Running a SEO audit is important for different reasons. It can help identify issues in your search engine optimization and areas you need to improve to rank higher in the SERPs. A SEO audit is a great solution to identify points of improvements and to create an action plan to correct SEO issues. Moreover, a SEO audit will help you keep your website in the tracks with the latest engines guidelines and on top of the competition.
Monitoring your Onsite SEO performance needs to rely on effective tools. You need to focus on onsite metrics that impact your rankings. This is where Oncrawl is a reliable partner. Before to dig into how to run a SEO audit with Oncrawl, you need to understand what is a SEO audit and what it can bring you.
What is a SEO audit?
A SEO audit is the evaluation of your site healthiness based on different criterias. Auditing your website relies on a checklist. The purpose is to come up with recommendations on what to fix and improve. You can use a SEO audit tool to do so but you also need to know what to check before because the tool won’t tell you. A SEO audit will display a current state of your website regarding its onsite performance, a list of actions based on a SEO checklist and a report describing your points of improvements and how to take advantage of new opportunities.
It is important to run SEO audits on your website on a regular basis (like 3 times a year but it depends of your field of activity as it could be more often) because Google guidelines are often changing and something that work today may not be working in a few months.
Which Onsite SEO elements should you audit?
As we are focusing on OnSite SEO elements that influence your site’s rankings, here are the different metrics on which you should focus.
Titles and Descriptions
They need to be unique for each page and to respect 160 characters maximum for description and 60 for titles. Titles need to include the main keyword the page is about and your description should advertize what your page is about.
URL Structure
You should verify that the URLs for each page are unique and properly formatted. To know more about optimized URLs, check our article. But to be short, include your keywords, hyphens and no stop words. Write unique ones with less than 255 characters.
Text formatting
Order your plan texts with H1 for titles, H2 for headings, bold or italics for meaningful parts and bullets points to make it clearer.
Content
It must be unique, qualitative, fresh and rich. Duplicate content will be penalized and poor content will have no chances to make you rank. To know more about how to get rid of duplicate content, you can refer to our previous article.
Internal linking
Only link to related pages without only using keyword anchor text for linking. Do not link to more than 2-3 internal pages.
External linking
Check how your external linking are behaving and if they are in dofollow or nofollow, their number by page, their status code and their top target.
Images
Images can also help you rank higher if well formated. Name them properly and use keywords. Fill out the ALT tags and don’t forget to use the right format. To know more about image optimizations, you can read our article.
Broken links
Broken links are bad for user experience and your rankings. From 4xx to 5xx you need to fix them in order to avoid huge bounce rate and SEO penalties.
User friendliness
Check if 404 are well designed and informative, page depth, ads, menu, interface and your sitemap.
Page speed
Load time should not be higher than 2-3 seconds as it can lower your user experience and your conversions rate. We have also written a topic about load time issues.
Web site structure
Regardless of the type of web site you are running, there are certain elements common to all, necessary for SEO purposes and a good user experience. You should check your content structure and more precisely if the content is grouped into relevant categories and pages, if there are breadcrumbs on internal pages and if the website contains a contact, about page and privacy policy.
Social Tags
Are you social tags behaving right? You can improve your click-through rate and your conversions using social tags. We have written a complete guide about Twitter Cards to understand how they work and about Open Graph.
Structured Data
Verify if your structured data are well setup as they can increase your traffic from the SERPs.
How to analyze your onsite performance using Oncrawl?
With Oncrawl, you can run as many SEO audits as you want and up to 2 Million URLs (regarding your plan subscription). You just need to enter an URL, a few crawl parameters (but deadly easy) and here you go, your crawl is processing!
You will land on you Summary tab where you can find your overall onsite SEO performances:
Our tool is divided between the following parts:
A content tab with subcategories including:
- Main tags: find how your title and description tags are behaving, check your Hn repartition and your social tags. We particularly focus on that last point as we think optimized Open Graph and Twitter Cards can indirectly help you boost your rankings.
- Editorial insights: this tab focuses on your content quality and especially your word count, your structured data, n-grams, ALT tags. In clear what makes your content rich.
- Duplicate content: we offer a dedicated tab for duplicate content as we have based our expertise on semantic and SEO. You can access your duplicate content repartition and distribution, filter your clusters of pages by content similarity or simply filter clusters by number of pages, etc.
Then you can access a strong focus on your site architecture regarding:
- Inlinks: see your number of links and average number of links by page, your follow / nofollow distribution, your average Inrank by page depth, your most inlinked pages and other useful insights like your rel=canonical performances.
- Outlinks: check how your outlinks are behaving, your main pages with broken links or your top target in external follow.
- Performance: you can monitor your page speed, weight distribution and your status codes.
You can now run your SEO audit and measure the right metrics with Oncrawl.