Digital marketers with the habit of auditing the websites on a regular basis have seen more success in terms of organic performance of the website, conversion rates and achieving their targets.

The SEO website analysis helps you in acquiring in-depth knowledge about SEO audit and following are the topics discussed:

1. What is SEO Audit
2. Why SEO audit is needed or important
3. What does SEO Audit encompass of?
4. What are the tools used or useful for SEO audit?
5. Take away of SEO Audit
6. Action items over issues discovered in Audit
7. Prerequisites for SEO Audit
8. SEO Audit Free Template

However, without practice and without your effort of questioning each and every minute data you observe your audit report cannot be complete, you may have to look into data from all perspectives and sometimes may have to compare to your competitors and understand the ideal scenarios.

What is SEO Audit?

SEO audit is a review process in practice by webmasters or digital marketers in order to find the loopholes/problems/issues on the system, opportunities, scope of improvements, and understanding the current status of the website or performance of the website and thereafter based on the learning or understanding the further implementations will be planned or marketing strategies will be devised accordingly.

SEO Audit is a review process in practice by digital marketers in order to understand the good and bad side of the account and thereafter taking the actions based on the learning of Audit.

Why SEO Audit is important?

Once the set of implementation or basic SEO implementations are done The importance of SEO audit is

SEO audit encompasses review of the website from several perspectives such as,

1. Technical Audit/Review

Technical status of the website plays a crucial role in SEO as the key factors in making a website rank on search engines like load times and the page sizes, the way number of HTTP requests handled by the servers are completely dependent on the technical implementation of the website.

Understanding the technical SEO:

Understanding the technical SEO mainly focuses on understanding the load times, page sizes, the number of HTTP requests and the way they are handled, content compression (HTML, CSS, JS, Images, Videos & Text), CDN and more and the following are the tools used in understanding the same.

• pingdom.com
• GTmetrix
• Google speed test tool
• Yslow plugin for browsers

How is load time affecting SEO:

• A poor load time firstly impacts the crawl/readability of your website by search bots and hence the chances of a website appearing on search results decreases
• A slow loading website is a bad user experience and the users whoever lands on the website may not wait until page load and would quit immediately and this indicated there is no purpose or objective served by the website to the users and hence search engines deprioritize you over your competitors.
  • The user experience is measured by the following metrics:
    • Bounce rate
    • Time spent on the website
    • Number of page views
    • The actions performed on the website such as the scroll of the webpage, filling lead forms, purchase of products, downloads and more.
  • A slow loading website also impacts conversion rates and hence business owners may not see any sales happening or drop in sales with the increase in load times

Take away:

The load times should be as low as possible and ideally, it is suggested not to exceed 3s.

Action items:

You have figure out a way to reduce the load times or get in touch with your web development team to bring it down.

2. Design Audit/Review

• A bad design may lead to too many HTTP requests
• May encompass HTML errors
• May encompass improper usage of HTML tags
  • The above-mentioned design elements may impact the load times when the number of requests is too many
  • The HTML errors and improper usage of HTML tags may miscommunicate the priorities to bots or may create discomfort for bots in understanding the content of the website
  • May also impact the user experience when it is not compatible with all browsers and devices
  • Below are some of the examples of HTML errors or wrong implantations
    • Not using a language tag in the head section
    • Using wrong or low priority text in the heading tags or using the heading tags multiple times
    • Missing the open or closing tags at instances or any other mistakes
    • Having no-index no-follow tags in the head section
    • Designed which may not be compatible with browsers and Mobile devices

Tools Used:

Markup validation tools- https://validator.w3.org/

IIS crawler, this is a package or the module to be installed and enable on windows computers. The IIS crawler cannot be used on Mac or other operating systems.

Here is a link with the details of IIS crawler installation and usage https://moz.com/blog/what-every-seo-should-know-about-iis

Mobile friendly test- https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Yslow, Tools.pingdom,, GTmetrix and Google speed test- To understand the number of requests type of request, the type of content, and more

Take Away:

• There should be few HTTP requests
• There shouldn’t be any HTML errors
• Appropriate usage of HTML tags to be strictly followed
• Make sure the design is compatible with all devices and browsers

Action Items:

• The number request mainly due to too many CSS and JSS have to be reduced by combing the CSS files to few and by combining all the JSS files to few
• In case of too many images, all those have to be combined to one- usually called as sprites, which is similar to collaege in google photos
• The HTML errors have to be removed
• Placing right kind of text in the heading tags
• Making sure the No-index, No-follow is used appropriately.

3. Content Audit/Review

• Text to code ratio: Is the measure of the proportion of the text to the code, the more text you have the higher the text to the code number. Make sure the text to code ratio is always above 30%. More the content more the keywords website ranks for and also user finds value when he lands on the website or web pages.
• Quality of the content:
  • The length or word count of the content: Is a vague way of telling that the content should be very informative and rich with keywords. Obviously, any content written for real users with all types of information will be of decent length. Make sure the content is at least 1500-2000 words on the webpage and it can go up to any length or number of words.
• Keyword usage in the content: Keyword helps real user to understand its all about the things they are trying to discover and hence the user engagement will be good, and meanwhile bots crawl the content, understand and help real user to discover it/find it, which implies your content will be prioritized on the Google search rankings.
• Coverage of important elements/concepts in the content: This implies that the content should have all the topics discussed related to the parent topic, just serving few basic details may not help the user find value in it. A real user visiting the webpage for a product/service may show interest varieties of information related to the parent topic.

E.G: Lets say a webpage about digital marketing services, here digital marketing services is a parent topics and all the details around it such as the types of services under digital marketing- SEO services, SEM services, content marketing services, E-mail service and more are can be referred to as one sub-topic or the child topic, likewise covering details of Pricing, clients handled, Who should take this services and many more, all these are called as subtopics.

• Proper usage of HTML tags in the content, such as
  • Heading tags- There are 6 heading tags H1- H6 used in the HTML/content and make sure you are using H1 and H2 Tags compulsorily, you can figure out the other keywords or heading to be prioritized and put them in the H3, H4, H5 & H6. Search engines/bots refer to the heading tags in order to understand the importance of the keywords or key elements on the webpage. Make sure that you should not have multiple H1 and H2 tags on the webpage.
  • <p>Paragraph tags: Paragraph tags are just used to represent the content as paragraphs in the HTML, they just help improve the readability of content to the user</P>
  • <a href=”https://Kandra.pro/”>Anchor tags</a>- Anchor tags help users and bots to navigate to next set of useful web pages. From the users perspective the engagement on the webpage gets better and from a SEO perspective the crawl rate gets better.
  • Bold tags/Strong tags: Your content will be usually discovered by the keywords and hence you bolding those terms and making it look prominently visible would improve the engagement as the user understands its all the things that he is looking for. Tag example <b>This will get bolded</b> , <strong> This will get boded</strong>
    • The bold tag is called as physical tag and search engines consider it’s for the real users and may consider prioritizing that text, whereas the usage of strong tag for the keywords helps search engines understand that content needs to be prioritized.
  • Plagiarized/Duplicate content on the webpage: The content developed for your webpage should be unique and copying from other websites leads to the penalty by search engines.

Tools Used:

Use Text to code ratio tool

The article development is still in progress.

Ramya Teja

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.