LEARN HOW TO DO SEO AUDIT IN JUST 5 MINUTES !

Ever been to any SEO training sessions? If you haven’t let me tell you there the experts would do a live site review and would give recommendations. It’s a great opportunity to learn to know every bit of detail about a website. But if didn’t have a chance to experience it yet; worry not my friend. I shall share with you my secret 5-minute SEO audit. Contrary to the popular belief the SEO audits is not time consuming. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes only. The key here is ‘practice’; the more you sharpen your skills with practice the better you get.

Some of the noteworthy readable material for those seeking a full course audit is:

• Sam McRobert’s Template on Quicksprout.
• Lindsay Wassell (Moz).
• Steve Webb’s YouMoz.
• As you follow this, it might occur to you that all the sections are distinct and different from one another. But when you practice them it all will be connected with one another.
  

  When you start your SEO audit you need only three things:

  1. Domain
  2. Location (in case of local search)
  3. Brand name

 

  Five essential quick Steps of Seo audit:

A brief knowledge of traffic

For this you first need to check the root domain, it can be done from SEMRUSH. You get both organic and PPC traffic in a graph, five keywords, and top five competitors. In here, you also get a pie chart which depicts the direction from which the traffic comes. Following is a list of other features you get:

• Details about domain overview- Organic Search , Paid Search, Back links and Display Advertising
• The Organic and Paid traffic Trend, whether it is increasing, decreasing, or static.
• Details about the Organic keywords and Ads keywords ,their country wise traffic distribution.
• Details about the competing sites and the accuracy of all the data.
• Rank of your domain. Is it higher, middle, or lower to other competitors?

 

For this we have to look out for 3 things on Search Engine (www.google.com):

2. SERPs outlook

1) Index Pages

Check out for the index pages on Google.com as shown in the below image.

2) Snippet

Check these steps now:

• Where is the domain showing in SERPs?
• Is these site links? Are these suitable selections? By this we mean are the headings and description apt and clear?
• Does it feature a listing in the side bar about the business or information it is about?
• Check if the Title and Description are relevant for the brand or it includes keywords.

No. of Backlinks

For root domain of the site:

• The information about the number of pages in the index. Check whether it is high, low, or medium.
• Check the headings keenly and look out for keywords if provided.
• Check for the repetition of keywords.
• Check the content whether it is meaningful and good. Are these attractive enough for you to click them?

Technical aspects

A ) Look out for the robots.txt file in root domain.

Example :

www.xyz.com/robots.txt

• Look out for the existence of robots.txt. Whether the programming interface follows an already established standard or is it in conflict with it?
• Is robots.txt makes some of the content to be blocked which it shouldn’t otherwise?
• Did any mistake occur while using it? (For example it being used instead of Meta robots).
• Does it make it available for hackers to easily loot?

B ) Check for the Canonicalization Issue by searching the program interface which are in conflict look out for:

• http://domain.com
• http://www.domain.com
• http://domain.com/index.html
• http://domain.com/index.htm

Now check if the site shows 301 redirecting to domain.com (Non-www) or www.domain.com (With WWW). You can use Moz SEO Toolbar or check by manually entering the non-www and with-www URLs one by one, If any one of them would redirect to another that means, Issue is not there.

In case of Issue use .htaccess file to resolve this canonical issue. Google the .htaccess file for apache server and after verifying the code you can upload this file to the root directory of the server.

 SEO friendly Structure and General appearance.

For this first visit the homepage and then follow these steps:

• Look out the Title and description of the website . See whether it is optimized and reader view incorporated in its keywords and font.
• Look out for the alt tags by using web developer toolbar or going to the source code by pressing – Ctrl+u and search for alt tags by pressing – Ctrl+f.
• When you use this web developer toolbar switch the CSS off and see if there is any cloaked text. Check the hidden text by selecting the entire text.
• Lookout for the H2 tags.
• Check all the contents within the page and look for the keywords related to the brand or niche.

Lookout for content.

This is the most important step. While doing do see the entire page and check if there is some interconnected meaning being derived from the content you have placed. Also check for all the links, that whether they include all the keywords. If a blog is being linked check back and forth whether all tabs are working in the content provided. Social media, resources, and other valuable content are being properly placed or not. Especially if it is a blog see the freshness of the content. You must check the content from the point of view of the audience it is being written for.

So, after this exhaustive discussion you must be having now a better understanding about your website and its position over the online habitat. However the above exercise does not mean to replace the full SEO audit. But it is definitely places you and your website into a qualitative and quantitative edge when you have a sale to close.