. It is a comprehensive tool that helps you analyze the new SEO trends and gives details about your website’s audience. It is free to create an account on Google analytics.  

You can easily track the performance and get visitors’ details of your website with other statistics. Small and medium-scale retail websites often use it to get details on customer behavior and page run speed. All these details can help you enhance your digital marketing strategy and drive more traffic to your website. 

2. Screaming Frog

Screaming frog is another essential tool for SEO. It helps to analyze the site structure and collect other technical stats of your website. This SEO audit tool is quick and offers advanced insights. It can easily find broken links, duplicate content missing title tags and check redirects for your website. 

Screaming frog is a user-friendly SEO audit tool with a transparent interface, and you get all the useful features in one place. 

3. SEMrush

Over the years, SEMrush has become a leading name in the SEO World. This all-in-one digital marketing suite has multiple tools for SEO. For instance, it has keyword research, paid ad research, content optimization, and social media monitoring tools. 

For SEO Audit, it has SEMrush’s Site Audit tool that helps the web page to identify problems and grow your website. It is a single tool that can help you analyze problems in internal linking, HTTPS security protocols, meta tags, SEO content, website crawl ability, page loading speeds, etc. 

4. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO audit tool. It offers services of Site Explorer, a Keyword Explorer, a Rank Tracker, and a Content Explorer with its Site Audit tool.

Like other SEO audit tools, it helps to recognize problems like broken pages and redirects, nofollow links and orphan pages, duplicate pages, and low word count articles. Also, it can point out any performance issues in your website. 

5. SEO Power Suite

SEO Power Suite is an affordable SEO audit tool for your website. It has both free and paid premium versions for users. It has four tool kits: a Website Auditor, Rank Tracker, a backlink research tool, and Link Assistant for link building and management. 

This single tool helps with an on-page audit, reporting, and Technical SEO. SEO PowerSuite enables you to crawl through Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Moreover, it identifies problems in search engine indexation and rankings, duplicate content, broken links, etc. 

Conclusion

As a website owner and digital marketing pr SEO expert, you must conduct frequent SEO Audits for your website.

A simple SEO audit with these ten easy steps will help you do a comprehensive SEO audit for all the SEO elements on your website. It can help you increase your website’s search engine ranking, which drives more traffic and increases conversions.