Step By Step SEO Audit Process

The downsides to most SEO audits are that they are too technical and they need weeks to complete. Here is a simplified, but effective ecommerce SEO audit process that can take only a few hours of yours and you need not be a computer science graduate to follow it up all through.

Check for the gaps that are holding your site back from high ranking
To start with, ensure that your site has only one version that can be browsed. Look into the different possibilities someone can type in to input your website address into the browser.

For example:
• http://techindiasoftware.com
• http://www.techindiasoftware.com
• https://techindiasoftware.com
• https://www.techindiasoftware.com

You must be able to access the site with only one of these variations. The others must 301 redirect to the canonical version. If the HTTP address automatically redirects to the HTTPs version or if the www version redirects to the non-www version, you must fix this issue on top priority. If everything looks good, note down the canonical version e.g., https://techindiasoftware.com and move on.

Use a good site audit tool like Screaming Frog or Beam Us Up or Ahrefs’ Site Audit to check all the external links to your site and also any JS links.

Go to Google Search Console > Google Index > Index Status to check if your site is indexed. This can also tell how many pages of your site are indexed by Google. Cross check this number with the number of internal pages you found during the site crawl. Rectify the list of errors displayed during the crawl. Remove the pages that have no content and those that are broken.

Ensure whether you are ranked for your brand name. When you use a generic name as your brand name, you might not get ranked. In this case, you have to do some serious band building and link building exercises including the following.

• Constructing some strong branded links
• Running a PR campaign
• Constructing some citations on business directories
• Ensuring that the site has a Google Business Listing
• Making sure that the site is present on the major social networks
If all these measures are taken, you will see your site slowly climbs up the ranks.

Work on the easy-to-fix site issues
Carryout a basic on-page SEO check manually. Do this for the home page as well as some important pages. Ensure that these pages have a well-crafted and clickable title tag. There must be a custom meta description which is optimized for major click through. There must be only one well-optimized H1 tag. The sub-headers like H2 and H3 must be used correctly. A well-written and captivating meta description can help you get more clicks even if it does not impact the ranking.

Check for duplicate and thin content. Beware of thin content since anything under 200 words must either be beefed up or deleted.

Ensure that your site loads fast since loading speed is a very important criterion for a great user experience and this is seriously given weightage by Google during ranking.

Check if there are any errors in the structured data. Including structured data can benefit the reviews, product information and events.

Examine the organic search traffic to the site
The objective of any SEO audit is to explore the ways to enhance a website’s traffic. It is necessary to examine how the site is performing now. View the traffic by month and then by week. If there are noticeable spikes or dips in the traffic, it can indicate some Google Penalty issues.

Ensure that the ranking is moving in the right direction. Decreasing ranking can be due to several reasons namely out of date content and Google Penalty. These cases must be investigated further.

Ways to push the ranking up to the top spots
• Create more internal links to the pages
• Construct some fresh backlinks to the pages
• Update the content and also re-launch it
• Ensure that the on-page is optimized for the right keywords.

Final steps
• Use a good site audit tool to analyse the backlink profile of the site. If the referring domains graph shows a steady increase, you are on the right track to better ranking.
• Discover and fix any broken links to and from your site.
• Find content gaps and then perform a full content audit.