Your SEO strategy is doing its job, lifting your brand’s visibility in search engines and driving traffic to your site. But what if you could attract even more visitors? An SEO strategy audit helps you uncover opportunities to display higher in search results and rank for additional critical keywords.
The guide below outlines the five key parts of an SEO audit: reviewing your site’s technical health, updating keywords and content, evaluating backlinks, optimizing on-page elements, and measuring performance.
Whether you’re trying to maintain dominance in rankings or trying to climb the last few positions to the top, use this framework to refresh your tactics and drive more visibility and revenue.
Why Regular SEO Audits Are Critical
Search engine algorithms take hundreds of ranking factors into consideration. There are always areas where you can fall short. Technical issues crop up, content gets stale, and audiences start using different keywords. Your site architecture and linking structures can also change as you add new content.
If your SEO strategies stagnate, your website won’t keep up with these shifts, and your rankings and engagement will drop. A comprehensive SEO strategy audit ensures you keep moving forward, tightening up site speed here and refining content there. These adjustments are difference-makers that can help you rank for more keywords, land a featured snippet, or appear at the top of a map pack. They can also bolster your place at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), making it that much harder for competitors to topple you.
Use the roadmap below to identify areas where you can sharpen your strategy and learn common mistakes that can be barriers to success.
Step 1: Evaluating Your Technical SEO Performance
An SEO strategy audit begins with the technical elements of your website that affect search performance. You’re looking for issues such as slow page loading times, indexing errors, duplicate content, and rendering problems on mobile devices. These problems cause friction when audiences interact with your content or search engines crawl your site.
What To Check
- Site speed and Core Web Vitals: Your website should quickly deliver the information visitors request. Use Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) to assess site speed and user experience. PSI includes features from Lighthouse to diagnose performance, accessibility, and SEO concerns.
- Crawling and indexing: Google Search Console (GSC) reports on problems Google encounters on your website. Review the Page Indexing Report to see which pages aren’t indexed and why. They may be blocked by a robots.txt file or considered duplicate content. GSC also highlights URLs with poor page experience.
- Mobile friendliness: Mobile devices account for more than 62% of web page views worldwide, which is why Google indexes the mobile version of websites first. Google has retired its Mobile-Friendly Test tool, but you can use PSI and Lighthouse to ensure your site functions well on mobile and desktop.
Common Pitfalls
Watch for potential technical SEO slip-ups on a day-to-day basis, such as:
- Publishing web pages with slow-loading elements and render-blocking resources. Make sure large images are optimized and minify CSS and JavaScript files for faster loading.
- Overlooking crawl errors that impact indexing. Fix server errors, broken links, orphaned pages, and misconfigured robots.txt or noindex tags.
- Neglecting to optimize for smartphones. Don’t assume the desktop version of your site works on mobile. Test your site on all screen sizes and devices and ensure it’s easy to navigate.
Step 2: Identifying Content Gaps and Keyword Opportunities
Audiences are drawn to your site by the content you publish. If your keywords miss the mark or if your content is low quality or irrelevant to customers, you’ll struggle to gain search visibility. You might even attract the wrong traffic, affecting conversions. By auditing your SEO strategies, you can find opportunities to refine keywords and content to better meet user needs.
What To Check
- Find underperforming pages: Head to Google Search Console’s Performance Report to find pages that rank well but aren’t generating clicks. These are hidden opportunities to drive more traffic. Review these pages to make sure they satisfy keyword intent and provide value. Optimize the page title and description to spark more clicks and add structured data to land an eye-catching rich snippet.
- Perform a competitive keyword analysis: Use Ahrefs’ Content Gap or Semrush’s Keyword Gap to find keywords competing sites rank for that your brand doesn’t. There may be chances to target additional search terms used by your customers. You might rank for “how to choose a camera” but not “types of cameras,” for example.
- Revisit existing content: Content eventually becomes outdated. Give older pieces a once-over and ensure they’re still accurate and relevant. Update information, refresh the layout, and add images or video to enrich the piece.
Common Pitfalls
Marketers often make mistakes when creating a content strategy. Make sure to avoid:
- Taking a narrow approach to keywords. Audiences use different search terms depending on their stage of the buyer journey and how much research they’ve performed. Don’t just focus on broad, popular keywords. Diversify your strategy to include semantic variations, long-tail keywords, and question keywords. Target various types of search intent and use high-intent keywords such as “free trial,” “on sale,” and “near me” to capture those who are ready to convert.
- Forgetting about previously published content. You can finesse existing content to help drive it up the search rankings, which is just as valuable as creating a piece from scratch. Google the content’s target keyword and compare your piece to top-ranking pages. Look to see if your content is missing important information, needs up-to-date stats, or is somehow missing the mark. Then, find related pieces on your site and add internal links to your refreshed page to pass authority from popular pages.
Step 3: Assessing Backlink Health and Authority
An SEO audit involves analyzing your site’s backlinks, which signal third-party trust in your content. Be wary of spammy backlinks that impact your credibility and quality backlinks that suddenly disappear. Make sure you regularly add new links from reputable sites to deepen your authority.
What To Check
- Perform a link analysis: Use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer or Moz’s Backlink Audit tool to evaluate your inbound links. Identify toxic links to disavow, and see if you’ve lost important backlinks that you should try to reclaim. For example, when you delete a page, you lose its backlinks, but if you redirect users to a relevant page, the backlinks still work, and you maintain some of the authority that page built up.
- Evaluate competitor backlinks: Your rankings depend in large part on how successful your competitors’ SEO strategies are. Find out what domains are linking to your competitors’ sites and not yours using Semrush’s Backlink Gap tool or Ahrefs’ Link Intersect report. This is where you can dig up promising backlinks to expand your profile and keep pace with competitors’ efforts. If competing brands are contributing thought leadership to an industry website, for example, you may want to do the same.
- Review your internal linking structures: Top-performing pages on your website can pass along earned authority to other pages on your site, boosting their credibility and visibility. For example, point visitors from your homepage to a new product page or from a popular blog to a just-published post. The link value of the higher-ranking page will flow through.
Common Pitfalls
Avoid some of these stumbling blocks that can affect your site’s authority, like:
- Ignoring backlinks from suspicious sites. If your overall backlinking profile is strong, one or two backlinks won’t substantially affect it. But don’t let toxic backlinks pile up. Monitor for inbound links from link farms, gambling sites, and poor-quality domains unrelated to your niche and disavow them if needed.
- Missing out on chances to share page authority. Evaluate your best-performing pages and find opportunities to link to less visible pages. Internal linking is an easy way to bolster the authority of pages that need a little support.
Step 4: Reviewing On-Page Optimization
On-page SEO gives search engines clues to your content’s meaning and relevance. As these elements are within your control, they’re an easy way to help improve search performance.
What To Check
- Title tags and meta descriptions: Use Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider to crawl your site and ensure that every URL has a unique and descriptive title tag and meta description. It alerts you to tags that are too long, too short, missing, or duplicated. Check that your tags contain a primary keyword, reflect page content, and engage readers to encourage clicks.
- Heading tags: Organize page content using <h1> to <h6> tags to improve readability. By creating a hierarchy and grouping information, you can better convey the significance of content to search engines. Incorporate the primary keyword into the H1 header to reinforce the topic of the piece.
- Schema markup: Identify opportunities to label content with structured data. Schema markup identifies key information to search engines, such as your logo, date founded, prices, and product availability, and improves your chances of displaying in the SERPs with rich snippets or knowledge panels.
Common Pitfalls
Weaknesses in on-page SEO can pull your pages down in the rankings or discourage clicks. Be mindful of:
- Lengthy meta descriptions. Meta descriptions that are longer than about 158 characters may not display fully in the search results. Write crisp, concise descriptions to encourage clicks and ensure key information isn’t cut off. Mangools has a free SERP simulator to help you hit the right length.
- Keyword-stuffed headers. While it’s tempting to drop keywords throughout your web page to make sure Google understands your topic, repetitive writing impacts user experience. Search engines often penalize over-optimized web pages, so create content naturally for your audience.
Step 5: Measuring SEO Success and Adjusting Strategy
The true test of your strategy’s success is your search performance and conversions. Incorporate analytics into your audit for data-driven insights that guide your next steps. Choose KPIs related to your goals and establish benchmarks to gauge your progress over time.
What To Track
- Organic traffic and rankings: Use Ahrefs Rank Tracker or a similar tool to track your search visibility. You can monitor search position for specific keywords, including the featured snippets, local packs, and knowledge panels that you display for. Google Analytics provides details on how well your SEO efforts are driving organic traffic to your site and can be paired with Google Search Console for deeper insights.
- Click-through rate (CTR): Search visibility gets eyes on your brand, but not everyone will click on your snippet. Use GSC’s Performance Report to see which of your pages have the highest and lowest CTRs in the SERPs. Focus on pages with low CTRs, as they’re prime opportunities to improve traffic. Make them more enticing to audiences by optimizing title tags and using structured data to target rich snippets.
- Conversions and user engagement: Finally, use Google Analytics for insights into how well your pages are driving desired actions. If traffic is high but users are bouncing or not converting, examine how audiences are interacting with your site. Tools such as Hotjar and Crazy Egg feature heat maps that show where audience interest drops off, helping you to strengthen landing pages and calls to action to enhance conversions.
Common Pitfalls
Auditing your SEO strategy can lead to new opportunities for growth, but marketers often get tripped up on:
- Focusing only on rankings. It’s great to land at the top of the SERPs, but visibility alone doesn’t drive conversions. Measure other metrics to monitor progress toward your goals and explore ways to improve performance.
- Not following through after an audit. When you’ve uncovered weaknesses in your approach, determine a course of action to maximize results. Prioritize each item and create a plan for moving forward and boosting your visibility, engagement, and conversions.
Take Your SEO Strategy Further With Victorious
An SEO strategy audit takes a deep dive into your website’s content, on-page optimizations, backlinks, and technical health to find untapped opportunities for growth. At Victorious, our in-depth audits use data-driven insights to develop strategies tailored specifically to your audience, goals, and industry. Get a custom SEO audit and maximize your search potential — schedule a free consultation with our experts today.
