How Do SEO Audits Help Improve Website Performance?

SEO Content Audits

A SEO content audit is imperative if you want to drive more quality traffic to your website and boost your ranking in SERPs. This audit helps to improve the content, ensuring it shows up in Snippets and “People Also Ask” sections in SERPs. With this audit, you can identify if your web pages are high quality, fresh, and accurate. You identify which pages to optimise, keep, or remove based on the Google E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines.

SEO Technical Audits

SEO technical audits focus on the back-end elements of your website that impact your visibility in SERPs. This identifies crawling and indexing issues, HTTPS status codes, meta descriptions, robots.txt files, and broken links. The smallest tweak can make a big difference to your website performance.

SEO On-Page Audits

This audit focuses on the web pages themselves, including headers, titles, and keywords. When you optimise these, your website becomes more visible in SERPs. This includes using relevant keywords, having well-organised content, and using simple URL's.

SEO Off-Page Audits

SEO Off-Page Audits focus on elements that take place off your website, such as social media presence and backlinks. When you  build a strong backlink profile and maintain a good online reputation, you improve your authority, credibility, and visibility.

How Do I Do a SEO Audit to Improve Website Performance?

SEO audits sound overwhelming, but they don't have to be. There are a number of steps you can take to get started.

1. Google Search Console can be used to look for indexing problems. If Google cannot index your pages, they won't show up in SERPs. This tool can help you identify which pages are indexed and follow Google Best Practice guidelines
2. Moz or Lighthouse can be used to look for website problems, identifying crawl issues and redirects that you need to fit. It's essential to ensure your website remains easy to navigate for visitors and search engines.
3. SimilarWeb or Lighthouse can be used to ensure your site is mobile friendly. A responsive design, not only improves your ranking in SERPs, but helps to ensure your content is easy to read, your design is responsive, and your images are compressed for fast and easy loading.
4. Site speed can also be analysed by lighthouse. A website should take less than three seconds to load. Anything longer and you stand the chance of losing a potential customer. 
5. You can use MozBar to check your internal linking structure. This ensures keywords are used in the links and that you link new content in older pages. It also ensures your links remain relevant.
6. Google Analytics can help you monitor your organic traffic. You can monitor this regularly to identify changes and determine if they are due to manual actions or updates. It helps address potential issues quickly to reduce a drop in website traffic.

Conclusion

While an SEO audit may seem daunting, you can break it down into smaller steps to make it easier to manage and get the information you need to improve your website performance in the long run.