Tag: Audit

How to Run a Content Audit (2022 Update)

Have you lost track of all the content you’ve created? It’s easy to do.

If you’re anything like me, you’re so focused on coming up with ideas and creating new articles that you might lose track of what you’ve already created.

But the truth is the content you’ve already created is just as valuable as anything you’re yet to create, possibly more so. Optimizing it just a little bit could result in thousands of dollars more in revenue.

That’s why you need a content audit of existing pages. In this article, I’ll cover:

  • What a content audit is
  • Why you need an audit
  • Content audit tools at your disposal
  • How to run a content audit step by step

Ready to create an inventory of your assets? Then let’s begin.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of creating an inventory of your website’s content assets and analyzing them against a set of criteria.

It’s a way of keeping track of the content you have created, seeing which assets need improving, and identifying which topics to tackle next.

A content audit can be as brief or as detailed as you want. You can audit your entire site, just your blog, or even just a category of your blog. They can all offer value and insight. I recommend doing a comprehensive audit, though. The time you spend on your audit now will pay off later.

Why Does My Website Need a Content Audit?

You should carve out the time to do a content audit to see where the gaps are and to start creating better content.

Why should you do a content audit? There are a number of reasons a content audit can help your website perform better.

A content audit offers a heap of benefits. These include:

  • Analyzing the performance of your content to help you make data-backed decisions about which pages to improve.
  • Highlighting pages on your site that aren’t optimized for SEO. Some pages may be missing metadata or have a poor heading structure, for instance.
  • Identifying SEO opportunities and content gaps that you can fill with new content.
  • Improving the quality of content on your site to upgrade the reader experience.
  • Identifying content you can repurpose.
  • Creating a complete inventory of content that makes managing your content strategy easier in the future.
  • Improving your content’s accessibility and inclusivity.

Whether or not you see value in running a content audit, there are certain points in the life of your website when running a content audit becomes essential. Consider running a content audit if:

  • Your website is a few years old and you’ve never run an audit.
  • There’s no clear strategy or you’ve inherited a content marketing strategy from another team.
  • You’re redesigning your website.
  • You think you’ve created content on every possible topic in your niche.

Determine Your Content Audit’s Purpose

How you approach a content audit will depend on your goals. While you can create a content audit that achieves all of the benefits I listed above, it will be much more effective if you pick one or two goals to focus on.

For instance, if you want to use a content audit to improve your SEO, then you’ll want to focus on identifying content gaps and pages with missing metadata. That means paying particular attention to the technical SEO of each page. 

Overview of SEO issues discovered on a web page.

Given you are reading a digital marketing blog, I’m going to write the rest of this guide as if you were running an SEO-driven content audit. You can still use this guide if you’re looking to improve your reader’s experience or make your content more inclusive and accessible, but just know some of the more technical aspects may not be relevant.

Content Audit Tools

Software tools are an essential part of the content audit process. Rather than go through your website manually, noting each issue in turn, you can use the following tools to automate much of the process.

Ubersuggest

If you’re running a content audit to improve your SEO, Ubersuggest is essential. Running a site audit is easy. Just enter your URL, click “Search,” and click “Site Audit” on the left. Think of this as a quick, free overall look at how your website is doing.

You’ll also get a snapshot of which SEO issues are most prevalent on your site and how critical they are.

Ubersuggest's homepage showing various SEO metrics.

Google Analytics

Do you want to compare the performance of your pages? Then use Google Analytics to find traffic data for each page.

Homepage of Google Analytics.

Note: Be aware that Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023, in favor of Google Analytics 4. If you haven’t already, you should make the switch to GA4 before completing your content audit. The faster you switch, the more historical data you’ll have and the easier it will be to reuse your content audit in the future.   

Broken Link Checkers

As you analyze your content, you’ll want to find and fix broken links. Integrity, Ahrefs, and Dead Link Checker can help you there.  

A broken link checker tool named Integrity.

Content Inventory

You could manually pull each content link associated with your website, but that could take far too long and you could risk overlooking some things. Instead, you may want to try a content inventory tool like Screaming Frog or DynoMapper.

A content inventory tool named Dynomapper.

Website Content Audit Steps

It may seem like there’s a lot of work involved with creating a content audit. But it’s easy when you break it down into manageable steps.

#1: Create a List of Your Content Assets

The first step of a website content audit is to make an inventory of your assets. Seeing all of them in one location makes it much easier to analyze content performance, highlight areas to improve, and update each asset methodically.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool is the best way to extract content assets from your site. It’s free to use if your site has less than 500 pages. But you can also use any of the other content extractors I mentioned above.

Whichever tool you use, export your data into a spreadsheet, making sure relevant data points (word count, meta description, target keyword, no. of images, etc.) are included. You may also want to add traffic data from Google Analytics to each page so you can analyze content performance alongside technical SEO metrics.

Creating a list of content assets using Microsoft Excel.

Content Audit Templates

As I explained above, you will want to build a content audit spreadsheet so you can keep all the data in one place. You can build one from scratch, download one of the following templates, or use these as a launching point and customize your spreadsheet.

Keep in mind the goals we discussed earlier. There are lots of stats or data points you could pull alongside each content. However, some data is going to be more relevant to you than others.

If you are using this audit to improve your content marketing engagement, you will want to check information about clickthroughs, social media engagement, comments, and so on.

If your goal is associated with SEO, you may want to include warnings and recommendations you gather from Ubersuggest.

#2: Create a List of Content Issues to Identify

Now you have all your content assets in one place; it’s time to analyze them. Go through each piece of content one at a time to see how it’s performing, whether it’s missing metadata or there are any obvious ways it can be improved.

Here are a few things to look for, in particular:

  • Duplicate Content: Search engines prioritize fresh content. If you have a lot of duplicate content living on different pages or posts, you’ll want to remove or rewrite those pages. 
  • Outdated Content: People don’t want to read outdated content, and search engines overlook it too. Update it wherever possible.
  • Content Gaps: What’s missing in your content? Are there topics you haven’t addressed yet? Target markets you haven’t spoken to? Being able to look at everything at once can help you find the gaps and fill them in.  
  • Target Keyword: Does the content asset target a particular keyword and include it in the copy?
  • Metadata: Have you written metadata descriptions for all pages? This spreadsheet is going to help you see which ones need to be written and which ones are repetitive and should be updated.
  • Image Data: Does every image have a descriptive title and alt tag? This will ensure your images are SEO-optimized and accessibility-friendly.
  • Word Count: Do your pages and posts have enough words to optimize for SEO? Or are they too short? Check that word count to see if pages need to be updated or edited down.

Keep track of everything by creating a note next to each asset about why it needs improving. You can also color-code your spreadsheet based on the type of optimization required, but this can quickly become complicated if a single asset has multiple issues.

#3: Address Content Issues

You can’t do everything at once, so now it’s time to prioritize your content issues. One strategy is to work through each asset numerically, starting with those at the top of the spreadsheet. Another is to group each optimization issue together and tackle them in bulk. For instance, you could update the meta data on every page, then move on to fixing image issues and so on.

Alternatively, use Ubersuggest to prioritize content issues for you. When you run an SEO audit on Ubersuggest, you’ll receive recommendations based on an issue’s difficulty and SEO impact. 

Ranking content issues based on how difficult they are to fix and the impact of them.

Focusing on tasks with a high SEO impact and low difficulty will give you a series of quick wins. But you could also prioritize all of the easy tasks to get the ball rolling if you’re not that confident.

Content audits work best when they are tackled by several people, so don’t be afraid to ask for help and split up the work. Maybe you can take care of on-page issues while a colleague addresses the content gaps your audit has highlighted.

FAQs

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of creating an inventory of your website’s pages and analyzing their performance.  

Why Do I Need To Do a Content Audit on My Website?

Content audits help you identify topic gaps, problems, and areas for improvement on your website. Good content helps you rank better in Google and can earn you more traffic, conversions, and revenue.

What Are Some Tools I Can Use for Content Audits?

You can use tools like Ubersuggest, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to run a content audit.

Where Do I Start With a Content Audit?

You should start your content by compiling a list of all of your content assets. You can do this by pulling a report through tools like Screaming Frog and then analyzing the results in a spreadsheet.

Conclusion

A content audit may feel overwhelming at first glance. But don’t let that stop you.

Starting a website content audit is one of the best steps you can take to improve your content marketing strategy. Compiling all of your assets in one place makes it much easier to see what needs improving and which assets are missing. It also makes it easier to prioritize and fix issues.

Once you’ve run a content audit once, managing your assets in the future becomes a breeze. You’ll have no problem taking your content marketing efforts to the next level. 

What issues has your content audit identified?

How to Run a Content Audit (2022 Update)

Have you lost track of all the content you’ve created? It’s easy to do.

If you’re anything like me, you’re so focused on coming up with ideas and creating new articles that you might lose track of what you’ve already created.

But the truth is the content you’ve already created is just as valuable as anything you’re yet to create, possibly more so. Optimizing it just a little bit could result in thousands of dollars more in revenue.

That’s why you need a content audit of existing pages. In this article, I’ll cover:

  • What a content audit is
  • Why you need an audit
  • Content audit tools at your disposal
  • How to run a content audit step by step

Ready to create an inventory of your assets? Then let’s begin.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of creating an inventory of your website’s content assets and analyzing them against a set of criteria.

It’s a way of keeping track of the content you have created, seeing which assets need improving, and identifying which topics to tackle next.

A content audit can be as brief or as detailed as you want. You can audit your entire site, just your blog, or even just a category of your blog. They can all offer value and insight. I recommend doing a comprehensive audit, though. The time you spend on your audit now will pay off later.

Why Does My Website Need a Content Audit?

You should carve out the time to do a content audit to see where the gaps are and to start creating better content.

Why should you do a content audit? There are a number of reasons a content audit can help your website perform better.

A content audit offers a heap of benefits. These include:

  • Analyzing the performance of your content to help you make data-backed decisions about which pages to improve.
  • Highlighting pages on your site that aren’t optimized for SEO. Some pages may be missing metadata or have a poor heading structure, for instance.
  • Identifying SEO opportunities and content gaps that you can fill with new content.
  • Improving the quality of content on your site to upgrade the reader experience.
  • Identifying content you can repurpose.
  • Creating a complete inventory of content that makes managing your content strategy easier in the future.
  • Improving your content’s accessibility and inclusivity.

Whether or not you see value in running a content audit, there are certain points in the life of your website when running a content audit becomes essential. Consider running a content audit if:

  • Your website is a few years old and you’ve never run an audit.
  • There’s no clear strategy or you’ve inherited a content marketing strategy from another team.
  • You’re redesigning your website.
  • You think you’ve created content on every possible topic in your niche.

Determine Your Content Audit’s Purpose

How you approach a content audit will depend on your goals. While you can create a content audit that achieves all of the benefits I listed above, it will be much more effective if you pick one or two goals to focus on.

For instance, if you want to use a content audit to improve your SEO, then you’ll want to focus on identifying content gaps and pages with missing metadata. That means paying particular attention to the technical SEO of each page. 

Given you are reading a digital marketing blog, I’m going to write the rest of this guide as if you were running an SEO-driven content audit. You can still use this guide if you’re looking to improve your reader’s experience or make your content more inclusive and accessible, but just know some of the more technical aspects may not be relevant.

Content Audit Tools

Software tools are an essential part of the content audit process. Rather than go through your website manually, noting each issue in turn, you can use the following tools to automate much of the process.

Ubersuggest

If you’re running a content audit to improve your SEO, Ubersuggest is essential. Running a site audit is easy. Just enter your URL, click “Search,” and click “Site Audit” on the left. Think of this as a quick, free overall look at how your website is doing.

You’ll also get a snapshot of which SEO issues are most prevalent on your site and how critical they are.

Google Analytics

Do you want to compare the performance of your pages? Then use Google Analytics to find traffic data for each page.

Homepage of Google Analytics.

Note: Be aware that Google is sunsetting Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023, in favor of Google Analytics 4. If you haven’t already, you should make the switch to GA4 before completing your content audit. The faster you switch, the more historical data you’ll have and the easier it will be to reuse your content audit in the future.   

Broken Link Checkers

As you analyze your content, you’ll want to find and fix broken links. Integrity, Ahrefs, and Dead Link Checker can help you there.  

A broken link checker tool named Integrity.

Content Inventory

You could manually pull each content link associated with your website, but that could take far too long and you could risk overlooking some things. Instead, you may want to try a content inventory tool like Screaming Frog or DynoMapper.

A content inventory tool named Dynomapper.

Website Content Audit Steps

It may seem like there’s a lot of work involved with creating a content audit. But it’s easy when you break it down into manageable steps.

#1: Create a List of Your Content Assets

The first step of a website content audit is to make an inventory of your assets. Seeing all of them in one location makes it much easier to analyze content performance, highlight areas to improve, and update each asset methodically.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool is the best way to extract content assets from your site. It’s free to use if your site has less than 500 pages. But you can also use any of the other content extractors I mentioned above.

Whichever tool you use, export your data into a spreadsheet, making sure relevant data points (word count, meta description, target keyword, no. of images, etc.) are included. You may also want to add traffic data from Google Analytics to each page so you can analyze content performance alongside technical SEO metrics.

Creating a list of content assets using Microsoft Excel.

Content Audit Templates

As I explained above, you will want to build a content audit spreadsheet so you can keep all the data in one place. You can build one from scratch, download one of the following templates, or use these as a launching point and customize your spreadsheet.

Keep in mind the goals we discussed earlier. There are lots of stats or data points you could pull alongside each content. However, some data is going to be more relevant to you than others.

If you are using this audit to improve your content marketing engagement, you will want to check information about clickthroughs, social media engagement, comments, and so on.

If your goal is associated with SEO, you may want to include warnings and recommendations you gather from Ubersuggest.

#2: Create a List of Content Issues to Identify

Now you have all your content assets in one place; it’s time to analyze them. Go through each piece of content one at a time to see how it’s performing, whether it’s missing metadata or there are any obvious ways it can be improved.

Here are a few things to look for, in particular:

  • Duplicate Content: Search engines prioritize fresh content. If you have a lot of duplicate content living on different pages or posts, you’ll want to remove or rewrite those pages. 
  • Outdated Content: People don’t want to read outdated content, and search engines overlook it too. Update it wherever possible.
  • Content Gaps: What’s missing in your content? Are there topics you haven’t addressed yet? Target markets you haven’t spoken to? Being able to look at everything at once can help you find the gaps and fill them in.  
  • Target Keyword: Does the content asset target a particular keyword and include it in the copy?
  • Metadata: Have you written metadata descriptions for all pages? This spreadsheet is going to help you see which ones need to be written and which ones are repetitive and should be updated.
  • Image Data: Does every image have a descriptive title and alt tag? This will ensure your images are SEO-optimized and accessibility-friendly.
  • Word Count: Do your pages and posts have enough words to optimize for SEO? Or are they too short? Check that word count to see if pages need to be updated or edited down.

Keep track of everything by creating a note next to each asset about why it needs improving. You can also color-code your spreadsheet based on the type of optimization required, but this can quickly become complicated if a single asset has multiple issues.

#3: Address Content Issues

You can’t do everything at once, so now it’s time to prioritize your content issues. One strategy is to work through each asset numerically, starting with those at the top of the spreadsheet. Another is to group each optimization issue together and tackle them in bulk. For instance, you could update the meta data on every page, then move on to fixing image issues and so on.

Alternatively, use Ubersuggest to prioritize content issues for you. When you run an SEO audit on Ubersuggest, you’ll receive recommendations based on an issue’s difficulty and SEO impact. 

Ranking content issues based on how difficult they are to fix and the impact of them.

Focusing on tasks with a high SEO impact and low difficulty will give you a series of quick wins. But you could also prioritize all of the easy tasks to get the ball rolling if you’re not that confident.

Content audits work best when they are tackled by several people, so don’t be afraid to ask for help and split up the work. Maybe you can take care of on-page issues while a colleague addresses the content gaps your audit has highlighted.

FAQs

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the process of creating an inventory of your website’s pages and analyzing their performance.  

Why Do I Need To Do a Content Audit on My Website?

Content audits help you identify topic gaps, problems, and areas for improvement on your website. Good content helps you rank better in Google and can earn you more traffic, conversions, and revenue.

What Are Some Tools I Can Use for Content Audits?

You can use tools like Ubersuggest, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to run a content audit.

Where Do I Start With a Content Audit?

You should start your content by compiling a list of all of your content assets. You can do this by pulling a report through tools like Screaming Frog and then analyzing the results in a spreadsheet.

Conclusion

A content audit may feel overwhelming at first glance. But don’t let that stop you.

Starting a website content audit is one of the best steps you can take to improve your content marketing strategy. Compiling all of your assets in one place makes it much easier to see what needs improving and which assets are missing. It also makes it easier to prioritize and fix issues.

Once you’ve run a content audit once, managing your assets in the future becomes a breeze. You’ll have no problem taking your content marketing efforts to the next level. 

What issues has your content audit identified?

The post How to Run a Content Audit (2022 Update) appeared first on #1 SEO FOR SMALL BUSINESSES.

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The 15-Step SEO Audit That Is Guaranteed to Improve Rankings

You’ve set up your website and it’s looking good, but it’s not engaging visitors, and your traffic is falling.

You’re not alone. According to Ahrefs, 90.63 percent of content gets no organic traffic from Google.

How do you solve the problem? The answer might be discovered by running a website audit.

A website audit can increase your rankings along with visitor numbers and conversions.

If you’re not sure where to start, this guide talks you through it step-by-step.

However, before we get into it, let’s explain what an SEO audit is and why it’s necessary.

What Is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a comprehensive analysis of a website and its search engine ranking (SERPs), including where improvements can be made.

When you conduct an SEO audit, you’re assessing your on-site optimization, identifying areas of opportunity for improvement, and gaining recommendations to improve your site’s search position.

An SEO audit can also uncover opportunities for improvement, including:

  • site speed
  • content gaps
  • technical SEO issues that reduce traffic
  • where competitors are outranking you
  • ways to improve UX

The average user spends 54 seconds on a website, and they make assumptions about your business even faster. According to one study, your site has less than two-tenths of a second to make a great first impression. That study was performed in 2011, so you may have even less time these days.

Making a great first impression is just one reason SEO audits are crucial—let’s look at a few more.

Why Are SEO Audits Necessary?

SEO audits provide a clear understanding of where your SEO strategy stands — and it can drastically increase your ranking. Need proof? After performing a simple content-focused SEO audit, Smash VC increased its organic traffic by 76 percent.

Although they can be time-consuming, an SEO audit is invaluable when it comes to improving online visibility and finding issues that need updating or addressing. For instance, audits help you:

  • find mistakes in your website’s code, content, and structure
  • stay competitive by providing actionable insights
  • identify whether you’re ranking for your chosen keywords and where you’re showing on the SERPs
  • update your content to align with algorithm and webmaster guideline changes
  • make decisions about which content to refresh
  • optimize your titles, headlines, and meta descriptions
  • do competitor analysis
  • measure the quality of backlinks, text length, and URL keyword opportunities, which are among the most important factors in SEO ranking
  • check loading times and mobile accessibility for the optimal customer experience

As you can see, an SEO audit is expansive and can affect all major areas of your website.

How to Know It’s Time for an SEO Audit

According to 45 percent of Search Engine Journal’s State of SEO respondents, personal or company websites are one of their top three sources driving the most business. It’s massively important that your customers can find you online, and to ensure they can, you need to perform regular SEO audits.

How often? It’s pretty much always a good time for an SEO audit. However, there are strong indicators that mean your site needs an SEO audit soon. These include:

  • your website’s organic traffic and conversions are falling
  • your site has a high bounce rate
  • your keyword rankings are falling and you don’t know why
  • customer satisfaction is declining. Research indicates SEO can increase ranking quality, thus boosting visitor satisfaction

You’ll also want to perform an SEO audit when you’ve built a new website or after a website migration. This will help you spot SEO challenges early so you can take the appropriate action.

However, rather than being a one-off event, it’s good practice to run an SEO audit at quarterly intervals to ensure your site is working at its best.

What to Do Before You Start Your SEO Audit

Regular SEO site audits were cited as the second most impactful tactic for increasing website traffic in a survey taken by professional SEOs.

The average SEO audit can take just a few hours—or up to six months. Getting prepared before you start the audit helps ensure you address the right issues, saves you time, reduces stress, and keeps you organized.

Before launching an SEO audit, make sure to:

  • Outline your goals: What do you want to achieve? Focus on any specific problems you might be having. For instance, perhaps your website isn’t showing for your chosen keywords, or your bounce rate is increasing. Just for clarity, a bounce rate between 26 and 40 percent is excellent, while the average is 45 percent.
  • Identify stakeholders and resources: Who is in charge of the project? What resources do they need? Will you have access to the people, tools, and data you need to perform the audit? Does anyone need to sign off?
  • Determine the metrics to measure
  • Decide on a date range: Do you want to look at your site’s performance for the last year, quarter, or month?
  • Choose your tools: There are plenty of multi-purpose tools, like Ubersuggest and Screaming Frog. For specific issues, there’s Copyscape for duplicate content, DeepCrawl for website crawling, Google Structured Data Tool, and Small SEO Tools’ keyword density checker.
  • Make a plan for your data: How will you analyze your data after your audit? Will you use a data visualization tool like Google Data Studio to report your findings? Get permissions and accounts created now so you can finish reports quickly while the data is still fresh in your mind.

The 15-Step SEO Audit Guide

Google has more than 200 different ranking factors—figuring out where you’re going wrong can be tough. However, a comprehensive SEO audit can uncover the cause and enable you to create an action plan to fix them.

This 15-step SEO checklist doesn’t cover the main issues that I see plaguing sites and reducing their ranking

1. Review (and Optimize) Meta Descriptions and Meta Titles

Here’s what you might not know: If your meta descriptions aren’t done well, Google will rewrite them. In fact, Google rewrites meta descriptions 62.78 percent of the time – which means you could be missing out on sharing your keyword or main selling point if you neglect your metas.

A meta description is a searcher’s invitation to your website. You’re looking to hook a reader in and get them to your website. A short, sweet, yet detailed meta description attracts more people to your site from search engine pages.

You can audit and optimize meta descriptions and page titles with Semrush in three simple steps:

  1. Start a new project and run a site audit.
  2. Complete a content audit to see a list of all pages, titles, and descriptions. Then, review the spreadsheet, remove unnecessary columns, and optimize your SEO.
  3. Select the on-page SEO checker to gather ideas for optimizing your website’s pages.
SEO audit - SEMrush dashboard

2. Improve User Experience (UX)

Search engines are getting smarter and smarter, and whether you realize it or not, UX is a significant ranking factor—and 73 percent of customers say experience impacts purchasing decisions.

Therefore, if your UX is bad, your SEO and rankings are likely to suffer. The good news is there are countless ways to improve UX.

Many different factors affect how a user perceives your site, such as the design, usability, load time, and more, but there’s no need to overcomplicate things.

Look for the low-hanging fruit first. What are some obvious improvements that can make your site easier to navigate and view?

Concentrate on things like:

  • Your color scheme: Does it match your branding?
  • Headings: Ensure they stand out and make clickable links obvious.
  • Images and video: Images and video help to set a mood, present a product or service, or send visitors to certain areas of your pages. Make sure to add enough images and video where it’s necessary, but maintain a nice balance between text and photos.
  • Path to key pages: Can users easily find pages that matter most, like service pages, product pages, etc.?
  • Forms: Do forms work and are they easy to navigate?

Consider using a heatmap to evaluate UX and gain ideas for further UX optimization. Note that you may need to spend more time on this if you have significant UX issues.

3. Check for Keyword Cannibalization

Cannibalization happens when you have multiple pages on your site that are similar or with identical keywords. Essentially, they are competing with each other for the same search traffic.

When cannibalization occurs, it potentially damages your visibility by lowering rankings for the competing pages and causing visitor confusion. Fixing it can actually improve your traffic by three times.

To find keyword cannibalization, use a tool like Ahrefs to:

  • perform a site audit
  • view your historical rankings
  • complete a site search under your topic and look out for identical URLs
SEO Audit - keyword cannibalization chart Ahrefs

If you find pages are cannibalizing from other pages, consider redirecting weaker pages or combining the content into a single large page full of valuable information.

4. Fix Indexing Issues

Wondering why traffic to your website is flatlining? You might have common indexing errors like:

  • 404 and server errors
  • missing pages
  • crawl issues and duplicate content

Other things, like too many permanent redirects, can cause indexing issues. It’s critical to know if you have too many re-directs since 74.9 percent of websites have them, according to a Semrush study.

There’s a variety of reasons Google might ignore your website, such as slow loading times, low-quality content, or lack of mobile-friendliness. However, you also need to remember that Google doesn’t index every page.

Beyond that, the potential answer to your indexing issues lies in Google’s Search Console.

SEO Audit Google console

You can use the tool to get valuable information about site-specific problems, such as security, duplicate content, and crawl issues.

To do this:

  1. Click on the Start button, which takes you to the URL inspection tool.
  2. Add your URL and wait for the results.
  3. Learn how to analyze the results and troubleshoot errors.

Another option is to use a Google Index Checker that allows you to enter multiple URLs at a time.

If you’re still stuck, Google has a full list of indexing issues, along with their solutions. Alternatively, work with an SEO agency for further direction.

5. Optimize Content With Keywords

Did you know the top Google result gets ten times more click-throughs than the page in the number ten spot? How do you make sure your site is on top? It starts with keywords. Get these wrong, and you won’t see traffic or sales. With higher rankings come more conversions, leads, clicks, and backlinks.

Content optimization doesn’t have to be complicated. Just follow these simple steps:

  1. Conduct competitor research using a tool like Ubersuggest.
  2. Analyze keyword opportunities and look for gaps—these are topics your competitors are covering that you aren’t.
  3. Create content targeting those keywords (or update older content to include the new keyword targets).
  4. Enhance your content, including meta descriptions, with keywords.
  5. Optimize your content for snippets and readability.
  6. Implement a better internal linking strategy. Make sure to use optimized anchor text in your links.

There are plenty of tools available to partially automate the task, like Topic, which can make a significant difference to your website position.

6. Check for Duplicate Content

Duplicate content isn’t a negative ranking factor. And actually, an estimated 29 percent of websites have some duplicate content.

Even though duplicate content isn’t a negative ranking factor, it can impact SEO as it may stop Google from indexing and ranking web content and negatively impact link equity.

This problem can occur when you have multiple domains, or if you’re publishing content in different formats. You can check for duplicates by using a tool like Copyscape or the Duplicate Content Checker Chrome extension.

Should you find duplicates, Google has some easy fixes, such as:

  • using 301 redirects or top-level domains
  • watching how you syndicate content, as Google prioritizes the most appropriate page
  • limiting similar content, like identical copyright notices
  • not using placeholder pages
  • adding canonicalization to tell Google your preferred URL

7. Check Loading Times

The average site takes 1.286 seconds to load on desktop and 2.594 seconds on mobile. If your site takes longer, you could be falling behind.

Slow loading sites can lead to increased bounce rate, lower conversions, and reduced visibility.

Most crucially, for some time now, your site’s loading time is a Google ranking factor. If your site takes too long to load, chances are visitors are going to choose a competitor instead of waiting around.

How do you fix slow loading times?

Run a performance analysis with Google PageSpeed Insights to get your page speed score and to highlight any errors, along with suggestions for improvement.

If your loading times are lagging, you can also try:

  • optimizing images
  • using a Content Delivery Network
  • reducing the number of plugins and scripts
  • minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
  • enabling GZIP compression on your server

If you still can’t figure out what’s causing your issues, feel free to reach out. My team is happy to help.

8. Analyze Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is the number of visitors that come to a website without you paying for search ads. You get organic traffic through links, mentions, and other types of online promotional efforts such as social media posts.

This kind of traffic is a valuable indicator of how popular your site is while helping measure the relevance and quality of your content and the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. It’s also valuable to your bottom line, with 94 percent of marketers saying organic traffic drives the highest ROI.

Now you understand its benefits, what’s the best way to boost organic traffic?

Begin by drawing up an SEO strategy. Use Ubersuggest for keyword and competitor research and add your chosen keywords throughout your pages, including in titles, URLs, and meta descriptions.

Next, conduct a technical SEO review of your site to ensure everything works as it should.

9. Analyze Mobile Friendliness

The more mobile-friendly your website is, the higher it shows in Google search results. Google introduced a mobile-first policy a while back, and with more than half of website traffic coming from mobile, it’s imperative you cater to these users.

You can assess mobile-friendliness by entering your URL into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to get your score.

SEO audit Google mobile friendly test

Use Google’s mobile usability report to assess the fixes you need to make. Depending on the score, consider performing a mobile makeover to improve UX or work with an agency on this.

10. Fix Broken Links

Broken links are one of the most common issues with websites—and most sites have at least a few. One study found the average site has 5.92 broken links per 100 pages. Broken links happen due to website updates, content changes, or deleted pages.

While it may not seem a major issue, most of us know how frustrating it is when links don’t work, and it negatively affects the overall customer experience.

In addition, broken links affect your rankings because Google relies on them for PageRank and anchor text. If these links are broken, Google can’t find them.

Fixing the problem is easy, though. Use a tool like Screaming Frog’s broken link checker to find any problems. You can then fix, delete, or redirect any links.

11. Improve Search Rankings With a Secure HTTPS URL

Google pushes for HTTPS for websites, and the search engine now labels sites without SSL as “unsafe” in its Chrome browser.

As well as being a measure of trustability, Google’s research shows there’s a significant move to SSL, with 98 percent of Chrome users loading pages using a secure URL.

However, as previous research indicates HTTPS has a moderate impact on ranking at best, it’s not a great idea to add SSL purely for SEO purposes.

If you do decide to make the move to HTTPS, Google has a list of best practices to guide you.

12. Complete a Content Audit

According to a study by Content Marketing Institute, 75 percent of successful content marketing teams plan to increase their content budget in 2022. Without a content audit, however, they might not know what efforts will drive ROI.

A content audit helps uncover what is working well and content that could be doing better.

Once you’ve finished the audit, you can optimize content and prioritize the most essential tasks.

Here are some of the key steps in a content audit:

  1. Draw up a list of content assets. CoSchedule has a free template available. You can also download all your pages from Google Analytics.
  2. Define your goals and create a list of any sticking points.
  3. Select your tools, such as Ubersuggest, Google Analytics, or Blaze for creating inventory links, and a broken link checker like Screaming Frog.
  4. Carry out research and analysis.
  5. Identify recommendations.
  6. Finally, create an action plan.

13. Complete a Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis helps you to understand your competition and spot opportunities that you can exploit to rank higher than them on Google.

It also enables you to see how your competitors are doing and what their strengths and weaknesses are while giving you an idea of how to better position your product or service to gain more traction.

Consider the following factors during competitive analysis:

  • keywords that your competitor ranks for
  • number of backlinks each website has
  • quality of backlinks
  • social media engagement (such as Facebook likes, Twitter followers, etc.)
  • website speed
  • mobile responsiveness

Plenty of tools can simplify this task, like Ubersuggest or SproutSocial for measuring social media campaigns.

With Ubersuggest, you just:

  1. enter the competitor’s URL and select Search
  2. choose the Keyword option from the left sidebar
  3. analyze the keyword list
  4. click Backlinks
  5. select Top Pages from the left sidebar

14. Use a Website Crawl Tool

A website crawler, a.k.a. A web spider or web robot crawls the web “looking” at content. Google uses these bots to help rank content, but several SEO tools also use them to help identify SEO issues with your website.

A website crawler or internet bot finds problems such as:

  • crawlability and indexability issues
  • broken links
  • duplicate content

Semrush has an SEO audit tool that you can use to complete a website crawl in minutes:

SEO Audit - SEMrush crawler tool

Here’s how to use the crawling tool to find SEO issues:

  • launch a new project
  • configure the basic settings
  • determine crawling settings and the type of crawler you want to use
  • allow and disallow URLs based on what you want the bot to look at
  • analyze your data and view your site’s health score

Make sure to set a schedule so you can choose the frequency of website crawling

15. Identify Content Gaps

Content gap refers to topics users are looking for information about that your site doesn’t cover. Filling content gaps provides a better user experience and helps increase organic traffic.

You can discover content gaps by:

  • Looking at content rankings: Perhaps your keywords are ranking, but not as high as you’d like. Begin with the basics by checking that SEO fundamentals are in place and enhancing content where you can.
  • Using keyword research: Your first step is seeing what’s working, so check for high-performing keywords. Pay special attention to long-tail keywords as these often have lower competition, and look out for related keywords, too.
  • Competitive analysis: Which keywords are your competitors ranking for? Use these as inspiration for new topic ideas.

To speed things up, you can automate the process using a tool like Ahrefs.

SEO audit - Ahrefs content gap tool

Enter your URL, and the tool shows you which keywords your site isn’t ranking for. Ahrefs also lets you find subtopics.

SEO Audit Frequently Asked Questions

What is an SEO audit tool?

SEO audit tools help identify the SEO mistakes that can ruin your website’s rankings. SEMrush and Ahrefs are just two of the tools available. If you’re looking for free options, try our SEO Analyzer for a free report or SEOptimer for an analysis.

What are the best SEO audit tools?

It depends on what you’re looking for. Ahrefs’ site audit tool, SEMrush Site Audit, Ubersuggest, and Screaming Frog are excellent starting places for a comprehensive technical audit.

What should I do after an SEO audit?

Your SEO audit will tell you what’s wrong with your site. After it is complete, start prioritizing recommendations and implementing them. Start with the most manageable tasks first and then move on to more difficult ones. Finally, create a timeline and stick to it.

Why is an SEO audit important?

SEO audits are important because they uncover opportunities for improvement. Once you’ve fixed SEO issues, you’ll see more visibility, higher traffic, and more leads or sales. You can also connect with an SEO specialist to develop and execute a strategy.

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Conclusion: 15-Step SEO Audit Guide

It doesn’t matter how great your website looks—if it’s not working at its optimal level, it won’t attract the visitors, leads, and conversions rates you need to thrive.

A detailed SEO audit allows you to find and fix any potential issues, and it equips you with the information needed to boost performance, increase rankings, and enhance visibility.

Although SEO may seem complex, it has a powerful effect on your traffic. Many tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog can help you get your website back on track.

Do you carry out regular SEO audits for your site? What are your favorite tools and strategies?

How to Conduct a Social Media Audit in Just 30 Minutes

The number of worldwide social media users will surpass 3 billion by 2021.

That’s more than a third of the Earth’s population!

That creates an incredible opportunity to reach online users, and you shouldn’t pass it up.

However, not every platform works the same for every business. That’s why it’s important to review what’s working and what isn’t.

Otherwise, you risk wasting time, energy, and money on flawed campaigns.

Don’t worry. That’s where social media audits can help.

In this post, I’ll show you how to perform a social media audit in just 30 minutes.

The result will tell you if you’re on track to hit it big or if you’re at risk of flushing more dollars down the drain.

Before we get to that, let’s talk about preparing your audit.

How to Prepare Your Social Media Audit

“Auditing” can sound intimidating.

I’ve worked with agencies that charge tens of thousands of dollars and take months to complete a single audit.

In this case, though, yours will be pretty simple. We’ll take a look at each platform and identify a few critical KPI benchmarks to gauge progress.

How often should you perform an audit?

Ultimately, you can do them as often as you’d like to. I recommend at least once a year, but every quarter is ideal.

The point is that you do it consistently and in a way that works for you.

I recommend creating a spreadsheet to maintain all of the information you’ll be recording. Google Drive is a great place to do so since it’s free. Here’s how to do a simple one.

Pull up Google Drive and create a new Google Sheets.

I like using Google Drive because you can share them with your team, partners, and other vendors.

Next, you’ll want to label the columns.

These will be categories that list account information and key performance indicators.

What exactly should your columns contain? Here are some ideas:

  • The username and URL for each platform that you’ll audit
  • The number of followers for each account
  • Engagement metrics
  • Demographic information
  • Popular content

These create a nice base to work off of. Here’s what my spreadsheet looks like now.

Social media audit spreadsheet

It seems a bit empty, huh? Let’s fix that by entering our account information.

Account URLs add to social media audit

I’d suggest that you date your audits or add monthly sections to them. This helps track monthly changes when you audit again in the future.

Since every platform is unique, you could also add columns for network-specific metrics.

With this basic template, you’re ready to use your auditing spreadsheet. Now, it’s time to get to work.

I’ll walk you through analyzing Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. If you are using TikTok or other niche social media platforms, add those to your spreadsheet as well.

Social Media Audit: Facebook

Facebook collects tons of useful data about your Pages and organizes it in one place. You can access it by visiting the Facebook Business Suite.

On that page, Facebook provides valuable insights into both your ad accounts and the business Page itself.

Since we’re focusing on general social media today, let’s first take a glance at the overview.

Business page Facebook social media audit

Right away, Facebook displays information about your Page likes, reach, and the engagement you’ve accumulated. You can filter the results for today, yesterday, the last seven days, or the last 28 days.

Next, click the arrow to the left of your Page to see a breakdown of your best-performing posts.

recent posts on social media audit facebook

This will tell you what type of content is delivering the most engagement and reach. With this information, let’s go back to our spreadsheet and fill it in.

It should look similar to this:

Updated spreadsheet social media audit

As you can see, I’ve entered how many new followers I’ve gained, how much my engagement has improved, and what content performed the best.

What about demographics?

For that, you will need to visit the insights tab. Click on This will give you a report on all of the Pages you run.

social media audit facebook insights audiences

Select the Page you’re auditing and it will take you to an overview.

You can also click “results’ to see how many people you reach (this will also show you Instagram reach if you’ve connected that account.)

You’ll also see:

  • The ratio of men versus women that follow you.
  • The percentage of users in each age group.
  • Which countries and cities your followers are from.
  • What other pages they like.

You have to market differently to every target demographic. Take note of which gender, age groups, and locations make up the majority of your fans.

You can use this data later for tailoring content. But first, let’s input some of this data into our spreadsheet.

Updated spreadsheet 2 social media audit for facebook

With that simple Facebook audit, you should now have a good idea of who your target audience is and what content they enjoy the most.

When you decide to audit your Page again, you can compare these metrics to the updated ones to see how your content performs.

Social Media Audit: Pinterest

Pinterest is a goldmine for marketers.

It’s a platform that heavily rewards quality infographics and visual content. It also offers an awesome analytics page to boot.

Once you’ve upgraded to the free business account, you can select “Analytics” and “Overview” from the top-left corner.

Pinterest analytics social media audit

The overview will tell you your average daily impressions, average daily viewers, and most popular content. These first two metrics are convenient for measuring your account’s growth.

social media audit pinterest pins

As we saw with Facebook, understanding what content performs best will help you offer more of it in the future. This can further increase your engagement and pins.

What kind of content do you notice performs well for your page?

social media audit pintrest pins

To dig into the demographics of your Pinterest follower, you can click the arrow beside “People you reach.”

You will find information about their location, gender, and language.

Clicking the “Interests” tab shows categories that your followers are most likely to be interested in.

Record these in your spreadsheet. In the future, you could publish more content in these categories to see if your followers enjoy them.

You’ll also see your impressions, saves, and clicks on the “Profile” page.

Saves and clicks are arguably the most important metrics here.

Seeing which posts users save the most will tell you which content to focus on and which to dial back.

It also reveals which types of pins are driving the most traffic to your website.

Selecting the “All-time” tab shows you which pins received the most shares and ranked the highest in searches.

Do you notice any similarities between the pins that are receiving the best feedback? Note this in your spreadsheet.

Record any important data in your spreadsheet. By now, your spreadsheet should be filling out quite nicely.

Social Media Audit: Instagram

Instagram is the go-to social media platform for fashion, beauty, and health brands.

Instagram already has over a billion users. Plus, more than 200 million businesses are using it to reach customers, too.

If you upgrade to a business account (and have 100 followers) you gain access to Instagram Insights. This is their native analytics tool to aid you in measuring performance.

It won’t give you insights into content that you posted before you upgraded, but it will give you information about your posts from then on. It can only be accessed from your phone.

Start by tapping the “hamburger” menu in the upper right-hand corner (the three lines.)

access instagram insights social media audit

Then tap Insights.

If you visit the Insights homepage, it will give you a general overview of your Instagram account. It first content overview, including posts and Stories.

There are also three tabs: content, activity, and audience. The audience tab will show you who your followers are and demographics.

Follower demographics social media audit

If you want to find out even more about your followers, click “See More” at the top-right corner. That will pull up two graphs.

One will show you the hours when your followers are most active.

Followers hours social media audit

The other will reveal which days they are most active.

You can use this to find the most optimal day and hour to post.

Audit Instagram Posts

Next, it’s wise to analyze how your photos are performing. You can do this in one of two ways.

The first option is to select an individual post and click “View Insights.”

Likes, comments, shares, and saves will appear at the top. Instagram also tells you how many profile visits the post resulted in and your reach.

Since hashtags are a huge part of marketing on Instagram, take the time to see which ones attracted the most users.

Consider adding that to your spreadsheet as well if you’d like.

Over time, you will be able to weed out the lesser-performing hashtags and replace them with better ones.

The second approach is to navigate to the posts area of the Insights homepage.

Click “Content” and Instagram will display every post from the last year and their impressions.

Insta insights social media audit

You can further filter it by time, type of content, and measurements such as comments or likes.

There are numerous ways that you can take advantage of this.

For example, you can filter by content to discover whether your audience likes photos, videos, or carousel posts the most.

Refine it down to comments and you may notice which captions or questions get the most responses.

Audit Instagram Stories

Have you ever posted an Instagram Story?

For businesses, it’s a fun way to show followers behind-the-scenes action.

With the Insights tool, you can dive into how your Stories are performing. Simply open a Story and click the viewers on the bottom-left area of the screen.

You will find which users viewed the Story, total impressions, and reach. It also documents actions like replies and clicks.

Use this to determine which content followers respond to the most positively with Instagram Stories.

Social Media Audit: Twitter

Twitter advertising is one of my favorite techniques for quickly gaining attention because it’s so simple.

If you visit the Ads Manager, you will gain access to your account’s analytics.

Let’s start by selecting the “Analytics” drop-down menu and clicking “tweet activity.” This will let you view tweet engagement, impressions, and more.

Tweet impressions social media audit

First, Twitter is nice enough to give you a convenient graph of your impressions over the last 28-day period. You can change this to the last seven days or a custom number as well.

Click the “Top Tweets” tab to see which of your tweets in a selected period are the most popular. Twitter determines this based on engagement and impressions.

Top tweets social media audit

Do you notice any trends?

Are certain calls-to-action or styles of tweets doing better than others?

These are questions you should ask yourself to further complete the audit.

Do you know who your followers are?

Well, you can figure that out by visiting “Audience insights” under the “Analytics” tab on top again.

Make sure that you change the selection to your followers.

Your followers social media audit

At first glance, you’ll see an overview with several tabs.

On this first page, you can see information about your followers, such as their:

  • Interests
  • Consumer buying styles
  • Household income categories
  • Wireless carrier
  • Gender

If you click the “Demographics” tab, you’ll see the following:

Twitter demographics social media audit

It’s safe to say that Twitter has a seriously impressive analytics system. It’s convenient, too.

From exact regions to home value, there’s nothing you won’t know about your followers.

Moving along to the “Lifestyle tab,” you’ll get a better idea of what interests them. This is great information to use for tailoring your content.

If you know what they like, you can integrate that into what you post.

They will feel much more connected to your brand when they know that you understand them on a deeper level.

For those of you who are involved in e-commerce, you’ll find a special benefit to the next tab, which is the “Consumer Behavior” tab.

Buying styles twitter social media audit

Twitter shows us what kind of consumer buying style our followers fall under and what kind of consumer goods they enjoy purchasing.

This is a goldmine if you sell products online.

It’s literally telling you how they prefer to shop and what they’re looking for.

Finally, the “Mobile Footprint” tab tells you which carrier and devices your followers mostly use.

What Should You Do With Your Social Media Audit When It’s Done?

You’re sitting back and marveling at your in-depth spreadsheet. Now what?

It’s time to get marketing.

You now hold a great deal of data that you can use to improve your social channels and your business as a whole.

You should start with content.

What type of content does your audience like the most? Try producing more of this and measure the results next week or next month.

For example, you may find that your Facebook fans prefer videos over images. As simple as it sounds, delivering more videos could be the easiest way to increase shares and engagement.

I recently posted this video on Facebook:

neil example social media audit

It was a direct result of a simple social media audit like this.

I’m investing a ton into video marketing because I’ve seen that it produces the best results across almost every platform.

I typically don’t talk about “finding your passion” and that type of stuff. I usually like to stick to nerdy marketing ideas.

However, I’ve noticed that more personal topics like this get an awesome reaction.

Guess what?

I’m adding more topics like this to my content calendar.

The whole reason for producing this content is to gain awareness and increase engagement.

The purpose is not to try and sell anything.

Instead, you want to mix content types and topics to drive the most interest possible.

Then, you can run retargeting campaigns with custom audiences to eventually sell to everyone who’s watching, commenting, and hitting the Like button.

Target a More Defined Audience

With all of the research you’ve performed, you also now know a lot more about the demographics of your fans.

Things like age, gender, and location are much more concrete.

In the beginning, you probably had a rough idea of what your ideal user was like. Now, you know for sure.

I’d recommend searching for market reports based on your target demographics. These will give you further ideas on how to serve them better.

Even infographics like this one from Goldman Sachs on millennials can contain rich nuggets of knowledge about your audience.

Goldman Sachs infographic example how to do a social media audit

Going off of this example, we might experiment by offering free shipping, discounts, or other convenience as the studies suggest.

Once you’ve compiled all of the previous data on your users, it’s simple to find out what works for them.

Reports and similar publications will detail trends and opportunities to take advantage of.

New sales channels and promising promotional strategies are some things to expect.

Overall, you know what your ideal user responds to the best, so you can tailor more content toward that.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

You now also know which platforms are delivering the biggest results.

You can use this information to implement what we call the “80/20 rule.”

It involves doubling down on the social networks that work the best for you.

Perhaps Instagram and Facebook drive the most traffic. If that’s the case, then focus your attention on those platforms.

Putting more energy into just a couple of networks may create more results than diversifying.

This rule also applies to content and advertisements. The data is telling you what works the best, so consider shifting your focus to just a few key areas.

At the same time, you can take this opportunity to test out different platforms. At the end of the day, you’ll never know until you try.

Maybe another social network would perform incredibly well, but you just haven’t tested it.

You can test a couple on a smaller scale and look at the results before you invest too much time into it.

You should also now be setting goals for your social accounts, including:

  • Follower count
  • Engagement numbers such as likes or comments
  • Traffic that you drive to your website

When you perform another audit, you should be able to do it faster. You’ll be much more familiar with the process, which will help you streamline the process.

When you perform your next audit, you can track changes by comparing your numbers to your previous audits.

Over time, you will have a vivid picture of how your social accounts are developing.

Calculate Social Media Ad Budget And ROI

Do you include ads in your social media marketing strategy?

If so, you’ll want to make them a component of your audit.

Ad platforms on Facebook and Pinterest, for example, will record the performance, costs, and other metrics for the ads you run.

Analyze which ad types and creatives are bringing you the best results. You could invest more of your budget into these while dialing back others.

This way, you can avoid spending money on advertisements that don’t deliver the most value.

Even small experiments with paid campaigns can help you better calibrate your organic efforts.

I integrate SEO and PPC for this very same reason.

I run a quick PPC campaign to find the keywords that convert best within an industry. Then, I’ll start building out content and SEO campaigns around this new data.

how to use data from a social media audit

The same applies to social. Run paid campaigns to quickly identify top content, audiences, and so on. Then, tailor your organic efforts around what already works.

Social Media Audit: Frequently Asked Questions

Why are social media audits important?

To understand what is working or what is not in your social media strategy.

How often should I do a social media audit?

Any time you are considering changing your strategy or at least once a year.

Do I need tools to do a social media audit?

No. While they can be helpful, the internal tools on social media can be used in your audit.

What do I do with a social media audit?

Social media audits help you find strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in your social media strategy. Use it to target a more defined audience, improve your social media strategy, and work harder not smarter.

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Social Media Audit Conclusion

A social media audit doesn’t have to be long or tedious.

If you follow what I’ve outlined in this article, you can complete yours in as little 30 minutes.

Every social media platform offers analytics and insights that you need to improve your social media marketing strategy and speak to your audience in their language.

Preparation and organization are the keys to a successful audit. That’s why a simple spreadsheet is so handy.

You’ll want to keep a record of how these numbers increase or decrease over time. That way, you can draw conclusions about what’s working and what’s not.

Set a schedule to perform your audits, too. You could do them on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.

Don’t be afraid to experiment by trying out new social media networks. You can add these to your next audit.

Set goals based on the collected data, and you’ll be consistently growing your social accounts over time.

What do you think is the most important part of a social media audit?

Bounce Rate Analytics: How to Measure, Assess, and Audit to Increase Conversions

Your bounce rate can be such a scary number, right? It’s common knowledge that a high bounce rate is bad, and a low rate is good. Every time you log into your Google Analytics account, it’s right there waiting for you. I understand the feeling when you see that number creeping up. But the problem is …

The post Bounce Rate Analytics: How to Measure, Assess, and Audit to Increase Conversions first appeared on Online Web Store Site.

The post Bounce Rate Analytics: How to Measure, Assess, and Audit to Increase Conversions appeared first on ROI Credit Builders.

How to Perform a Thorough SEO Audit in Less Than 3 Minutes

They say there are over 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm.

But are you going to take the time to optimize your site for each and every single one of them?

Well, you should… but you probably won’t.

See, SEO has changed… it used to be that you could do a handful of things and rank well. Sadly, those days are gone.

Now you have to do every little thing and do it well to dominate Google.

So, I decided to make your job easier and release yet another new feature in Ubersuggest that audits your website for you in less than 3 minutes.

It’s called SEO Analyzer.

Introducing SEO Analyzer

If you want to find out what’s wrong with your website, you won’t have to do it manually anymore.

All you have to do is head over to the SEO Analyzer and put in your URL.

seo analyzer

How SEO Analyzer works

Once you put in your URL, you’ll be taken to a report that looks something like this:

seo analyzer

Once the report loads (it typically takes 3 minutes or less), you’ll see an overview like the image above.

The overview is broken down into 3 main sections.

Overview

overview

The first section shows you your on-page SEO score (the higher the better), your estimated search traffic, the number of keywords the domain ranks for, and how many backlinks the site has.

You’ll also see a message from me that breaks down how many pages were crawled and any SEO errors that were found.

When you click on any of those 4 boxes, it will take you to a more in-depth report.

Clicking on the on-page score takes you to a page that lists out your SEO errors. It looks something like this:

seo issues

Clicking on the organic traffic takes you to a report that shows you how well your site is performing.

traffic analyzer

Clicking on the keywords box shows you all of the keywords your website ranks for organically.

keywords

And clicking on the backlinks box shows you all of the sites linking to that domain.

backlinks

Site health

This is my favorite section of the site audit report. This is where you can really dig around and boost your rankings

site health

You can click on any of the four site health boxes and drill down into more reports.

This is important because you’ll want to first focus on clearing up any critical errors. From there, you’ll want to fix any warnings and then, finally, consider doing any of the given recommendations.

The health check box gives you an overview of the healthy pages and the ones that have issues or are broken or blocked or even redirected. By clicking on this box you’ll get taken to a report that lists all your SEO issues in detail.

seo issues

From there you can click on any of those issues and you’ll be taken to the exact pages that contain any SEO errors and what they are exactly. An example of this is pages with too long of a title tag.

long titles

If you aren’t sure on how to fix any of the issues, just click on “what is this and how do I fix it?” and a box like this will appear:

how to fix

And if you click on the critical errors, warnings or recommendations boxes, you’ll see reports just like the ones above. They will be broken down by how important they are.

hard easy

That way you’ll know which fixes have the greatest SEO impact and how hard they are to implement.

You should first focus on the ones that have the highest SEO impact and are the easiest to implement. And I took the liberty to prioritize the table for you, so all you have to do is start at the top and work your way down to the bottom.

Site speed

Speed is important. Not only do faster load times help boost conversion rates, but they also help boost your search rankings.

site speed

There are two sections to the site speed. The section on the left breaks down your desktop load time and the section on the right breaks down your mobile load time.

Site speed varies drastically by a person’s connection and computer, but the charts give you a rough range of how fast or slow your site loads.

Your goal should be to have your site load in 3 seconds or less for both mobile and desktop.

The report even breaks down which areas are slowing down your site speed.

For example, you could have an issue with “First CPU Idle”… and if you aren’t sure what that means, just hover over the question mark and the tool will tell you.

tool tip

Top SEO Issues

I know I said the report has 3 main sections, but the 4th section is just repeating the site health section.

top seo issues

You’ll see the 3 most important fixes that you should make to your site if you want higher rankings.

If you don’t have the time to fix everything, start off by fixing the 3 issues listed here. Those will give you the biggest bang for your buck.

Conclusion

So, what do you think about the SEO Analyzer report? Do you think it was a good addition to Ubersuggest?

I know I haven’t talked about the SEO Analyzer report much, but we’ve been working on it for 4 months now.

For now, the tool crawls the first 100 pages on your website, and eventually, our goal is to increase the limit to 500 or even 1,000. Technically we can do that fairly easily, but for the launch, I’ve capped it at 100 due to the sheer number of users I have and server load.

Give the SEO Analyzer a try and let me know what you think.

The post How to Perform a Thorough SEO Audit in Less Than 3 Minutes appeared first on Neil Patel.