SEO Audit With Free Tools | Forget Paid SEO Tools

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SEO is one of the biggest channels in digital marketing for bringing keyword targetted visitors having some intent to any website.

So businesses whether doing local marketing or international marketing, should leverage this great source of traffic.

SEO can be helpful for bringing traffic, creating brand awareness, building trust, establishing authority within your industry.

It is also helpful for maintaining brand reputation online, function as primary customer support etc.

SEO auditing is the process of analyzing the technical, on-page and off-page factors of an existing website to find out the errors and opportunities to make improvements.

Suggested Article: SEO Technical Audit for Beginners

It’s like diagnosing a patient to find out the root of a disease and prescribe medicine. :P

So it is an important pillar of any SEO campaign, especially for an existing website.

In this short guide, I am going to throw light upon techniques of SEO audit using free tools.

Single version website:

Your website may have many versions such as with https, without HTTP, with www or without it. You must have only 1 preferred version and all other versions should redirect to the main version.

If you choose https://www.website.com as the main version other versions such as http://www.website.com, http://website.com https://website.com should redirect to it.

Check using this simple google search operator:

Site:website.com -inurl:https etc.   Or use Screaming frog SEO spider.

Check Brand name rank:

Check if your site is ranking for your brand name i.e your domain name on the search engine or not.

If not, you must optimize for it.

Meta title and description tag:

Check title and meta descriptions of each and every page using a crawler. Use a SERP previewer tool to see the correct length and characters etc.

Keywords:

Find what are the keywords your website is ranking for. See organic traffic and search queries in google analytics, Google search console or uber suggest tool.

Find the low hanging fruit and optimize the content after analyzing the intent behind it.

Check H1 tags on your pages:

Afer title tag h1 tag is the most important tag, it tells google what is your webpage is all about. Place the main keyword, don’t use it twice on the same page. 

You can use manual check using ctrl+u to see the page source.

Top-performing pages:

Find out which pages are performing better and which ones are not. Use google analytics acquisition data to find our landing pages with traffics.

Duplicate Content Check:

Here is what Wikipedia says about duplicate content.

Duplicate content can harm your authority, trustworthiness of your site. Also, your website may not rank using content that others have already posted.

Use Copyscape to find it out.

In case if you are using the same content in different pages ( such as product pages ) you need to use a canonical tag to declare a master page.

Use Siteliner to find it out.

Thin Content:

Pages which is not giving any value, having low word counts and no backlinks, traffic etc are considered thin content.

You can take 4 actions depending on the situations:

1. Delete them forever
2. 301 Redirect or consolidate
3. Update the content of the page.
4. Leave as it is.

You can find ahref’s video for doing a perfect content audit.

Webpage loading speed:

Fast loading webpage is great user experience, so google boost their rank if everything else is alright.

Find out slow loading pages using Google Page Insight and GT Metrix and fix them one by one.

Structured Data:

It tells google a bit more about your page and shows snippets which improves CTR and ultimately ranking.

Use Google structured Data testing tool

Backlinks Analysis:

Backlinks are still regarded as one of the ranking factors. Check the number of referring domains providing Dofollow links.
Having links from related, authority sites having high domain authority and traffic is a powerful SEO factor.

Use Google search console’s top linking sites tab or UberSuggest’s backlink tool. 

If you see a spammy site linking to you you can disavow the link using GSC remove URL feature.