In a world where 68% of online experiences start with search engines like Google, you can’t afford to leave your SEO behind other things.

However, boosting your SEO and keeping your page high on search engine results pages (SERPs) is virtually impossible if you don’t know what issues are keeping it down.

And that’s why SEO auditing is essential.

In this article, we will discuss six proven tips for conducting an effective SEO audit and scaling your website for a larger share of organic traffic.

#1. Choosing The Right SEO Audit Tool

A good SEO audit tool helps you identify technical issues affecting your pages, including minor errors that could have otherwise been ignored. It also provides a comprehensive score to gauge your website’s health. If it does not do that, it’s not recommended.

Most importantly, your preferred tool should suggest how to fix issues that arise instead of just dishing them out to you in red colors.

Source: SE Ranking

By the way, it's okay to combine more than one tool to focus on each aspect of your website and provide accurate fixes.

#2. Assign a Priority Score To Each Problem

After conducting an SEO audit, you should have a panel showing the various issues affecting your website. These problems usually include missing titles and meta descriptions, too-large images, issues with status codes, etc.

Source: SE Ranking

Export them into a spreadsheet and assign a priority score based on how they affect your website performance.

#3. Analyze Your Backlink Profile

On your SEO audit report, check out how many websites link back to you. That’s their vote of trust in your services or content and a signal of credibility to search engines.

Note that the total number of backlinks on your SEO panel is not the same as the unique number of referring domains linking to you.

#4. Review Content Issues And Fix

While many SEOs focus on keywords during audits, it’s best to take a holistic approach and focus entirely on your content.

Another important thing is that content can be something other than your blog posts. You should look for often ignored content issues such as page duplicates, long titles, missing headings, or thin meta descriptions.

#5. Look Out For 404s, Missing Meta, And Tags

404s are commonly reported technical SEO issues that happen when a page is broken or missing. This can occur due to website migration or bugs.

Source: ScreamingFrog

#6. Conduct Website Speed Analysis

The ideal page loading time is 2.5 seconds. But that’s just a benchmark; you should aim for as low as one second.

Conclusion

Auditing your website for good SEO can look intimidating and overwhelming, but that’s only on paper. To get good results, start by picking the right SEO audit tool. Then, assign a priority score to each issue on your audit report.