Doctors say regular checkups are important for ensuring good health. You may not know what problems you have in your body without a checkup. The same can be said about a WordPress website too.
You need to conduct a regular WordPress SEO audit to ensure that your precious site is in good health and also to find any problems that you were unaware of. In addition, if your site has run into any kind of problem, then you can solve it through an SEO audit as well.
In this blog, we are going to list the necessary steps to conduct a thorough SEO audit for your website.
Let's start with-
Benefits of Conducting an SEO Audit for a Website
Conducting an SEO audit for a website offers numerous benefits that can enhance its performance, visibility, and overall success. Here are some key advantages:
1. Improved Search Engine Rankings
An SEO audit helps identify issues that may be hindering your website's ability to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). By addressing these issues, you can improve your site's visibility and attract more organic traffic.
2. Enhanced User Experience
An audit can reveal areas where the user experience (UX) is lacking. Improving site speed, mobile responsiveness, and overall usability can lead to higher engagement rates, lower bounce rates, and increased conversions.
3. Increased Website Traffic
By optimizing your website's content, structure, and technical aspects, an SEO audit helps drive more targeted traffic. This can result in higher visitor numbers and better-quality leads, as the site becomes more relevant to search queries.
4. Better Conversion Rates
An improved user experience and more targeted traffic can lead to higher conversion rates. An SEO audit can help optimize landing pages, streamline navigation, and ensure calls-to-action are effective, which boosts conversions.
5. Competitive Advantage
Regular SEO audits help you stay ahead of competitors by keeping your site up-to-date with the latest SEO practices. This proactive approach ensures that you maintain or improve your position in the competitive online landscape.
6. Identification of Technical Issues
SEO audits help uncover technical problems such as broken links, duplicate content, or indexing issues that may be affecting your site's performance. Addressing these issues can lead to a more efficient and accessible website.
7. Content Optimization
An SEO audit provides insights into how well your content is performing and identifies opportunities for improvement. This includes optimizing for relevant keywords, ensuring content relevance, and improving readability and engagement.
8. Better ROI on Marketing Efforts
By optimizing your website for search engines and users, you can achieve a better return on investment (ROI) from your digital marketing efforts. This is because improved SEO performance often translates into higher organic traffic and conversions without additional marketing spend.
9. Informed Strategy Development
SEO audits provide valuable data and insights that can inform your overall digital marketing strategy. This includes identifying which keywords to target, understanding user behavior, and prioritizing areas for improvement.
10. Long-Term Sustainability
Regular SEO audits ensure that your website remains optimized over time. This long-term approach helps maintain and improve your site's performance as search engine algorithms and user behaviors evolve.
To know more about WordPress website optimization, check our guide on 👉 A WordPress SEO Checklist for Beginners.
Now, let's see how to conduct a WordPress SEO audit.
How to Conduct WordPress SEO Audit
Now you know the benefit of conducting a WordPress SEO audit, it is time to conduct an SEO audit for your website.
After handling many sites and performing SEO audits for them, we have prepared a comprehensive checklist to do this efficiently. We are going to show you two methods-
- Method 1: Automatic SEO Audit
- Method 2: Manual SEO Audit
Automatic SEO Audit
If you are short of time and need a quick overview of your site, then you can do a quick SEO audit using a tool like SEMRush.
Just log in to your SEMRush dashboard and on the left side, you will see an option called “Site Audit”.
There you need to add your domain by clicking on the “Add Project” button. You will get a pop-up and add your domain name to the pop-up.
Then, you need to set the number of pages that will be crawled per audit, and crawl source as well. Then click on the Site Audit button to finish.
Now, you’ll be able to see your audit overview here on the dashboard. You can view Errors, Warnings, and Notices (which aren’t required fixes but are strongly recommended).
In addition, you can see your overall Site Health, Crawled Pages, Top Issues, Crawlability, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals, Site Performance, Internal Linking, and Markup. Use the menu across the top of the audit dashboard to dive deeper into the details of the site crawl.
With this automatic technique, you will see in-depth statistics and a list of your page' SEO performance, plus issues you need to fix.
Manual SEO Audit
A manual SEO audit gives you a clear scenario of how your website is doing. We prefer this method to relying on any tool. Sometimes the tool might miss something or you may forget to fix any issues suggested by the tool.
But with the manual process, everything is done through you and you can easily make sure every issue is addressed.
Here is the manual process to conduct a WordPress SEO audit.
Preliminary Steps
Before you start, you need to follow the preliminary steps. Because, when you are conducting an SEO audit, you may need to change something. You need to be prepared for that.
1. Backup Your Site
“Ensure you have a recent website backup before making any changes”.
First and foremost, you must take a proper backup of your site. As we said, you might have to make changes while conducting an SEO audit. And it is not that every change will work. Then you have to go back.
If you have a backup of your site, then it will be easier to go back and start again.
You can use a plugin like UPdraftplus or Sucuri, to back up your website.
2. Choose a WordPress SEO Plugin
Choosing an SEO plugin for your WordPress website is essential to enhance search engine visibility, optimize content, and improve user experience.
With a WordPress SEO plugin, you will get tools for keyword optimization, meta tag management, XML sitemap generation, and social media integration.
They also provide performance tracking, readability analysis, and technical SEO enhancements like robots.txt and .htaccess management. These plugins automate many SEO tasks, making it easier to maintain and improve your site's search rankings, drive traffic, and achieve better overall site performance.
If you are done with the preliminary steps, now begin the process of running a WordPress SEO audit-
- Run a Website Crawl
- Identify Traffic Drops
- Check for Website Duplicates
- Fix Indexability Issues
- Analyze Your Core Web Vitals
- Fix Broken Pages
- Address Sitemap Issues
- Adjust Content According to SEO Best Practices
- Monitor Your Rankings
1. Run a Website Crawl
A website crawl involves using specialized software to mimic the way search engine crawlers navigate through your website. This process helps identify potential SEO issues that could be impacting your WordPress site’s performance or search engine rankings. There are various software options and WordPress plugins available to help with this task.
2. Identify Traffic Drops
Search engines like Google periodically update their algorithms, which can cause pages that were previously performing well to experience traffic drops. Additionally, a human reviewer might take manual action against your site if it fails to comply with Google Search Essentials, further impacting your traffic.
Outdated content is another potential cause of traffic drops. Older blog posts or landing pages might contain information that is no longer relevant to your audience.
You can use tools like SEMRush to see the traffic drops-
To address these issues, regularly monitor your site’s traffic to identify significant drops, especially after an algorithm update. Refer to Google's algorithm update history to understand how these changes may have affected your site traffic.
It’s also a good practice to routinely update blog posts and other content to ensure you consistently present accurate information and address relevant concerns.
3. Check for Website Duplicates
Website visitors should only be able to access your site through secure addresses, which begin with “https.” If someone types a non-secure version of your website domain, such as http://website.com or http://www.website.com, it should automatically redirect to the secure version.
If your website is accessible through both secure and non-secure domains, this is an issue. Search engine crawlers will see these URLs as different versions of your site and treat them as such, leading to potential indexing problems for your WordPress website.
To address this, check if your website URLs are accessible via both secure and non-secure addresses. If they are, you need to manually redirect the non-secure addresses to the secure ones to ensure proper indexing and security.
You can use the ICANN domain name lookup tool. Type in your domain name and similarly written domain names (for example yourdomain.com and yourdomain.net). Investigate any domains that look similar to yours.
Or you can use Google Search as well.
4. Fix Indexability Issues
Search engine results are generated from a search engine's index, which is a database of crawled, parsed, sorted, and collected web pages. To rank on SERPs, your pages must be included in this index.
Indexability issues can be complex, but various SEO software tools and WordPress plugins can help you automatically identify them. Detecting and resolving these issues ensures that your web pages have the opportunity to rank.
Canonical and noindex tags are valuable tools for addressing indexability issues:
- Canonical Tags: These tags instruct crawlers to index a specific page that may be similar to other content on your site. For example, eCommerce sites often have multiple product listings with slight variations (e.g., size or color). Canonical tags help ensure that these similar pages are indexed correctly and not overlooked by crawlers.
- Noindex Tags: These tags allow you to hide certain pages from crawlers, preventing them from being indexed. This is useful for private pages like login forms and admin panels or for pages with thin or low-quality content that could negatively impact your overall SEO.
Using these tags appropriately can help manage and improve your site's indexability, ensuring that the right pages are visible to search engines.
5. Analyze Your Core Web Vitals
Google uses its Core Web Vitals to measure user experience, which can significantly impact search rankings. Analyzing your website’s performance according to these standards is crucial for boosting your search engine rankings.
Google’s Core Web Vitals include the following:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. Pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.
- First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. Pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): While not yet a Core Web Vital, Google has introduced INP in their publications. It will begin replacing FID as a key metric in March 2024.
These metrics assess a web page’s performance, affecting user experience, conversion rates, and bounce rates. By optimizing your site for these metrics, you can improve both user satisfaction and search engine rankings.
6. Fix Broken Links
Checking for broken pages and links is essential during an SEO audit. Whether due to accidental deletion or other errors, broken pages can disrupt site navigation and waste potential backlinks.
SEO software tools and WordPress plugins often include features that alert you to broken links.
To address these issues:
- Identify Broken Links: Use SEO tools or plugins to find broken links on your site.
- Restore or Redirect: If possible, restore the broken pages. If not, set up 301 redirects to guide users and search engines to the correct pages.
- Monitor Backlinks: Pay special attention to broken links that have valuable backlinks, ensuring you don’t lose valuable link equity.
You can use this free broken link checker tool to find broken links-
Regularly checking for and fixing broken links helps maintain a smooth user experience and preserves your site's SEO value.
7. Address Sitemap Issues
A sitemap is a list of pages within your WordPress website's domain, indicating which pages you want search engines to index. It should exclude dead pages, non-canonical pages, or redirects to avoid confusing search engine crawlers.
To check for sitemap issues:
- Visit Google Search Console.
- Click on Sitemaps.
This will allow you to ensure your sitemap is correctly formatted and only includes the pages you want indexed, helping search engines effectively crawl and index your site.
8. Adjust Content According to SEO Best Practices
Aside from fixing technical issues that may be affecting your SEO performance, it's also crucial to adjust your site content according to SEO best practices.
Some essential elements to include on each web page you want Google to index are:
- Title Tags: These provide a concise description of a page's content and are crucial for SEO.
- Meta Descriptions: These snippets give a summary of a page's content and can influence click-through rates from search engine results.
- Headings (e.g., H1, H2, H3, etc.): These help structure the content on the page and indicate the importance of different sections to search engine crawlers.
These elements help search engine crawlers understand the structure and relevance of each page, boosting your potential rankings.
Additionally, it's important to conduct keyword research for each page. Using the right keywords in your headings, title tags, and meta descriptions ensures that your content aligns with what users are searching for, further enhancing your SEO performance.
9. Monitor Your Rankings
Sometimes, seeing the effects of your SEO adjustments can take a while. However, a vital part of any SEO audit and strategy is to consistently monitor your search engine rankings. This step helps you objectively assess your SEO strategy and make adjustments as necessary.
A Quick Glimpse of All Types of SEO Audits
For your convenience, we have created a table summarizing the Technical SEO Audit, On-Page SEO Audit, Off-Page SEO Audit, User Experience (UX) Audit, Content Audit, and Reporting steps:
| Category | Task | Tools/Plugins |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO Audit | Use Google Search Console to identify crawl errors, mobile usability issues, and security problems | Google Search Console |
| Ensure your site is indexed properly in search engines | Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster | |
| Test your site speed using tools | Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix | |
| Implement caching to improve load times | WP Rocket | |
| Optimize your images by compressing them | Imagify, Smush | |
| Minimize HTTP requests by combining CSS and JavaScript files | WP Rocket, Autoptimize | |
| Ensure your site is mobile-friendly | Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool | |
| Verify your site uses HTTPS and check for any security vulnerabilities | Security plugins like Wordfence | |
| On-Page SEO Audit | Review your content for relevance, keyword optimization, and engagement | Yoast SEO, Rank Math |
| Ensure every page has unique, keyword-rich title tags and meta descriptions | Yoast SEO, Rank Math | |
| Use header tags (H1, H2, H3) properly to structure your content | – | |
| Check your internal linking structure to ensure link equity is distributed across your site | – | |
| Use descriptive file names and alt text for all images | – | |
| Ensure URLs are clean, descriptive, and include relevant keywords | – | |
| Off-Page SEO Audit | Analyze your backlink profile and disavow any toxic or spammy backlinks | SEMRush, Moz |
| Ensure your content is being shared and engaged with on social media platforms | – | |
| Optimize for local search if relevant, ensuring your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) is consistent across directories and verify your Google My Business listing | – | |
| User Experience (UX) Audit | Ensure your site has a clear and logical navigation structure | – |
| Use Google Analytics to check bounce rates, time on site, and pages per session | Google Analytics | |
| Ensure your site is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities | – | |
| Content Audit | Identify underperforming content and either update, improve, or remove it | – |
| Identify content gaps and opportunities for new content that addresses your audience's needs | – | |
| Continuous Monitoring & Reporting | Schedule regular SEO audits to ensure ongoing optimization | – |
| Use tools to generate SEO reports to track improvements and identify new issues | – |
Tools and Plugins You Should Consider
Here are some tools and plugins you need to use to conduct WordPress SEO Audit constantly-
Yoast SEO or Rank Math: For on-page SEO optimization .
WP Rocket: For caching and performance enhancements.
Imagify or Smush: For image optimization .
Google Search Console and Google Analytics: For monitoring site health and performance.
Bonus Tips to Conduct WordPress SEO Audit
From our experience, we have added some bonus tips to you can check while conducting a WordPress SEO audit-
1. Check Keyword Rankings
Regularly monitor the rankings of your target keywords in search engine results pages (SERPs). Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Google Search Console can help track these rankings over time. Analyze fluctuations and identify opportunities to optimize further.
2. Perform Competitor Analysis
Study your competitors' SEO strategies to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Identify keywords they are ranking for, analyze their content tactics, and assess their backlink profiles. This analysis can provide insights into areas where you can improve and opportunities you may have overlooked.
3. Adjust For AI
With AI and machine learning advancements, search engine algorithms are evolving to understand user intent and context better. Focus on creating high-quality, relevant content that aligns with user queries rather than just targeting specific keywords. Utilize AI tools for content optimization and to stay ahead of algorithm changes.
Adjust for Recent SEO Trends and Best Practices
Stay updated with the latest SEO trends and best practices. This includes understanding updates to search engine algorithms (like Google's Core Updates), changes in user behavior, and advancements in technology (such as voice search optimization). Implement strategies that align with these trends to maintain and improve your search engine rankings.
Maintain Your Site's Health With a Thorough WordPress SEO Audit
It is a myth that only expert SEO professionals can conduct a website SEO audit. If you are passionate enough and care about the site deeply, then you can also do a thorough SEO audit.
There are many guides and resources available online that will help you do that. But they are all scattered and most of them are filled with jargon you might not understand. That is why we have prepared this list that will solve all your confusion and help you do a thorough checkup of your website.
If you find any issues, then you can seek the help of a professional to solve them.
If you have any confusion or need any help with understanding any of the points, do let us know in the comment section.