What are the key steps to carry out an SEO audit?

Is your website online, but you end up with poor search engine rankings? Do you want to increase your visibility, but you don’t know what to do? The solution is to perform a SEO Audit.

What is an SEO Audit?

A SEO Audit is an in-depth audit of your website. This makes it possible to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the website and to optimize its natural referencing. This process is essential for website owners who want to be visible to their customers. Visit the site https://www.agence-seo-lyon.fr and entrust your SEO Audit to a qualified SEO agency. This is a comprehensive SEO analysis of the website, which is the first step in a SEO strategy successful. This analysis makes it easy to identify elements of the site that need to be improved or are missing.

Why is an SEO Audit necessary?

The main objective of a SEO audit is to implement effective SEO strategies to correct the errors identified. This strategy is intended to be applied in the short, medium or long term. In any case, the SEO diagnosis of the site will make it possible to:

• identify technical errors on all pages of your site;
• know the position of your site in search engines;
• list all inbound and outbound links to your site;
• analyze all the technical factors that harm your SEO;
• update your website against Google robots.

Taking into account the data and information collected during a SEO Audit, it will be easier to develop an appropriate strategy to improve the performance of your site. This strategy should focus on both technical optimization and on-page SEO quality.

How to carry out the SEO audit of a website?

Check the format of your Sitemap

the Sitemap is a text file containing the list of each URL on your website. This file presents the order in which the pages should be crawled by search engines. If your website does not have one, you should create one as soon as possible. Sitemaps make it easier for crawlers to crawl your site and help them understand the structure. They are particularly useful, especially for large sites with many pages.

Check your robots.txt file

The file robots.txt tells web crawlers which pages they can or cannot crawl when they crawl your site. It can be used to deliberately block certain pages when you don’t want them displayed. However, you may have accidentally blocked them without realizing it. Using a test tool, you can enter a URL and check which pages may have been blocked. This step is very important because it indicates which pages users and crawlers can view and index.

Identify crawl errors

Using SEMrush, you can use your website URL to start an audit. After a few minutes of scanning, you will get a list of errors, warnings, and notices. Errors are the most urgent issues, warnings are potential issues, and notices are issues you need to investigate.

This audit will highlight crawl errors such as H1 tags missing, duplicate content, broken links, and more. This is a great way to highlight site issues and give you insight into what needs to be addressed first.

Check for errors in metadata

Metadata refers to the descriptive elements of a page that don’t actually appear to the user, but in the code. They can, however, be seen on the search engine results page (SERP) when a user searches. The tag ” title is the page title that appears in the blue text you see in listings on results pages. The meta description is a description of the content of the page, visible under the title tag. The title tag and the meta description are both important for your SEO, and each must include the targeted keyword.

Check for broken links and 404 errors

The broken links are links to pages that no longer exist. Whether they are internal or external links, ie inside your site or to another site, broken links are not very aesthetic. When you link to something, you are referring to its content and if it is not present, the user experience is poor. The 404 errors are pages that have been deleted or moved, but to which they have not been redirected. Sometimes when you move content, you need to delete a page, but redirects ensure that if someone clicks on the old page, they will be taken to the new one. Without a redirect, the user will be redirected to an error page. This is where you should use the 301 and 302 redirects to direct users to the new page, 301 being a permanent solution and 302 being temporary.

Test site speed

Site speed has become an essential aspect of technical SEO. In fact, as of 2020, site speed is a very important factor to rank well on Google. The search engine care about user experience. They want their searchers to get the best possible results, and providing them with slow websites doesn’t appeal to them. Users want pages to load quickly and are often frustrated with slow loading sites. Because of this, they are likely to leave your site and choose another result in the SERPs to find the answer to their search query.

Check if the site is mobile-friendly

The mobile searches have become extremely popular. Indeed, the majority of people who do research now have smartphones with internet access. For this reason, search engines have started taking mobile friendliness into consideration due to its importance on user experience.