SEO auditing is essential to a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. It helps you identify optimization opportunities and potential problems with a website.
Any good SEO software suite will include site audit tools that function much the same as Google’s bots and thoroughly examine a website.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a map of your website that search engines can use to crawl and index pages. It’s one of the core elements of an SEO audit plan.
A clean XML sitemap is necessary for SEO, as it helps the bots understand your website’s structure and how pages relate. Ensure that the sitemap is displayed somewhere on the website and submitted to GSC (Search Console).
Consider creating a separate XML sitemap if you have videos, image files, or news pages. This will help the Google search engine find these content types and show them in Search results. You can also ensure the pages include unique keywords in their titles and meta descriptions. This helps Google distinguish between similar pages and choose the most relevant ones for a search query.
Google Analytics
What is SEO audit tool, and what are the best examples? One of the most powerful free tools for SEO analytics is Google Analytics. This tool provides businesses with various reports that can help them optimize their websites and maximize ROI on their SEO campaigns.
Google Analytics also provides data on how users find websites, including what they search for and which pages they visit. This information helps create an internal SEO strategy to increase traffic and improve conversions.
However, tracking SEO metrics in Google Analytics can be time-consuming since many reports exist. That’s why creating a Google Analytics dashboard that displays all the most important SEO metrics in a single place is essential. This way, marketers can focus on analyzing the data and making improvements rather than juggling from tab to tab.
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools provides various SEO audit tools that help you improve your website’s performance. The platform allows you to check page-level issues that search crawlers have encountered, inspect indexed and non-indexed pages, submit sitemaps, spot pages in the news and discover results, identify structured data problems, and much more.
Another helpful tool identifies webpage load speed and provides suggestions to improve it. Moreover, the platform allows you to check the quality of your structured data through schema markup and review snippets in search results.
SEO plays a significant role in finding your website by potential customers and can boost your revenue in many ways. To get the best ROI, you must regularly conduct a full SEO audit using the abovementioned tools.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a powerful free suite of tools that helps you track and improve your website’s search performance. It provides insights into site health, SEO errors, and search query data, vital information to help you increase your website’s search traffic.
Search Console offers a variety of reports, including keywords, search query performance, and URL inspection. These reports can help you find the most popular search queries sending traffic to your website and underperforming keywords needing attention.
If you have a team that works with your Google Search Console property, you can add them as users and give them full access to view all reports without sharing their Google account email address. To do so, navigate to the Settings >> Users and permissions option in your Search Console property and click ‘Add user.
Google Trends
Google Trends has been around since 2006 and provides marketers a unique window into how people search on the most popular search engine. It normalizes search terms by time and location, allowing users to compare the relative popularity of two or more search terms on a scale from 0-100.
The tool’s real-time search data can illuminate patterns other devices may miss. It also allows you to filter by category (web, image, news, shopping, YouTube) and platform. Searching for a keyword and selecting the last 90 days might reveal more obvious seasonal trends, such as increasing searches for twin sheets and comforters before college dorm move-in. The “Related Queries” and “Related Topics” features can also help identify keywords to target in future content marketing campaigns.
