There are many changes happening online every day : new competitors emerge, market needs change, and new updates to Google’s algorithm are introduced.
Each of these events can wreak havoc within the web and affect your website as well . Which is why you should constantly analyze the situation over time… but to do so, you will need our advice for your 2023 SEO Audit !
What is it and why do a SEO Audit in 2023
Inside and outside a site there are a variety of factors that, combined, can influence its position within the SERP . For those who manage a site or work in the search engine marketing sector , it becomes essential to have a method and procedure to keep all these factors under control: the SEO Audit.
It is a process that allows you to analyze your site from different points of view to identify problems or errors that could hinder its positioning on Google, as well as identify strengths that can be highlighted.
If every year the situation on the web changes due to algorithmic updates and the arrival of new competitors, by applying an SEO Audit procedure, it will be possible to guarantee that your site always stays on top of fluctuations and changes, managing to react promptly . And this also applies when doing local SEO !
The SEO Audit is therefore a procedure that should be performed regularly over time to evaluate whether:
- There are issues related to on-page SEO.
- There are backlinks from less authoritative sites and/or there are enough backlinks from valuable sites.
- The site offers a quality user experience.
- There is duplicate or poor quality content.
- There was a loss of organic traffic due to site health issues or incorrect website indexing.
In summary, we can say that the SEO Audit in 2023 represents an indispensable tool for improving website performance on search engines, keeping up with the latest developments and outperforming the competition.
The tools to use for your Seo Audit 2023
In addition to numerous factors to consider in the SEO Audit of a site, there are also various tools, some free and others for a fee , which allow you to carry out the essential checks to check the SEO optimization of your site.
Here are some of the most famous and used ones that will be useful for the SEO Audit 2023:
Semrush: a platform for analyzing sites that offers several features, including Site Audit . This tool allows you to get a complete overview of your site’s performance, identifying technical issues, SEO errors and optimization suggestions.
Google Analytics 4 : the web analytics tool offered by Google that provides a wide range of metrics and data on the performance of your site, including the number of visits, pages viewed, average time spent by users and much more.
Google Search Console: This is also provided by Google and allows you to monitor and optimize your site’s indexing as well as organic performance and technical health. You can identify any ranking issues and see how your site appears in the SERPs.
Google PageSpeed Insights: also from Google, evaluates the loading performance of your web pages for both desktop and mobile versions, giving you specific suggestions to improve loading times and the user experience of your site. Also includes Core Web Vitals assessment .
Screaming Frog: is an important SEO analysis tool. It allows you to perform a complete scan of your website, detecting technical problems, structure errors, duplicate content and other information crucial for site optimization.
SEO Zoom: It is an SEO analysis and monitoring software, similar to SemRush, which offers a wide range of features. It allows you to perform in-depth analysis on your keywords, monitor your site’s ranking in search engines, analyze your competition and get optimization suggestions.
Ahrefs : is a suite of link intelligence tools that also allows you to analyze the link profile of a site, providing information on backlinks, anchor text , organic keywords, traffic, and so on.
These tools are just a few of the many available to conduct an accurate SEO Audit and improve the performance of your website. Choosing the right ones to use will depend on the specific needs of your project and the resources at your disposal.
We therefore know what SEO Audit is and which tools can help us, but what are the factors to consider for an SEO Audit in 2023?
Many, but we can divide them into 3 macro areas.
1. Seo Audit 2023: general evaluation of the context of your site (off-page SEO)
Ultimately, SEO is a tool to achieve a goal.
But what is this goal?
When creating a site and undertaking an SEO strategy, it is essential to establish clear objectives such as, for example, increasing organic traffic, improving visitor conversion or positioning yourself as an industry leader. Making sure your goals are realistic and measurable will give you a clear direction to follow during your SEO audit.
Furthermore, it is advisable to combine all this with a competitor analysis to understand what the current situation is like in the sector, whether it has changed since the last time you checked and identify actions that can put you ahead. Then identify your main competitors and analyze their positioning, content strategies, the link profiles they receive and their presence on social media. Look at the websites that rank well for the keywords you want to use and find out what tactics they are using to get results. This analysis will give you valuable insights into what’s working in your industry and what you’re not doing.
2. SEO Audit 2023: technical analysis of the site
Here a series of very important factors come into play to analyze, since each of them contributes, individually, to consolidating the authority of your site in the eyes of Google.
Site page loading speed
Today we want everything immediately, even from websites.
Users expect fast, responsive sites , and as a result, search engines want them that way too. Therefore, make sure that your site is fast: it is generally considered so if the loading of the page does not exceed 2.5 seconds (that’s too much!) from a desktop and even less from a smartphone.
In this regard, Google, in 2020, introduced the Core Web Vitals to provide indicators that measure the user experience relating to loading performance, interactivity and visual stability of the page and leaving guidelines to help those who have a site to understand and optimize these metrics.
In this context, Google’s PageSpeed Test also helps us , but there are other tools available such as Web Page Test, GTmetrix and Pingdom.
If your site is not fast, then you will need to do something to fix it: for example, reduce the size of images, minimize the code and take advantage of browser caching.
Mobile-friendly site
Your site must be optimized for smartphones . It is a factor that has had an impact for many years and will continue to be essential in 2023.
At this stage you will therefore need to ensure that your site has a responsive design that automatically adapts to different screen sizes. You can check its compatibility with mobile devices using tools such as the Google Search Console Mobile-Friendly Test and make the necessary changes to ensure a good mobile browsing experience.
Keyword trend
Even keywords remain a fixed point for the SEO Audit 2023. In addition to checking which keywords your site is positioned for with tools like SEOZoom, and if there are other better ones to focus on, you will need to pay attention to possible cannibalizations, which occur when several pages on your site compete for the same keyword.
If you don’t give the right indications and don’t solve the problem, in the presence of cannibalization Google could arbitrarily decide which page to show in the search results (and it doesn’t necessarily choose the most strategic one for you…).
Safety
If your site is not configured with HTTPS , it is not secure. And if it is not safe it will not be looked upon favorably by Google, as well as by users.
You can check by simply looking in your site’s address bar. If it is indicated that you use the HTTP protocol, you will need to implement an SSL certificate .
Also, to understand the situation of your site, you can go to SemRush’s Site Audit HTTPS report . Here you will find the score that has been assigned to your website and a number of potential problems that make it not “trustworthy”.
Indexing
How are the pages on your site laid out?
In your 2023 SEO Audit you will have to check the indexing of your site by verifying, in addition to what has been said in the previous points, also the presence or absence of:
Robots.txt – The robots.txt file plays a crucial role in guiding search engine crawlers through the site. Check the contents of the file carefully to make sure you are not blocking important pages or crucial sections of the site from being crawled. Some tools like Google Search Console’s “ Robots.txt Tester ” can help you with this.
302 Redirects : When doing temporary (302) redirects, search engines may misinterpret the new page as a duplicate or not index it at all. So make sure you spot all redirects by crawling the site with Screaming Frog and use 301 (permanent) redirects for pages that have moved permanently.
404 Pages : Pages with a 404 error can hurt user experience and site indexing, but they can also help us tell Google to stop indexing a particular page so users don’t continue to visit it. Here too, perform a deep site scan with Screaming Frog to locate pages returning 404 errors and fix them or redirect them to relevant and working pages.
Non-indexed pages : by typing “ Site:yourdomain.com ” into Google you will be able to view all the actually indexed pages of your site. If you notice crucial pages missing from the list, you may need to check your robots.txt file, noindex meta tags , or other configurations that are preventing indexing. Google Search Console offers valuable information about page indexing and can help identify any problems.
Backlink profile situation
Relevant backlinks from high-quality sites are still an important ranking factor in 2023. With Ahrefs you can discover the links your site or any other domain receives, track new ones, explore your competitors’ links, and get word insights key and the best performing anchor texts.
User Experience
Search engine algorithms are getting smarter at evaluating user experience . So take a look at this aspect too. If necessary, do some usability or UX testing and make sure your site offers:
- intuitive navigation,
- an attractive layout,
- accessibility to all users ,
- easy to read content,
- contact forms and streamlined, simple and fast purchasing processes
3. SEO Audit 2023: On-page SEO
On-page SEO is an essential part to analyze because it focuses on optimizing individual elements within web pages themselves, and you can use various tools to ascertain this, from Google Search Console to SEOZoom.
In this context, for each page you should ask yourself :
Is the main keyword present in the H1, meta-title and meta-description (although the latter is not officially a ranking factor)?
Is the main keyword inserted, naturally, in the first and last paragraphs of the text?
Is each URL optimized, well structured and SEO Friendly?
Are the ALT tags of the images present and contain the main keyword?
Are there internal links? Are they really useful and positioned in the right way?
But what most needs to be taken into consideration here is the content: quality texts are one of the most important factors for SEO. Make sure they are informative, relevant, and well written.
Also, remember to regularly update your site with new articles, guides or useful resources to attract the attention of users and search engines.
Include relevant keywords in your content, obviously in moderation, because keyword stuffing can cost you a penalty, and make sure that the text is relevant to the search intent, is long and exhaustive and does not contain texts copied from other sites.
Final considerations
SEO continues to be a critical element of online success, and making sure your site is optimized properly is crucial to attracting quality traffic and improving search engine visibility.
Do you want to do an SEO Audit on your site? Follow our advice or contact us now for our support!
