How to Conduct a Complete SEO Audit for a Small Business Website Effectively

seo audit small business website

How to Conduct a Complete SEO Audit for a Small Business Website Effectively

If your small business is dealing with the current world of online customers without a website, you can never reach your brand’s full potential. But even if you have a website, how effective is it actually?

This is where the SEO audit for small business websites comes into the picture.

But what is it exactly, and how can it help your site and business make more sales?

Well, the SEO audit allows you to identify the areas of your website, which need much more attention, and also the plus-sides that can be optimized even more to augment the user experience and frequently attract search engine crawlers.

But how can you explore the limitless possibilities of your website if you don’t know how to delve and discover the shortcomings and correct them?

To conduct and complete a website SEO audit successfully, you need optimization expertise and premium site auditing tools. Suppose if you don’t have much knowledge of SEO and auditing tools, in that case, you can consult with a top-notch SEO company that can quickly get you a comprehensive audit report along with a detailed blueprint on how to resolve the errors for once and all.

So, in this blog post, I will tell you the various aspects of small business website SEO audit and what it consists of. Let’s get started.

Why is Website SEO Auditing Imperative?

Before we get into the technicalities of website audits for small businesses, let’s discuss why it is so necessary.

One of the key benefits of doing an SEO audit is to understand the true potential of your website and discern the areas that need to be developed even further. Now, since every website is different, it’s challenging to understand where your site currently stands as per Google. But after doing the SEO audit, you will get a comprehensive idea about this. However, that’s not all.

Conducting a website SEO audit will allow your site to function even better than before and also eliminate any archaic SEO practice that might penalize your site now or in the future.

We all know how much keywords are essential for the entire process of ranking a website on search engines like Google. Believe it or not, but conducting a website audit will help you understand the best-performing keywords. Now, you can easily spot the keywords that can bring you the most amount of traffic and help you convert them more into sales.

All this valuable information will only lead you towards one thing; a better website and better revenue! But for that, one has to follow all the steps necessary for the process. Let’s look at them one by one.

Keyword Audit

First off, we have the keyword audit. This is a must-do, which you have to keep in your SEO audit checklist, and without any doubt, it comes right on the top. As mentioned earlier, an SEO audit will help you identify the best-performing keywords for your site.

But this not only includes the keyword audit related to your site but also the keywords used on your competitors’ websites.

This is one of the greatest benefits that this process can lend you. Most small business owners often stay clueless about their competitors and what drives a massive volume of traffic toward their websites. But with the keyword audit done properly, you indeed can stay two steps ahead of the curve.

Having a comprehensive understanding of your targeted keywords is absolutely necessary. It requires you to use keyword analysis tools that will help you achieve that. These tools will tell you the most relevant and profitable list of keywords that will drive traffic toward your website.

All you have to do is enter a few keywords related to your business and products/services, and you will be able to discover keywords suggested by the tool and how they have been performing over the last few months/years. SEMrush and Google Keyword Analysis Tool are some of the tools that can come in really handy for doing comprehensive keyword analysis for your small business website.

On-Page Audit

Next, on the site audit checklist, we have the website’s on-page audit. Now, this process contains a number of crucial aspects to check and subsequently correct them.

For example, first, you have the Page Title audit. Now, if you wish to choose a title that will fit perfectly in the stipulated space on the SERP, you will have to keep it between 45 to 55 characters, including spaces. Ensure to use one or two keywords in the page title relevant to the page and make it as intriguing as possible.

Next, you will do the page Meta description audit. This is very important since search engines display the Meta description on the SERP. Here, you have to use your copywriting skills and spice up the description like a short yet powerful sales pitch. This will entice your customers to click on your links. Also, you should use one or two relevant keywords to optimize the meta description better and keep them under 150 characters.

Auditing header tags (h1 to h6) is also an essential part of the entire on-page audit process. For this, the Screaming Frog tool can come to your aid. This tool can ensure that your header tags are perfectly aligned with the page title and Meta description of the page to make your copy much more optimized and easily readable. Remember, one webpage should have one h1 tag but may contain multiple other header tags (h2 to h6).

After page title, meta description, and header tags, you must complete the image audit. This includes analyzing and optimizing image alternative text, image file name, and image title (optional). Auditing and optimizing images helps search engines understand images better and further index them appropriately. Remember, keeping image alternative texts blank is an HTML semantic error and considered very bad for SEO.

Content Audit

Considering the impact and influence that content has on SEO and ranking, a content audit is undoubtedly one of the essential steps in the website auditing process. The goal of this is to identify the quality of the content and discover if there are any content gaps that need to be filled as soon as possible.

The content auditing process begins with evaluating the quality of the content presently being used on the site. After that, you can assess the content to that of the keywords and buyer personas that have already been identified. This will allow you to judge whether there is any gap or areas where you can develop better contents to target the keywords that are not yet targeted.

Little by little, the content audit will help you map all the shortcomings, and based on your analysis, you will further develop more high-quality content to increase the authority of your website and get better returns.

After the content audit, you have to rectify all the errors you identified. Like it or not, but most of your audiences/customers/clients will judge your website based on the quality of your content. And by quality, I mean everything from the grammar, spelling, punctuation, the volume of content, depth of content, etc. This is where you can use tools like Grammarly and your personal editing skills to make your site content impeccable and effective.

Competitors’ content audit is also equally imperative for a small business. Understanding what types of content your competitors produce, how they craft their content, or how they sway customers will help you develop a better content strategy for your own website.

Backlink Audit

Do we need to go over elaborating on the importance of backlinks for SEO and ranking? I guess not. But same as inbound link building, backlink audit is equally essential for your website. It actually helps you dig deep into analyzing the quality of your site’s backlinks.

Apart from understanding the authority of your inbound link profile, a backlink audit will also allow you to discover new opportunities. Also, sometimes, there could be a few links that can pose threats to your website; the backlink audit will help you eliminate them as well. After conducting an audit, you can devoid all the toxic or low-quality links and keep only the ones that can pass true value to your small business website.

It will make your website rank much better and also prevent it from falling prey to many penalties from search engines.

Besides, auditing your competitors’ inbound links will help you unearth a lot of potential authoritative websites where you can try building backlinks for your site.

Technical Audit

Technical audit is imperative if you want to keep your website in good health. The process includes auditing many technical aspects such as site tags, page loading time, website navigation, site usability, responsiveness, and many more.

You should do a few tests to discover if there is any issue with your website. Rectifying them will make your website faster and more powerful than ever. Needless to say, it plays a huge role in SEO and search engine rankings.

Website technical audit checklist includes:

  • Check if there are pages returning 404 error codes. If you find, permanently redirect them to relevant, internal, existing pages. Also, design custom error pages with search functionality to help users find information quickly without bouncing off.
  • The internal links should never return 4xx errors.
  • Every single URL of your website should be served on HTTPS. Also, to avoid mixed content errors, there shouldn’t be any internal HTTP calls.
  • Make sure your site is never duplicated by any other domains or sub-domains. Use tools like Copyscape to monitor your contents’ originality. If required, you can use Google’s DMCA tool to request Google to take down the copied content from the search results.
  • Use the Google Search Console tool to check if webpages are frequently crawled and indexed or not.
  • Check if the robots.txt is blocking any content that you wish search engines to index and rank.
  • Check if your site has canonicalization and cannibalization issues or not.
  • See if your site is mobile-optimized, i.e., it can be accessed from a mobile screen without the site interface getting cluttered or unreadable.
  • Ensure your website’s navigation and CTAs are easy to click and tap, large enough, and sufficiently gapped in between.
  • Lastly, monitor the loading time of your website on desktop/laptop and mobile devices. Make sure it loads in the first three seconds. For checking it, you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, etc.

Some of the Most Used Website Auditing tools

SEO audit for small business websites will not be possible if you are not using the much-needed site audit tools. Some of the most popular auditing tools are:

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is indeed one of the most preferred website audit tools for crawling an entire site and providing you with helpful insights related to its SEO problems.

The tool works on various SEO factors like page titles, meta descriptions, anchor text, broken links, outbound links, response time, etc.

Woorank

This site audit tool is widely used by top-of-the-line SEO agencies, B2B marketing companies, and many digital marketers.

From on-page audit to off-page backlinks, from technical audit to keywords; Woorank covers a wide range of aspects and gives you valuable recommendations about the existing SEO errors.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console tool not only allows you to monitor your website closely but helps you optimize it as well. The tool is quite easy to use and offers a lot of priceless data and features that you won’t find on most other site audit tools.

The tool displays a number of information like the keywords to target, current ranking positions, number of clicks, crawling errors, mobile responsiveness, website’s usability, loading time, etc.

So, there you have it – all the aspects of SEO audit for small business websites, which you have to monitor and analyze time and again. By now, I believe you have some idea about why site audit is pivotal and how to conduct it properly. Should you have any further queries, please feel free to mention them in the comment section below.

Till then, happy auditing your website.

 

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