Prior to the effective implementation of a natural referencing strategy, it is necessary to sift through the strengths and weaknesses inherent in your website but also to analyze the winning strategies of your competitors.
SEO Audit: Web analytics
This essential step is none other than the SEO Audit. When you want to create a website or update an existing version, the SEO Audit is the best weapon to add to its strategic arsenal, and for sustainable efficiency.
This short guide, who is intended to be exhaustive on natural referencing audits, will guide you to become fully aware of the interest of the SEO audit as well as the potential positive spin-offs for your site or your business.
How to define SEO audit
Before you can get the most out of the SEO audit, it is necessary to establish the basics and to set the definition of the SEO audit. This is to submit your website to professional expertise, usually an SEO specialist, who will conduct a complete and accurate analysis of the latter to determine the areas to improve and arouse the craze of your prospects. This audit will highlight:
- The technical problems of natural referencing
- The structural problems inherent to the website
- SEO problems on the page
- Potential off-site problems
- User experience issues
- Information on the competitive market
An audit is a standard procedure that must take place regularly. This is essentially a form of “checkup” for your website.
What is the purpose of an SEO audit?
Presented in the form of an imposing document, it is an analysis that aims to somehow make an inventory of your website (audit on-site / off-site), a parallel with your sites competitors while aiming to optimize you’re positioning as well as your keywords.
In the light of the various information collected in the context of the SEO Site, it will be possible for us to drastically improve our SEO by implementing the recommendations of the professional whose services we have added. The audit is therefore a purely strategic document for natural referencing that establishes a real pay strategy based on Search Engine Optimization whose goal is to position your website at the top.
What are the elements to analyze on a website?
It would be a twist to reality to say that it is possible to adopt the same strategy for any site. Each site has its own components, be it at the architectural level, in terms of objectives or target. It is necessary to adjust your analysis to the identity of the site in question. However, some unavoidable elements must be submitted for analysis for any SEO audit.
Here are some of the criteria to evaluate for any SEO audit:
- The keywords and the semiotic universe of the site are subjected to analysis in order to identify the most convincing requests and likely ultimately to generate traffic.
- Evaluate the on-site and off-site strategies of your main competitors. The goal is to inspire and perfect them to become the top search engines.
- The history of the site can be observed through the study of performance in terms of positioning and traffic. The strategy will be significantly different as the audited site is already performing well.
- The study of semantics, content, markup or the architecture of the site can improve the construction of the site and proceed to its optimization, etc.
- Technical analysis assesses browsing speed, mobile compatibility or the presence of rich snippets. The overall performance of the site will influence the visibility and crawling of Google. Quality control also involves analyzing anchors and backlinks.
A large number of key criteria are therefore scrutinized in order to draw the necessary conclusions in terms of natural referencing.
What recommendations following the SEO audit
The optimization study with natural referencing will make it possible to put in place decisive recommendations. Here are some of these recommendations:
- Optimization of the SEO architecture of the site or flattening of the internal mesh according to internal requests
- Troubleshooting HTML markup and semantic level: meta description and title tag
- Work upstream on each page to optimize the keywords. This includes texts, images but also videos
- Resolution of mobile incompatibilities, slowness of sites
- The introduction of rich snippets will be able to maximize the click through rate of the page in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and favor content more supported by the crawler
- It is essential to implement a net linking strategy to improve the referencing of the website
- The creation of additional parts on the site as a blog
- Track Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Following the SEO audit and the implementation of any SEO exhortations, it will be essential to monitor the performance optimization of the site submitted to the audit. Special attention should be paid to:
- Global traffic- keywords
- The number of requests
- Check markup and http codes
Performance indices are tracked over the long term in order to keep a close eye on trends. It is a good idea to submit your site to a qualitative analysis before making any major changes.
Conclusion
The SEO audit will allow you to highlight the few improvements to be made for your site in order to lay the foundations of a winning method in terms of SEO. This is one of the most crucial steps to your success without which it will be difficult to position yourself at the top in the SERP’s.