If you’ve heard that Google is all-powerful, then you should start thinking it’s true. The requirements of the most used search engine in the world to rank a website can lead to a page through a gorge or reward those who do comply with the rules and are up to date with policy updates. How can you tell if your website is in accordance with the demands or if it is paying the fruits of traffic and recruitment that your business needs? Well doing an audit of the website. In it, you will take into account all the factors that can influence the success of your page from the perspective of your customers and Google. There are several platforms or technological tools that provide data on the performance of your website, but you probably already use them. It is preferable to tell you what are the essential elements that a website audit should cover, the questions you should ask yourself at each step and the lessons you can learn from what you get. These are the five parts in which you can divide the audit. While they can be done simultaneously with a large team, the recommendation is to do so in order to avoid rework. 1. Technical Audit You have to start by reviewing how the technology that supports your website is performing. This affects from the ranking of the pages to the way in which the users relate to the web. These are the elements that you should review in this step:

● Is your site using an SSL certificate? Is it being implemented in an appropriate manner?

● Are you using a content management system to make updates easy?

● Does it use the best security practices, such as denying access after several unsuccessful login attempts?

● Fast loading on most of the most important search engines? Does it load well on mobile? Have you used the Google Mobile Friendly test?

● Are you using Google Analytics or any other app to report data from all pages?

● Have you updated the software and modules on your site?

● Does your page make backups on a regular basis?

2. On-page SEO audit

This audit consists of reviewing the factors that influence your ranking in searches, it is done in each of the pages of your website. Some changes to optimize websites can take months, but when it comes to improving SEO on the pages is much easier because you can make changes at the time. What do you need to review?

● Do the texts on each page have the SEO keywords defined for your site?

● Do you have relevance indicators including business addresses and phone numbers?

● Do you have a clear privacy policy and the terms of service?

● Are the content pages easy to share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google Plus?

● Are your content pages making proper use of the tags and linking to other internal content?

● Are the images on the pages optimized with respect to the keywords?

3. SEO audit off-page

In SEO there are external factors that influence in reaching a greater visibility online. It is about the external sites that converse with your website, over which you have limited or no control. Therefore, these types of audits are often challenging. However, recognizing the importance of these factors, Google has provided resources to do so. It is impossible to count “all” the back links that lead to a site. No matter how diligent you are, it is impossible to know exactly the portfolio of external links and take action against those with whom you do not want to be related. But Google can do it. To achieve this you can use Google Webmaster Tools. This is what you have to look for in the analysis:

● How many domains have links to your website?

● How many back links do your content and landing pages have?

● Is your back link portfolio growing or shrinking? Does someone take control?

● Have you used Google Disavow Tool to eliminate bad back links?

● Is your site having traffic and mentions from your social platforms and YouTube?

4. Audit of user experience

One of the factors to which Google assigns more weight in the evaluation of the ranking is the user experience . This indicator measures how design, technology and content make life easier for the user. If they find what they need on your website, if they do it in a few clicks, intuitively and in less time. These are the questions that evaluate the quality of the user experience, so valued by Google:

● Are the pages on your site loading in less than three seconds with the average Internet speed?

● Do you have menus for easier navigation?

● Do you use a minimum amount, or none, of advertising that interferes with viewing the content?

● Do you have a responsive design to use on mobile devices?

● How many clicks separate the user from the information he or she looks for?

5. Audit of content and sales funnel

Nowadays, no website audit would be complete without analyzing the content strategy . Good content is one of the most powerful forces to ensure online visibility, build relationships of trust with prospects and achieve progress in the sales funnel . We know that the content must be of quality and add value, but how we evaluate it in terms of its contribution to the web positioning. Here are some premises:

● Is your content developed based on the profiles of your buyers?

● Are the content pages helpful, useful, informative, relevant and adapted to the language of the users?

● Do you have Landing Pages fully optimized by product, service or offer?

● Is each piece of content designed for a specific type of buyer according to its shopping journey?

● Do all content pages have “share” buttons on social networks? If you have never done a complete audit of a website, these five phases may seem very complex, but once you have finished you can align your website with the best digital marketing practices, ensuring that in the future you only have to make minor adjustments according to the new rules. In fact, a first audit that contemplates these five dimensions can take weeks, but once completed you will have aligned your web and content team so that they do not incur the same mistakes. It is important that every three months you make a preventive check, especially because Google changes its demands frequently. Keeping your website optimized and up to date will put you many steps ahead of the competition and help you to make your content more visible, so you can fulfill your task of attracting more traffic and more prospects.

Web audit: a fundamental issue to get the most out of your page

Aweb auditconsists of theanalysis and subsequent correction of errorsdetected in a web page or a blog, as well as theimplementation of the necessary improvementsin order to optimize its various elements, both design and content, structure, etc.In this way, we will achieve a better positioning, more traffic and more conversions and, therefore, an increase in profitability.

Usability, optimization and security: the three major aspects of web audit

To be useful and reliable, a web audit mustanalyze three basic aspectsof our page or blog:UsabilityOptimizationSecurityIn this way, we will know with objectivity and accuracywhat is the state of health of our page, having a fundamental information to: improve the positioning in the entrances of Google and other search engines, get more traffic, increase the conversion percentage of visits to registries (leads) and real clients, or gain in prestige and authority, among other advantages.

1. The usability analysis

Usability is theease and convenience with which users browse our website.In this aspect, an auditcan be invaluable helpto detect: broken links, excessive slowdowns the speed of page load or some of its parts (especially through mobile phones), unclear menus or other problems of navigation.Overall, the correction of these errors can greatly improve user usability, improving their experience and getting visitors to enter our page repeat and stay longer with us.

2. Optimization of the page

A second fundamental aspect in a web audit is toanalyze all those aspects(which are many and variable) that influence the algorithm of Google and, therefore, will end up determining our position in theSERPafter user searches:

● Structure of URLs

● Quality of contents

● Strategy of keywords or keywords.

● Site architecture.

● Number and quality of internal and external links.

● Planning the presence of the web in social networks and professional platforms.

● Etc.

3. Aspects related to security

One of the aspects increasingly valued and demanded by users of a website issecurity, especially when personal data or of special sensitivity come into play, such as those related to health or banking.Hence the need todetect in time any type of vulnerability or weaknessthat allows a third party to make fraudulent use of such data.

How can I do a web audit?

The procedure to perform a web audit will depend on our needs and the level of analysis and improvements that we want to implement.One possibility is toresort to a consultancy or company specialized in web audits, but we can also perform the analysis of our website usingfree and very low cost commands and tools:

● Through the command “tuudomain” we can check that the number of pages indexed in Google matches the number of pages and entries we have on our website or blog. In this way we will avoid problems of indexing, a question, on the other hand, very common.

● To check the cache of our page we must use the “cache“command in front of our URL. This question is fundamental for SEO, since we make sure that Google robots go through the frequency due to all the links on our page. ● Check that our site does not have duplicate content with programs such as Copy scape, a factor that, in addition to reducing quality and interest to our page, is increasingly penalized by Google.

● With the tool of Google Webmaster Tools you can analyze and optimize the titles and meta descriptions of your publications.

● The Screaming Frog tool helps you easily detect broken links on your page. If you are interested in improving the organic positioning of your page in Google, either through a web audit or other methods, we recommend you take a look at these 3 articles about SEO from our Online Marketing Dictionary:

7 ways to audit and improve your website in a simple way

You spend a great deal of time researching your competition. Identify their best strategies, analyze their keywords and their backlinks profile, all with the intention of overcoming their positions. In a previous article we talked about it: Practical Guide for Competitive Intelligence Online . Well, the time has come to take a closer look at your website. Because your website requires constant dedication.

● 7 ways to audit and improve your website

● 1. Start with an Automated Site Audit

● 2. Investigate your site also on Google

● 3. Check which pages are positioned from several keywords

● 4. Search your brand names on Google

● 5. Check the structure of your site

● 6. Check your mobile site

● 7. Do a link profile audit

Is your site optimized enough for your competition? Do you know their weakest points? When was the last time you checked for broken links? I think it’s time to do an audit of the site! Here are 7 keys that will help you improve your web page. And get ready to overtake your competition.

1. Start with an Automated Site Audit

To put it in a very simple way, an audit of the site is an in-depth analysis of your site that is carried out with a single objective: to determine what works and what does not work. An adequate site audit analyzes each aspect of your site, from the technical configuration to the content, through an on-page optimization. Luckily, you do not have to do any of this by hand. You can use the site audit software, with which you can automate the process. I’m going to use SEMrush to show you what a site audit report looks like. Screenshot of a main site audit report made with SEMrush Once the audit is finished, the tool divides the results into 4 sections:

● Summary that provides a general result of the audit and indicates the areas that should be improved.

● Problems that describe each error. Warning or other problems encountered during the audit. All these problems are crucial to improve the performance of your site. Even so, they differ in the level of severity.

○ Errors are the most serious problems and they must be solved immediately. These problems are those that can have a deeper effect on the performance of your site.

○ Warnings are problems that should be resolved, but you can position your site but not the solutions.

○ Notices are not problems as such. You could consider them recommendations to improve the performance of the site in general. Example report report

● Page report. This section gives you access to individual reports of each page on your site.

● Compare crawls. SEMrush also includes the option to monitor your progress by eradicating site problems.

2. Investigate your site also on Google

Just as an automated site audit will give you a comprehensive view of your site, it is also a good idea to conduct similar research manually. Search your site on Google. And, finally, check how many pages the search returned. This simple exercise should indicate if there is a problem with pages on your site that have not been indexed correctly. Or if the search engine had indexed pages that you did not want to appear there, such as blog categories, custom WordPress post types, etc. Also check if your home page is shown as the first result. If not, this may indicate optimization problems:

● The page or site may have penalized you;

● The structure of your site or internal links may be giving incorrect information to the search engines;

● Maybe you are preventing, unknowingly, that the search engines access your site.

3. Check which pages are positioned from several keywords

Another way to test the performance of your site is by checking if the right pages are positioning themselves by the correct keywords. Log in to a keyword crawler and see which pages are positioned from multiple keywords. Is it the pages you wanted and optimized for those terms? That there is a discrepancy between the keyword and the landing page that is positioning for that term might suggest the following:

● A problem with the indexing of your site;

● A poor navigation structure;

● Errors with internal links;

● A penalty;

● Improperly optimized content Solving those problems can be as easy as improving meta tags or the content of a page. But it may also require you to restructure your web page, delete other pages (even temporarily) or reinforce pages linking them internally with others.

4. Search your brand names on Google

You should also investigate if your site is shown in searches related to your brand. Specifically you should see if your home page is displayed first. Are the other listings correct? The absence of your home page, or any other page related to your brand in these results could suggest that there has been a penalty or other problems that prevent you from positioning yourself with your brand names. But if there are many users who try to reach your site from a brand search, it is essential that you make sure that at least your homepage is shown in those results.

5. Check the structure of your site

Many of the site’s problems are the result of poor site structure and poor internal link work. Therefore, check the navigation of your site and the structure of the information. At least make sure that

● Your home page links to the appropriate categories;

● Category pages link to the appropriate subcategories or product pages;

● Product pages link to relevant categories;

● Blog posts link relevant content and also link to your homepage. A good site structure will ensure a much better user experience. This should help your visitors find the information they need as quickly as possible. Instead of acting as an obstacle. A good structure will also help Google to crawl your site . After all, is not that how the Googlebot discovers the information on your site?

6. Check your mobile site

Users will search and access your site from multiple devices. Therefore, you should try to work well regardless of how they try to access it. Search your site on Google from a mobile device. Is the “mobile optimized” labeldisplayed on the list ? Are all pages correctly redirected from the desktop version to the mobile version? Are all functionalities maintained? Does browsing make it easy to find all the information? Is a page hidden or deleted in the mobile version? Since mobile optimization is becoming a positioning factor , it is essential that you ensure that your website is displayed correctly to all users.

7. Do a link profile audit

And, finally, it also evaluates the backlinks of your site. Although they are not part of the configuration of your site, links are an important positioning factor . Just as in a site audit, your backlink equivalence tries to establish if there are problems with your link profile. It can help you identify unnatural links, detect new opportunities to get backlinks and compare your link profile with your competitor’s profile. A link audit is a long process. If you are interested in the complete process, read herethis step by step tutorial by Julie Joyce.

conclusion

A common mistake is to focus on the strategies of the competition and forget about the site itself. But regardless of the depth of competitive intelligence you achieve, and unless your site is well optimized, you will not be able to overcome its positions. Conducting an in-depth site audit will help you detect and improve areas that need more immediate attention.

How to do an audit on your website to improve positioning

All of us who have a website work every day on different strategies and actions to improve search engine positions and capture more traffic. We often talk about how to get links, optimize keywords or manage content marketing by writing to Google and to users. However, we must not forget that the basis of all these actions is to know perfectly the own project. In order to improve the positioning of your site, and know the real situation of this with respect to Google and the competition, it is essential to perform a web audit with powerful tools (such as my favorite, Screaming Frog ). Let’s see how! What is a web audit and how to carry it out to improve your positioning

● What is a web audit?

● How to do an audit with Screaming Frog

● Configuration of Screaming Frog

● Online audit reports

● Implementation of the results

What is a web audit?

A web, online or SEO audit is a preliminary study that must be carried out on each web page analyzing all the aspects that the search engines will take into account when positioning. This analysis is the starting point of any online strategy, but it should also be repeated with certain frequency in order to measure how the different SEO actions evolve. There are different tools that facilitate this task, but for me one of the most complete and popular today is Screaming Frog, because although it is paid, it allows us to analyze thousands of URLs on a website.

How to do an audit with Screaming Frog

As I said, Screaming Frog helps you perform a full on-page audit analyzing each of the elements that are part of your web page. With this tool you can study your website through a simulator of the behavior of a specific bot that you can choose from a list of possibilities: Thus, you will obtain information about:

● Possible indexing problems

● Possible tracking problems

● Possible problems of canonization

● Possible 404 error problems and link juice

● Possible redirection problems

Configuration of Screaming Frog

The first thing to do before activating the tool is to program the parameters you want to analyze. To do this, you have to enter the “Configuration” tab and the “Spider” tab. Here, you will define how many characters or pixels each element should measure, what will be checked and even the limits of the analysis. Once the tool is fully configured, it will be time to hit the “Start” button to start tracking all the information about your web page. When finished, Screaming Frog will warn you so you can check your different results reports.

Online audit reports

Then, when you have all the information available in the tool, you will be able to consult all the reports with the data of your website one by one. The information that Screaming Frog reports is very broad, that is why we are going to see the data that you may find most interesting is a web audit to work on SEO at a basic level :

● Internal – All: In this report you can see all the URLs that form your web page and are indexed in the search engines. It helps you to know what information your website is reading Google, or the engine you choose.

● Response Codes (3xx and 4xx): It is essential to know the possible errors that are part of your web page.

● Page Titles : It refers to the SEO title, and in this report you can know which ones are too short or long, which ones are duplicated, or which pages do not have this element.

● Meta Description : A report that analyzes the meta descriptions of all your content. You can see which ones comply with the characteristics that you have defined in the configuration and which ones need an optimization.

● H1: It is a report of the style of the previous ones that in this case analyzes the data of the H1 of each content. You can also get this information from the different H2.

● Images: Finally, we must not forget SEO for images. With this report you will know which images have alt well and which ones weigh too much.

Implementation of the results

Once you have analyzed all the information of Screaming Frog, you should not end your web audit here. It is time to implement all these results to optimize your page. You can download all the information in Excel files, or compatible with other similar programs, to start improving each element. Take into account the features you used in your configuration, which are the objective you want to reach. Check one by one each error reported by the audit tool, and improve as much as possible all of them. Soon you will see how these small optimizations give you results in your SEO positioning!

Web Audit Concept

What is a web audit?

The web audit , also known as SEO audit , is the starting point with which an online positioning strategy is started . It is, in fact, the previous step to perform any action, since it is used to analyze all the possible factors, both internal and external ( on pageand off page ), that affect the performance of a web page when taking positions in any current search engine. Another point of interest related to web audits is that they serve to check the performance of a page in relation to another of the competition. In this way, you can see how is the overall picture and study other pages that perform better to see what kind of strategies are carried out to be able to act accordingly. There are several main objectives of an audit of this type. From the detection of weaknesses or errors of a web page to the optimization of the same for a correct indexation compose the range of purposes that justify the realization of one. This is precisely why it has to be done before starting to mobilize an SEO campaign , as it serves to check which are the strong points to attack with it and the keywords with which it works best.

What is a Web Audit for?

The purpose of a web audit is simply to show both the strengths and weaknesses of a web page. It is the process by which, through a set of tools, the behavior of a portal is determined and its causes are ascertained. In case of stagnation or unexpected growth, is the best way to find out what is behind everything and, of course, to act accordingly if there is something to fix. In general, it is something that is in the hands of professional SEO agencies , since they have the knowledge and the means more than enough to carry out an exhaustive and precise analysis with which to know everything about a website and, afterwards, mobilize to improve it.

Examples of use of a web audit

As an example of web audit it is difficult to point out something exact, since it requires using various tools, such as Ahrefs when determining the number of incoming links . However, in the next post we leave you several names of these utilities and, incidentally, how they can be used to climb positions in Google and similar: How to make a good SEO Strategy step by step?

More information on web audits

Since it is one of the mechanisms by which any Internet site has to pass sooner or later, it is recommended that you inform yourself as much as possible. Then, we leave content related to the web audit that can be very useful to know a little more about its execution steps, range of action and consequences:

● Web Consultant

● Web Consulting

● SEO Budget

● How much does an SEO audit cost?

● Best Web Auditing Agencies

8 TOOLS TO AUDIT YOUR WEB PAGE

The audits done by professionals are the most recommended, but despite this, we do not always have the economic flexibility to access them. For this reason, it is very common that, during the first stages of our project, we have to take charge of an SEO analysis ourselves. If you find yourself in this or any other similar situation, then we will show you 8 of the best tools to audit your web page .

Website Auditor It is an all-in-one audit tool . It is one of the most complete found in the market. It is paid, but you can use a free version, which, although it has limitations, is still very useful. The annual maintenance of the pro version is $ 17, but it is worth investing. It helps you to locate broken links, create optimized content for SEO by checking if you have too long or missing posts titles, create your robots.txt file and sitemaps. It provides information of page rank , date of Cache, visits per page, inbound links, among other utilities that this application gives us.

Screaming Frog It is a multi-platform software that gives you a detailed analysis of your websites . It is a very good help with a free version and an annual payment. Personally it would not be the only tool with which I would work, since the data it offers are based solely on Bing. But it is very useful to compare results, because it gives us a wider panorama, with text link checks, background images, frames, plug-ins , CSS style sheets, scripts , etc.

Google webmasters tools This is one of the services provided by Google completely free of charge, as a support for webmasters to optimize their web pages. And, contrary to Screaming Frog, the data presented is exclusively extracted from Google, without providing data from Bing or Yahoo. In addition, it informs you if your page has suffered a hack, check the indexing of your website, it allows you to check the pages that contain errors. As you can tell, GWT can provide a large amount of data that will help you improve your online visibility. It does not matter if you use the other applications mentioned, but make sure that this tool is on your frequently used SEO list.

SeoBook It is one of the tools to audit your website that are free and of the most recommended and are very good to manage audits, as much or more than some of payment that is offered and it is totally free. It also contains training links for beginner webmasters who are interested in learning more about SEO analyzes and audits, but also about PPC and other Internet marketing strategies .

Internet Marketing Ninjas Although they offer only four tools in total, it is a very useful aid for the audit of your website. The strengths for audit purposes are mainly on-site optimization ; the images and the check of links to find broken links, re-addresses, and software that traces the entire site.

SEOtoolSet For those who have less experience in SEO, is one of the applications to audit your website that may be excessive. With SEOToolSet, you can run the check separately for a range of data such as domain indexing, keywords and page analyzer. Of course, these simple analyzes are offered for free, but you’ll have to pay an upgrade to get access to the premium version and have it all in one package. It is an excellent starting point to discover if you will need a more detailed audit or even the help of a professional to optimize your website.

Angular Search Marketing Free Tools Angular is another provider that offers a “Fremium” model (half free and half premium) where you can test the basic features at no cost, but also offers different categories of audit tools: onsite, offsite , and others. Their applications are quite good in general, but they are very limited in functionality. In case you need to run a quick scan, it’s worth checking it out as another option.

Small SEO Tools It is one of the applications that goes unnoticed compared to the others, but it has several functions of quality analysis that makes it at least worth a quick check because it can give us some detail that others overlooked us. For example, you can see their main referral links, stay up to date with your keyword ranking, and more. It should be noted that you should avoid using your plugin to write texts or creator of backlinks if you want to follow Google’s SEO guidelines, since these “helps” can introduce a risk Google Panda quite significant, and the creation of links is not something you should undertake without a solid strategy. Having made this comment, with regard to audits, you can use it with complete peace of mind. With this list of the best SEO tools for audits we help you to manage your own website doing an optimization in a pro-active way, so you can find possible problems and get started to correct them or consult a specialist to help you position yourself better .