{"id":21331,"date":"2017-05-24T08:44:01","date_gmt":"2017-05-24T07:44:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fifteen-staging.fifteen.dev\/blog\/how-to-conduct-an-in-depth-seo-audit\/"},"modified":"2024-10-31T13:03:30","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T13:03:30","slug":"how-to-conduct-an-in-depth-seo-audit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fifteendesign.co.uk\/blog\/how-to-conduct-an-in-depth-seo-audit\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Conduct An In-Depth SEO Audit"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-content\"><p>Every good <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fifteendesign.co.uk\/digital-marketing\/seo\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SEO strategy<\/a> starts with an in-depth onsite audit. I often speak to marketing professionals who have created near-perfect SEO strategies that have tanked due to the lack of an initial audit. There\u2019s no better way to familiarise yourself with a website, a company and what they do than pulling apart each page and assessing its SEO value, I find that starting with a domain overview helps, and I then start digging into the site, page by page. If you don&#8217;t have time to carry out your own in-depth audit then use our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fifteendesign.co.uk\/solutions\/free-instant-seo-audit\/\">free instant SEO audit<\/a> tool to get a quick-fire overview of yours or your clients website.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Domain Overview<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>A domain overview should contain any key stats that affect the site as a whole, rather than page specific issues. Some top tools to use when conducting a site audit include SEMRush, <a href=\"https:\/\/moz.com\/products\/pro\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Moz Pro<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/developers.google.com\/speed\/pagespeed\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Google PageSpeed<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/trends.google.co.uk\/trends\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Google Trends<\/a> and SEO Quake.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Important metrics you need to note down as part of the domain overview include:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Responsiveness<\/li>\n<li>HTTP:\/\/ or HTTPS:\/\/<\/li>\n<li>Daily volume of organic and paid traffic<\/li>\n<li>Backlinks<\/li>\n<li>Referring domains<\/li>\n<li>Domain Authority<\/li>\n<li>Top organic keywords<\/li>\n<li>Main organic competitors<\/li>\n<li>Structured Data<\/li>\n<li>404 Pages<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These points can be as brief or as detailed as you see fit. I always like to do a decent analysis of these metrics as once this research is done you can base the rest of your audit around your findings. As a minimum, you need to be able to \u201canswer\u201d each of the above points, but the more analysis you do the easier your job is later on in the audit.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>SEO Page Breakdown<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Once I\u2019ve gathered information about the domain as a whole, I start doing an in-depth analysis on the sites main pages. I start with the homepage and work through any main landing pages, then the blog page and the contact page. Page breakdowns need to be in-depth, as well as stating what the metrics are I like to make bullet points of next steps, quick fixes and general notes about the site&#8217;s health. I then colour code my bullet points, showing a hierarchy of urgent fixes and possible quick wins.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Details I explore in my page breakdowns include:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Google Trends graph of possible keywords<\/li>\n<li>Page authority<\/li>\n<li>Linking Root Domains<\/li>\n<li>Inbound Links<\/li>\n<li>Page Speed<\/li>\n<li>ALT Tags<\/li>\n<li>Title Tags<\/li>\n<li>Meta Descriptions<\/li>\n<li>On-page H tag structure<\/li>\n<li>Keyword rankings (for targeted keyword on each page)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After doing a Domain Overview and breaking down pages using the headings above, you start to get a real idea of where the problems lie on the site. Sometimes fixes can be as easy as re-writing the landing pages, adding an extra image with an ALT tag or just relooking the heading structure. Sometimes the issue isn\u2019t on a page, and you\u2019re better off working on your domain authority by acquiring high-quality backlinks \u2013 although you wouldn\u2019t be able to assess this without doing an in-depth analysis of every page, as well as the overview.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Competitor Analysis<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>The final part of the process is to conduct a competitor analysis. I start by choosing the websites top 3 competitors and make a graph containing current keyword rankings for all 4 sites for your main keywords. This way you start to build up a picture of each of your competitor\u2019s strengths and weaknesses, as well as your own.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I would then conduct a breakdown of their sites, making notes on the following subjects:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Local SEO<\/strong> \u2013 What City are your competitors targeting?<\/li>\n<li><strong>On-page structure<\/strong> \u2013 Check what page layouts your competitors are using &#8211; If they rank higher than you for your chosen keyword consider reformatting your page.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Domain &amp; Page Authority<\/strong> \u2013 If they rank above you but you think your pages are better optimised, is their domain\/page authority noticeably higher than yours?<\/li>\n<li><strong>Structured Data \u2013 <\/strong>Using Googles Structured Data testing tool you can check what structured data competitors are using, and then think about implementing on your site if you haven&#8217;t already.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Page Speed \u2013<\/strong> Checking competitors site speed can be a helpful indication of how well coded their site is and can bring up simple errors that you can check your site for.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Title tags &amp; Meta data \u2013<\/strong> Check what meta data they\u2019re using and how they\u2019re using it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Once you\u2019ve done your competitor analysis you\u2019ve got all the information you need to go on to make an awesome SEO strategy. You know your priorities, you\u2019re aware of all site issues and which order to tackle them and you\u2019re aware of quick wins that can give you significant ranking boosts with little effort. If any new ideas come to light, you know where your competitors are at and can check the success of implementing these ideas using the data you\u2019ve collected. By now you should know the\u00a0site from top to bottom, meaning any strategy ideas have been well thought out and should be quick and easy to implement.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to increase traffic to your website using an in-depth SEO strategy, or want any <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fifteendesign.co.uk\/digital-marketing\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">digital marketing<\/a> help you can contact our team by emailing <a href=\"mailto:hello@fifteen.co.uk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">hello@fifteen.co.uk<\/a> or ring us on 0115 932 5151.<\/p>\n<p>Want to find out quickly and easily for yourself your current websites SEO score? Use our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fifteendesign.co.uk\/solutions\/free-instant-seo-audit\/\">free instant SEO audit<\/a> tool to get an instant overview of the most important SEO elements.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every good SEO strategy starts with an in-depth onsite audit. I often speak to marketing professionals who have created near-perfect SEO strategies that have tanked due to the lack of an initial audit. There\u2019s no better way to familiarise yourself with a website, a company and what they do than pulling apart each page and [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":21332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.8 (Yoast SEO v27.8) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>How To Conduct An In-Depth SEO Audit - Fifteen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Every good SEO strategy starts with an in-depth onsite SEO audit. Here you can find out about how to conduct an in-depth SEO audit and why you should.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.fifteendesign.co.uk\/blog\/how-to-conduct-an-in-depth-seo-audit\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How To Conduct An In-Depth SEO Audit\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Every good SEO strategy starts with an in-depth onsite SEO audit. Here you can find out about how to conduct an in-depth SEO audit and why you should.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.fifteendesign.co.uk\/blog\/how-to-conduct-an-in-depth-seo-audit\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Fifteen\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/FifteenDesign\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-05-24T07:44:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-10-31T13:03:30+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.fifteendesign.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/seo-audit.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1800\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"994\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Kyle Lindsay\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Kyle Lindsay\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Estimated reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"How To Conduct An In-Depth SEO Audit - Fifteen","description":"Every good SEO strategy starts with an in-depth onsite SEO audit. 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