If you want to improve your website’s performance and rank higher in search engines, you need to conduct a thorough SEO audit. An SEO audit is a process of analyzing your website’s technical and on-page SEO issues, as well as your competitors’ strategies and opportunities. By doing an SEO audit, you can identify and fix the problems that are holding your website back, and optimize it for your target keywords and audience. 

In this guide, we will show you how to do an SEO audit in 11 easy steps, using some of the best SEO audit tools available. We will also provide you with a handy SEO audit checklist that you can use to make sure you don’t miss anything. Let’s get started! 

Step 1: Run a crawl of your website 

The first step of an SEO audit is to crawl your website using a tool like Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) or Google Search Console (GSC). A crawl is where software scans your website to find SEO issues, such as broken links, duplicate content, missing tags, and more. You can set up a crawl by importing your website from GSC to AWT, or by entering your domain name in the tool. Once the crawl is complete, you will get a report with an overall SEO health score and a list of issues to fix. 

Step 2: Identify organic traffic drops and work out what caused them 

The next step is to check if your website has experienced any significant drops in organic traffic, and what may have caused them. You can use a tool like Ahrefs Site Explorer or Google Analytics to see how your traffic has changed over time, and if it aligns with any Google algorithm updates or manual actions. If you find any traffic drops, you should investigate the possible reasons, such as technical errors, content quality issues, link penalties, or changes in user behavior. 

Step 3: Check for duplicate versions of your website 

Another common SEO issue is having duplicate versions of your website indexed by Google. For example, your website may have different URLs depending on whether it uses www or not, or whether it uses HTTP or HTTPS. To Google, these are different websites, and they can cause confusion and dilute your authority. To avoid this, you should make sure that only one version of your website is indexed by Google, and that all the other versions redirect to it. You can check this by typing each version of your URL into your browser and seeing where it ends up. If it doesn’t redirect to the preferred version, you should set up a 301 redirect to fix it. 

Step 4: Speed up your site 

Site speed is an important ranking factor for Google, as well as a key factor for user experience. A slow-loading site can frustrate your visitors and make them bounce away. To speed up your site, you should first identify the issues that are slowing it down, such as large images, unoptimized code, or server delays. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to analyze your site speed and get suggestions on how to improve it. 

Step 5: Find and delete “zombie pages” 

Zombie pages are pages on your website that don’t serve any purpose or value for your visitors or for SEO. They may be outdated, irrelevant, low-quality, or duplicate pages that are taking up space and resources on your site. Zombie pages can hurt your SEO by wasting your crawl budget, diluting your authority, and creating a poor user experience. To find and delete zombie pages, you should use a tool like AWT or GSC to see all the pages on your site that are indexed by Google and filter out the ones that have low traffic, low engagement, low relevance, or low quality. Then, you should either delete them or improve them. 

Step 6: Check your organic traffic 

After fixing the technical issues on your site, you should check how well your site is performing in terms of organic traffic. Organic traffic is the traffic that comes from search engines like Google or Bing. It is one of the most important metrics for measuring the success of your SEO efforts. To check your organic traffic, you can use tools like Ahrefs Site Explorer or Google Analytics to see how many visitors are coming to your site from search engines, what keywords they are using, what pages they are landing on, how long they are staying on your site, and what actions they are taking. 

Step 7: Improve your on-page SEO 

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing the content and elements of each page on your site for your target keywords and audience. On-page SEO includes things like title tags, meta descriptions, headings, images, internal links, and more. To improve your on-page SEO, you should use tools like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer or GSC to find the best keywords for each page on your site based on their search volume, difficulty, and intent. Then, you should use tools like AWT or Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check if your pages are properly optimized for those keywords and make the necessary changes. 

Step 8: Set up keyword rank tracking 

Keyword rank tracking is the process of monitoring how your site ranks for your target keywords in search engines. Keyword rank tracking can help you measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, identify new opportunities, and spot any issues or changes in your rankings. To set up keyword rank tracking, you can use tools like Ahrefs Rank Tracker or GSC to see how your site ranks for your target keywords over time, and get alerts on any significant changes. 

Step 9: Analyze your backlink profile 

Backlinks are links from other websites to your site. They are one of the most important ranking factors for Google, as they indicate the popularity and authority of your site. To analyze your backlink profile, you should use tools like Ahrefs Site Explorer or GSC to see how many backlinks your site has, where they are coming from, what pages they are linking to, and what anchor texts they are using. You should also check the quality and relevance of your backlinks, and remove any spammy or harmful ones. 

Step 10: Fix broken links 

Broken links are links that lead to pages that no longer exist or have moved. Broken links can hurt your SEO by creating a bad user experience, wasting your crawl budget, and losing link authority. To fix broken links, you should use tools like AWT or Screaming Frog SEO Spider to find all the broken links on your site, both internal and external. Then, you should either update them with the correct URL, redirect them to a relevant page, or remove them altogether. 

Step 11: Competitor analysis 

Competitor analysis is the process of researching and analyzing the strategies and performance of your competitors in search engines. Competitor analysis can help you discover new keywords, content ideas, link opportunities, and best practices that you can use to improve your own site. To do a competitor analysis, you should use tools like Ahrefs Site Explorer or GSC to find out who your main competitors are, what keywords they are ranking for, what pages they are getting traffic from, what backlinks they have, and what gaps they have that you can exploit. 

That’s it! You have completed an SEO audit of your website using some of the best SEO audit tools available. Now you have a clear picture of how well your website is optimized for search engines, and what areas you need to improve. For any kind of help or assistance in doing an SEO audit, feel free to contact us.