If you own a website, you’ve probably heard of SEO (search engine optimisation), but you may not be familiar with an SEO audit.
In short, an SEO audit is the process of evaluating a website to see how well optimised it is for search engines such as Google. Think of it like an MOT for your website.
An SEO audit can help you identify issues that may be preventing your site from ranking higher in the search engine results page (SERP).
By addressing these issues, you can enhance your site’s visibility and rankings and attract more organic traffic to your website. More relevant traffic ultimately leads to more conversions!
Why is an SEO audit important?
Search engines such as Google use sophisticated algorithms to determine how websites rank in search results. These algorithms look at various factors, including the quality of backlinks, the relevance of content, and overall user experience to determine a website’s ranking.
In the online marketing world, we follow what is known as ‘SEO best practices’, which are a set of guidelines designed to help a website meet search engine standards.
These best practices cover a range of different areas, including technical SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
By following these best practices, websites effectively signal to Google that they are probably valuable, high-quality content that meets users needs. This, in turn, can lead to higher rankings in the search results.
An SEO audit will evaluate your website and identify any errors or areas that need improvement, such as broken links or slow loading pages. An audit provides actionable insights to help you address these issues and, ultimately, enhance the SEO performance of your website.
Key aspects of an SEO audit include:
Technical SEO
An SEO audit can analyse the technical SEO of a website, looking at factors such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, broken links and site structure. By resolving these issues, this provides a positive and seamless experience for both users and search engine crawl bots.
Technical SEO is the foundations of a website, much like the foundations of a house. A technically sound website ensures that search engines can crawl, index and rank its pages. Without this, your website may go unnoticed by search engines.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is exactly what it sounds like. This involves optimising certain elements on a web page to help improve its visibility in search results.
On-Page SEO can include optimising content for strategic keywords, ensuring title and meta descriptions are optimal for search results, adding alt text to images and ordering content with the appropriate header tags.
Ensuring the content on your website is optimised for both users and search engines can help boost SEO performance. The easier it is for search engines to understand and rank, the higher the likelihood of attracting more visitors to the site.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO refers to any external, off-page factors that influence the overall SEO performance of a website, such as backlinks.
A strong backlink profile, meaning links from other reputable websites linking back to yours, can boost your SEO efforts, as these are signals of authority and credibility to Google.
An SEO audit can identify how many backlinks your site has, where they’re coming from, and determine the quality of these. Harmful or “spammy” links can have a detrimental effect, so an SEO audit may suggest removing these.
An SEO audit is essential for identifying any errors or areas of improvement that can help boost the performance of your website in the search engine results page.
By keeping your website in top health, you’re more likely to appear in search results, and users are more likely to visit your website.
An SEO audit doesn’t need to be too technical. Here at Engage Web, we can do it for you!
Interested in a free SEO audit of your website? Find out more here or reach out to the expert team today.
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