What is an SEO audit? Essential tasks

Good search engine optimization (SEO) of your website is essential for proper positioning in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. To obtain this good optimization, an SEO audit is essential, with it you will obtain a complete analysis of the status of your website and act accordingly. What is an SEO audit? Essential tasks

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit, as the name implies, is an audit of your website, with the aim of identifying everything that is optimized and especially what is not, to detect the main errors, opportunities and SEO difficulties. It does not matter that your website or online store (e-Commerce) is developed in WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Prestashop or any other CMS . The SEO Audit is essential in all websites to define an SEO positioning strategy to reach the first page of Google.

Essential tasks in an SEO audit

In an SEO audit, there are countless characteristics that you should take into account, technical characteristics, security, accessibility, performance, and content marketing. But there are some that are essential to obtain an audit that defines a strategy to reach the best positions in Google:

Brand study

The brand study is necessary to understand the sector, positioning, products, etc., of your organization. Comparing it with other references in the market. This study includes the brand narrative in the sector and keywords that the audience uses to dialogue with your audience of interest and position yourself.

Keyword study

Keywords play a fundamental role since it will be the search engines that will determine when your page should appear in search results such as Google. Doing keyword research, or Keyword Research is the first step before you start writing.

The study of keywords must be aligned with your business objectives, identifying opportunities based on current positioning. Including analysis of keywords for each page, strategic analysis of the keywords of the competition and review of the current searches on your website by users.

Content strategy

Content is another of the most important parts of SEO. The content of your website has to be well optimized, since it is the users, and Google, who are going to interpret all the content. The content marketing strategy for your website allows you to create valuable and relevant content in order to attract your target audience and convert them into customers.

The content strategy is aligned with the study of the brand and the study of keywords. With this, you will have relevant content, be it videos, images, or articles that allow you to connect with your audience and share it with other people who may become customers in the future.

Implementation of technical changes

Technical adjustments on the web and social networks are essential, it is useless to have the best strategy without the best technical implementation. The technical changes cover features such as:

Indexability: Analyze how easy it is for Google and other search engines to be able to correctly crawl your website, particularly the content that we want to appear in search results and be correctly categorized. It is important to check the Meta Tags well.
Meta Tags: All the information that Google shows in its search engine are meta tags. The must-have tags are the title tag and the description tag. The title must be unique, must contain keywords, and must not exceed 75 characters. And the description meta tag should not be repeated either, it should include keywords, a CTA to increase the conversion and not exceed 160 characters that will be displayed in search results on Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
Tracking: You have to ensure that Google bots and others can correctly track your website. The higher the frequency of crawling by Google, the greater the number of pages on your website that it will be able to crawl, and therefore any changes you make to your website will be crawled by Google in no time.
Loading speed: Does your website load in less than 3 seconds? The shorter the loading time of your website, the better the browsing experience of your users, and the higher the frequency of Google crawling, improving SEO accordingly. There are many actions that can be implemented, as dedicated hosting, CDNs, Lazy Loading for images and videos, WebP, Lazy content, technology AMP, etc.
Error analysis: All pages on your website should return a 200 code from the webserver.
Links: All the links on your website should work, all of them! Both internal and external. With special care with external ones that you cannot control, they should all return a 200 code from the webserver.
Sitemap and robots: These two files are essential on your website to indicate to Google all the pages of your website and which parts of the web it should not review because they are, for example, private sections.
Content: There are important content factors that you should correct based on your content strategy, such as identifying duplicate content, keyword density, poor or poor quality content, etc.
Images and videos: It must be ensured that all visual material such as images and videos has the alternative text label "alt", in which a description must be added according to the image or video. It is a basic accessibility task.
Accessibility: Accessibility enables each user to be trained, regardless of disabilities, offering the same experience, without barriers. The web semantics, keyboard navigation, the correct structure of the tables, the alternative text of the images and videos, the contrast of the colors, the font and the size of the text, the line spacing, etc. must be taken into account.

Conclusion

An SEO audit is essential for the positioning of your website and consequently for the return on investment. There are many characteristics that you should take into accounts such as the study of brand, keywords and content, without forgetting the implementation of technical changes. If you want your website to have some visibility and appear on the first page of Google, it will take a lot of work to achieve it.