In the same way as cleaning out your closet and organizing them, that’s what the idea of SEO audit is about.
As content creators, we get so carried away with creating content constantly that we forget to take a step back to access the site/ blog as a whole. If individual articles are our building blocks, the site structure is our floor plan. Without a solid floor plan and foundation, you’ll be on shaky ground regardless of how well you optimise your blog posts.
As such, it is crucial to ensure you have your site-wide elements set up right as they are essential for achieving a SEO-friendly site.
So let’s go through how you can audit your own site to achieve a user-friendly experience for both the bot crawlers and a positive experience for your users.
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How to do a SEO Site Audit
1. Plugins
While plugins assist your site and provide features to an otherwise basic site, more plugins do you more harm than good.
The more plugins you have, the more it takes up your site resources. That means either slowing your site down, or you’re forced to upgrade your hosting platform to accommodate more resources, both of which are unnecessary as long as you have the essential plugins.
Site resources become very precious the more posts you have, the more media you upload and the more traffic you get.
When you exceed your CPU or inode usage, your site crashes. There is no more real disaster than a crashed site because that means a massive loss in traffic!
After blogging for 5 years, I’ve experimented with a ton of different variations of plugins with similar functions.
I’ve now settled on the most essential plugins for protecting spam, optimizing site speed, images, SEO, tracking analytics and improving user experience, while removing everything else.
Essential plugins I strongly recommend:
Wordfence Security – for spam
WP Rocket – for optimizing site speed and all things caching. A free but limited alternative is Autoptimize.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer – for compressing images. A free but limited alternative is Smush.
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights – for tracking outbound links. Extremely helpful to study buttons/ CTA that convert best and the type of links users are inclined to click most.
Rank Math – a better alternative to Yoast for optimizing SEO
Last Modified Timestamp – for indicating the latest date a post is updated on
Pretty Links – for turning ugly affiliate links into consistent, customizable links
Table of Contents Plus – for including a table of contents in every post for easy navigation
TablePress – creating tables for easy comparison of products mentioned
Share Buttons by AddThis/ SUMO – social share buttons
2. E-A-T
EAT is a ranking factor that Google rolled out a couple years ago. It stands for:
Expertise
Are you an expert in the niche you’re talking about? Does your content reflect that?
The opposite of providing expertise is by supplying inaccurate, unhelpful, or outdated content.
Authority
Are you an authority figure in your niche? Nobody starts out a pro and that’s okay! What you can do is work towards establishing your site as an authority voice in your niche.
More often than not, your authority is determined by the sites that your blog is associated with. The more backlinks you get from authoritative sites, the more the “authority” you are seen to have.
Trustworthiness
Is your site a trustworthy source? Trustworthiness can be expressed in the form of awards, testimonials, endorsements, and other trust factors on your site.
Now the big question – how does your site achieve E-A-T? Below are some ways to establish your site’s expertise, authority and build trust.
Have an author byline at the end of every post to show that there is a real person behind each article, not a bot sending automated, spam content.
Incorporate quotes from experts, use data or cite from reputable sources in your content to prove your content’s factual statements and establish your content credibility.
Above all, Google takes user experience heavily into account. That means you should take particular note of the whole readability experience.
Is your content structured in a way where information is easily understood and consumed? Does your content answer your readers’ questions? Do you provide enough information? Are you using multimedia like video and images? Do your sites load quickly?
All these factors come into play and are what help build your site’s expertise, authority and trust score.
If you’re able to deliver both quality and value on your site, then you’ve got your site well on E-A-T!
3. Site Structure
In the same way as organizing your wardrobe where you put your socks together, accessories together, winter wear together, etc. That’s what siloing your content is about.
It consists of hierarchical groupings of topics and subtopics. Doing so helps search bots understand what your site is about and how each post is in relation to one another.
If your blog is about airplane reviews, you might want to categorize your content based on airline class (i.e. broad core subjects) – first class, business class, premium economy class, economy class, etc.
Don’t underestimate the importance of Categories. By categorizing your posts in a systematic way, bots are better able to understand the topics you cover. Thus, it increases the likelihood that relevant articles and posts get ranked for similar search terms. Such interlinking ensures that maximum link juice is passed between relevant pages, which makes it easier for your posts to rank higher on Google search.
This is an important ingredient for achieving a SEO-friendly site.
The closer a post/ page is to the home page, more “authority” it will receive. Hence, your most important content should be as close to your homepage as possible.
You should be able to reach your deepest pages within 2-3 clicks from your homepage for easy crawlability. If not, make it an effort to decrease your page depth – depth tells you how many clicks away from the homepage your page is.
4. Low value content
In the same way your most valuable content (i.e. cornerstone content) supports your site’s credibility and authority, your least valuable content are the bad apples in your apple farm.
Google takes stock of all your apples that you have (in this case, posts) and ranks your site’s score according to the overall quality of your posts.
If they find posts that have low visits and people clicking away from them as soon as they land on your post, they’ll understand from the user behaviour that this site doesn’t really benefit readers or solve their problem. This would thus hurt your site quality rating and impact your SEO score.
Remember, Google rewards sites that solve users’ problems. They reward sites based on positive user behaviour such as how long a user stays on your site and how they interact on your site.
With an SEO audit, we want to remove underperforming, low-quality pages, with the goal to improve the overall health of a website.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do your posts fulfil your blog purpose?
- Are they the kind of content your audience wants/ expects to see?
- Are they in line with your blog themes?
- Do they contain keywords with high traffic potential?
- Are they newly published? If so, give it some time for a chance to link
If you answered no to any of the above, you can then consider reworking it, merging similar posts into one mega cornerstone post or deleting it altogether.
5. Broken pages
Also an indicator of the quality of a site, having broken pages is a sign of bad SEO. It’s as if you haven’t cleaned out your dirty laundry!
To find out if you have any broken pages on your site, go to Brokenlinkcheck.com to diagnose your site.
From the results, you can pull out the URL which contains the broken pages. From there, edit the individual posts to remove the broken pages.
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An SEO Audit is also incomplete without highlighting important on-page SEO practices and technical, off-page SEO elements. They will be covered in a separate post.
For now, with the SEO audit points in mind, go back to your site and get a feel of the user experience.
Are visitors able to navigate around your site easily? Are they able to find what they’re looking for? At one glance of your home page, will they know what your blog is about?
If it helps, seek out feedback from other people. Everyone has a different feel of things. Some might focus on size of fonts, others might put particular focus on colours and aesthetics.
Take their feedback into account as you improve your overall site experience.
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