By Harry Mackin

Wouldn’t it be nice if every single website had a perfect, clear SEO strategy from the very start? And every single page on that website was perfectly aligned with every aspect of that strategy, from its original inception through every update?

What a dream, right? Sadly, that’s rarely the reality of running a website – especially if you’re managing a huge enterprise one. Instead, too many cooks over too long a period of time end up stirring up a kind of Frankenstein’s site. It might work, but you may not even know how many pages it has, much less how each of those pages is contributing to your SEO strategy.

Enter the SEO audit. A professional SEO audit is the best way to check on the effectiveness of your website and get it back on track for fulfilling strategic objectives. And the larger and older the website, the more valuable an SEO audit can be – which is exactly what makes enterprise SEO audits so crucial, despite their many challenges.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a comprehensive review and reassessment of a website’s SEO strategy. They evaluate how a website’s pages are currently performing in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and why. In the process, SEO auditors identify any potential issues that may be preventing better performance and suggest ways to fix those issues and improve the site’s overall SEO strategy. 

An SEO audit has two main goals: 

1. To develop an informed and contextual understanding of how and why the site in question is ranking in SERPs the way it is. 
2. To define the next steps of an SEO strategy that will improve those rankings.

How does an SEO audit work?

Search engine algorithms like Google’s consider thousands of factors when determining which web pages to award top results in their SERPs. They even weigh these factors differently depending on the context of the subject matter and keyword. These factors include:

• Technical considerations, such as page load speed, mobile friendliness, site architecture, page crawlability, etc.
• On-page considerations, such as keyword placement and usage, page layout and structure (proper use of title tags, lists, etc.), use of semantically related keywords, page metadata, etc.
• Authority considerations, such as how many backlinks the page has, how well any related pages rank or how frequently they’re visited, etc.
• Content quality considerations, such as how well the content provides the information a visitor needs based on their search, the use of images and/or videos, length and readability, etc.
• Competitive considerations, which compare the SEO of the site to sites of similar subject matter and reach.

To achieve their two main goals, SEO auditors have to analyze these considerations for each page of the website they’re working on.

Most SEO auditors take a triage approach to finding …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

Author: Aaron