A thorough SEO audit helps businesses improve organic search engine rankings and drive more traffic, brand awareness, and conversions. It encompasses a variety of activities, including monitoring keyword rankings, assessing website accessibility and speed, and ensuring that pages are optimized for mobile.
Thankfully, there are many free tools available to help with this process. Here are some of the best.
Conduct a Crawl
Whether working with a small business or a large corporation, SEO audits are critical to ensuring that your client’s website is optimized correctly. The good news is that free SEO tools have improved over the years, making it possible for anyone to conduct an SEO audit without spending a penny.
These tools can assist in identifying on-page SEO issues and ensuring content matches search intent. They also allow you to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles.
Analyze Your Site’s Structure
Whether you’re an SEO agency or digital marketing company or running a small business website, audits are crucial to your success. They contour where you are and tell you how to move forward.
An excellent free SEO audit tool will help you find duplicate content issues – from URL-based to physical copies that appear on different pages of your site. It will also check for branded keywords that must be included in page titles and meta descriptions; you can check with Vazoola.
Check for Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a common SEO problem that can harm site performance. It can confuse crawlers, dilute PageRank, and prevent search engines from directing relevant traffic to your website.
Fortunately, duplicate content is relatively easy to fix. A duplicate content checker can help you locate and prevent duplicate content issues. These tools will scan your website for duplicate content and report on it. They will also show you the best way to resolve the issue.
Check for Internal Links
Checking for broken internal links can be done manually by verifying each link on your website. This can be time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Another way to check for broken internal links is to use an automated tool. These tools can help you find and fix broken links in minutes. They also provide comprehensive data and a clear dashboard. You can get detailed information about your internal linking structure, including 404 errors, orphaned pages, and other issues.
Check for Structured Data
Structured data assists search engines in comprehending web page content and generating rich snippets in search results, potentially increasing click-through rates.
The Structured Data Testing Tool verifies if your webpage has a valid schema markup. It can also show you if there are any warnings and the exact type of warning.
It can help you test your site for different Google ‘rich result’ features like logos, contact information, events, products, etc. It can also check if your markup conforms to Google’s guidelines.
Check for Title Tags
Title tags inform search engines of a page’s topic and match queries. They also appear in the SERP and can influence clicks.
Title tags should be accurate and unique to each page. They should reflect the content on a web page and be compelling enough to encourage search engine users to click through. They should be 60 characters long, including spaces and non-standard separators such as – or |.
Check for Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are a vital piece of information that can be displayed on SERPs. These short paragraphs act as a digital advertisement for your webpage and can influence searchers’ decisions to click or not to click on your result.
Meta Descriptions are pulled in part or entirely from the meta description tag and can be extracted from the body content of a page. This is why it’s essential to create unique, relevant descriptions for each page, even if they are truncated in search results.
Check for Alt-Tags
Image alt text is important for both web accessibility and search engines. It helps screen-reading software describe images to visually impaired users and is a factor in page ranking for Google image searches.
However, please do not overdo it with keywords in the alt text. Keywords should be included in an image’s alt description only when they naturally fit. Keyword stuffing may lead to penalties from Google.
Check for Google Analytics
You can audit your website’s SEO for free using tools like SE Ranking to check organic search rankings and keywords. This helps to cut down on paid advertising costs.