How to Conduct an SEO Site Audit and Boost Your Website’s Performance

Matthew Taylor - Managing Director

What you will learn.

An SEO site audit is essential for any B2B business looking to improve its organic search rankings. It is the foundation of your overall website and organic traffic strategy, resulting in improved keyword optimisation and increased visibility.

Why Conducting an SEO Site Audit is Crucial for Your Website’s Success

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) audits highlight technical and on-page issues impacting your site’s visibility. They reveal optimisation opportunities that help maintain high visibility and rankings, even as search algorithms evolve.

Regularly conducting SEO site audits provides actionable insights for you to:

Proactively adjust poorly performing content according to the latest standards or trends
Make data-driven decisions on future SEO practices
Increase organic traffic through continuous optimisation

Without an SEO audit checklist, your optimisation strategies are essentially guesswork.

The Essential Steps of a Comprehensive SEO Site Audit

An SEO site audit involves evaluating multiple site elements. To do this, you need specialised tools to help collect data and quantify the site’s health, content and performance.

Here are the key tools to use:

Google Search Console: This tool provides valuable insights into a website’s pages and queries.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Google Analytics examines user behaviour, key conversion events, and traffic sources. Its latest version, GA4, provides advanced tracking focusing on individual user interactions to get specific, intelligently segregated data.
SEMrush, Ahrefs and Moz: These SEO tools provide a site health score, backlink data, keyword research, and competitor analysis. In particular, SEMrush’s Site Audit tool can perform a detailed technical SEO audit, including insights on Core Web Vitals and crawlability scores.
SEO Spider: Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool offers advanced insights into technical SEO issues that might slow down your website.
Lighthouse Speed Test: This tool specialises in analysing page speed and identifying technical SEO audit issues like mobile usability and lazy loading.

Review Crawlability and Indexing

The first step in conducting a thorough SEO site audit is to check if your website is properly indexed. You should monitor numerous search engines like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for your website’s SEO rankings. However, some businesses focus on Google, which has by far the largest market share among these search engines.

You can check your website’s crawlability and indexing in Google Search by accessing Google Search Console’s Page Indexing Report.

If some of your website’s pages are not indexed properly, refer to the ‘Coverage’ and ‘Sitemaps’ sections in Search Console for a detailed analysis of indexing issues.

Here are the common reasons why a page is not properly indexed:

The page was excluded due to a ‘no index’ tag in its HTML code
There is an alternative page with a proper canonical tag
The page was crawled but not indexed due to poor content quality or other technical issues

It’s also crucial to note that while some pages require proper indexing, not every page on your website needs to be included in search engine results. For instance, B2B businesses often do not need category tags, login portals, or internal tool pages to get indexed.

We recommend regularly submitting updated sitemaps to Search Console to signal new content and ensure accurate indexing. This process helps search engines understand which pages are live and relevant and improves their understanding of your site’s structure, improving crawlability.

Assess Site Health

You receive a health score when you run an on-page SEO audit using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Ideally, this score would be as close to 100% as possible, although anything above 85% is typically considered a good site health score.

Tools like SEMrush provide a detailed breakdown of issues that could impact your site’s performance. Prioritise resolving these critical errors and warnings to avoid ranking penalties. These penalties result from violating search engine best practices (e.g., poor website performance or subpar user experience quality).

Check Site Speed and Mobile Optimisation in Lighthouse

As the number of mobile users continues to rise yearly, Google started prioritising mobile-first indexing when evaluating sites for ranking. Lighthouse Speed Test helps optimise your mobile website, analysing its speed, responsiveness, and usability across desktop and mobile devices.

To boost your rankings and enhance user experience, aim for a page load time under 2.5 seconds on mobile.

Lighthouse helps you identify possible enhancements, such as:

Reducing image sizes without compromising quality
Eliminating render-blocking resources
Improving server response times

If your internal team handles website maintenance, compressing JavaScript and CSS files to reduce loading times and optimise site performance is a good starting point.

Conduct a backlink audit

Backlinks are vital for SEO, as search engines use them to determine a website’s authority and trustworthiness.

Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs have a Backlinks section for this purpose. Begin by extracting a list of all backlinks directed to your website. Then, take the following steps:

Analyse backlink quality: Assess each site’s domain value to remove low-quality or spammy links.
Disavow toxic backlinks: Use Google Search Console’s Disavow Links Tool to let search engines ignore any harmful links you can’t remove manually.
Monitor your backlink profile: Regularly review your backlink profile to improve linking and disown harmful links.

Conduct a Content Audit

We recommend conducting audits using GA4 and Search Console’s ‘Performance’ report to track high-performing pages and optimise those with potential for improvement. A content audit for SEO helps identify posts that resonate most with your target audience. This process typically involves the following:

Collecting data based on the business’s KPIs
Assessing which content drives high-quality traffic and attracts high-intent users
Tailoring the content strategy to address your website’s weaknesses

Expert tip: Content audits for SEO can support the Pillar Page strategy, which enhances internal linking. This method involves creating an overview page focused on a central idea, with links to supporting internal articles offering deeper insights into related topics. This approach is particularly valuable in B2B contexts, where you address specific pain points and solutions within your industry.

On-Page SEO Improvements You Can Implement After an Audit

Your on-page SEO audit should have provided a list of actionable insights that you can now implement, such as:

Cleaning up meta tags and titles
Refining URL structures
Improving on-page content, such as keywords and internal links
Optimising multimedia elements

Here’s how you can improve your On-Page SEO based on your SEO audit checklist:

Analyse Meta Titles, Descriptions and URL Structure

Meta titles and descriptions: Each page should have a relevant, informative title and description that includes the target keywords. Keep titles under 60 characters and descriptions under 150 for the best display in search results.

For example, if you’re a B2B SaaS digital marketing agency like Common Ground, the meta title would resemble the following:

Optimise Content and Evaluate Keywords

Since Google’s Helpful Content Update, the platform has begun prioritising the structure and value of the information provided by web pages.

To create a page that appeals to search rankings by delivering authority and targeting both short-tail and long-tail keywords, follow these practices:

Evaluate the primary and secondary keywords you’re currently ranking for on each page.
Focus on seamless keyword integration within your content.
Avoid keyword stuffing by carefully tracking SEO keywords.
Use contextual keyword variations to enhance relevancy.
Break up content into accessible, informative chunks using subheadings for better readability.
Utilise AI-based tools, such as Clearscope and SurferSEO, to improve ranking through naturally integrated keywords and supporting phrases.

Take Advantage of Internal Linking Opportunities

Internal linking enhances user navigation and experience by guiding visitors to high-intent pages, thereby increasing SEO lead generation and driving conversions.

Make sure to follow these best practices when establishing internal links:

Link to high-value pages at every step of the sales funnel journey.
Use descriptive anchor text that indicates the link’s purpose(e.g. instead of “click here”, use a CTA aligned with user intent, such as “optimise your workflow”).
Regularly review internal links to adapt to changing trends and algorithm updates.

Regularly Review Old Content for Updates or Removal

Not all content is evergreen. Remember to regularly review your content and remove broken links and pages that are no longer relevant.

As your website grows, revisiting old pages allows you to:

Add new internal links
Adjust keyword targets
Consolidate thin content into more comprehensive guides or articles for better SEO

Optimise Images and Multimedia

How fast a website loads images and multimedia directly impacts its overall speed.

When adding images to your site, consider the following for faster loading time:

File type: Use modern formats like WebP for images and compress all multimedia assets.
Compression plugins: Use tools like Minify to reduce the size of image files already stored on your website.
Alt text: Alt Text is a good place to slip in relevant keyword references.
Lazy loading: This process loads the site’s media assets as users scroll rather than trying to load everything at once.
Video embeds: When possible, embed videos from major platforms like YouTube or Vimeo instead of hosting them on your website.

Technical SEO Fixes to Boost Site Performance

Technical SEO may have underlying problems only a thorough SEO site audit can uncover. These technical issues include:

Broken links and redirects
Site speed
Duplicate content
Incorrect canonical tags

Fixing Crawl Errors

If 4xx and 5xx errors persist, set up specific redirects or resolve missing pages to ensure minimal disruption.
Submit a new sitemap (and robots.txt file) to Google via Search Console for faster and more accurate crawling and indexing.

Improve Site Speed

Properly store frequently accessed files in a user’s browser cache.
Use CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) for global sites to reduce latency and improve user experience across regions.

Signify Site Safety

Google prioritises secure sites prefixed with HTTPS instead of HTTP. Similarly, site visitors are more likely to trust HTTPS sites. Abiding by this standard attracts high-intent users, improving visibility and engagement.

HTTPS requires SSL certificates, which most hosting providers already offer by default.

Schema Markup for B2B Sites

A Schema Markup or structured data is an optimised web development standard that lays out your site structure and purpose to search engines.

This is done by breaking down pertinent information and signposting it within your site’s code. Here’s an example snippet for a schema markup:

{

“@type”: “Post”,

“title”: “Common Ground’s SEO Expertise in Action”,

“description”: “This article lays out all the ways Common Ground can give you expert SEO assistance.”,

“datePosted”: “2024-11-25”,

A schema markup offers the following benefits:

Helps search engines display rich snippets, product features and FAQs
Increases the website’s click-through rate
Captures user attention and encourages engagement

Monitoring and Measuring the Impact of Your SEO Site Audit

Once you have implemented improvements based on your SEO site audit, continuously track these key changes to see if they improve your overall site ranking. Here are some tips to successfully monitor your site performance:

Set clear KPIs for organic traffic, keyword positions, and conversions.
Set a regular schedule to assess your KPI metrics (e.g. monthly SEO review).

Use specialised tools (Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, SEMrush, etc.) with comprehensive features, such as customising and measuring specific KPIs and other advanced analytics.
Some important SEO metrics businesses should monitor include organic traffic, keyword rankings and conversions.

Real-Life Example: How a Proper SEO Site Audit Boosted a Client Website’s Performance

Grosvenor is a leading B2B property manager in London. They approached Common Ground to leverage local SEO and drive customer engagement via digital channels.

Having proven experience in handling different SEO cases for B2B clients, Common Ground performed an SEO site audit for Grosvenor. We then proceeded to craft a comprehensive SEO and content strategy that meets the client’s specific needs.

Our Local SEO strategy resulted in a 224% increase in Belgravia tenant clicks, a 524% increase in Mayfair tenant clicks, and 100 keywords moving into top-ranking positions.

How Common Ground Can Help You Conduct a Successful SEO Site Audit

Just like Grosvenor, Common Ground’s services can help you discover what problems are plaguing your site, and fix them.

With an experienced team that understands the value of on-page SEO audits, we can deliver what you need to improve your overall site strategy.

We strongly believe in transparency and clarity, so you will be kept up-to-date on all our findings. Our SEO audits, which cover technical SEO audits, link auditing, on-page SEO audits, and off-page SEO audits, will give you a completely comprehensive report of your website’s current status.