After you hit “Compare,” the tool will compare the sets of keywords the analyzed domains are ranking for. In the next two steps, we’ll take a look at how to get the most out of your competitors’ keywords and backlink data. For this step, I recommend using a dedicated SEO crawling tool. Semrush’s Site Audit tool is my personal favorite, as it checks for over 140 technical issues—making it one of the most comprehensive solutions in the industry. You should use the HTTPS version because it encrypts data between your server and users’ browsers—improving security, user trust, and even (possibly) giving you a slight rankings boost. SEOptimer is ideal for website owners, website designers and digital agencies who want to improve their own sites or theirs of their clients.
Lastly, the tool uses the Human Quality Rater Guidelines to assess where your content succeeds and where it falls short. This makes it easy to add relevant E-E-A-T signals to your content based on Googles own guidelines. The YMYL guidelines are used by Google to scrutinise content written on sensitive topics like finance, health, safety or overall well-being. If you are struggling to copy and paste the content from your site, enter the URL into this tool, and it will extract the text content. Now that the Project is all setup, the next step is to simply copy and paste your content into the chat area. It’s the basis for creating an incredibly powerful content auditor that’s designed to mimic what Google’s algorithm and human evaluators want to see.
This trick will help you see which pages are indexed and which ones are skipped. It’s an efficient way to help index your pages, which will improve your SEO. With Google Analytics on all of your pages, you can move to the next step of a site audit. If a page doesn’t have that tracking code, you won’t be able to see any statistics about it, including page visitors, time on page, and other metrics that indicate performance. The robots.txt file placed in the root of a website prevents web spiders from accessing specific folders on your website.
Perfect for Small Business Owners, Digital Agencies
Our experienced digital marketing team can also help with everything that comes after, including strategy, content creation, and UX design. At the highest level, the comprehensive SEO audit covers everything. It includes elements from the previous levels and adds competitive analysis, backlink assessment, and an in-depth examination of your entire digital footprint. This level suits businesses committed to dominating their niche and outperforming competitors.
Identify organic traffic drops and work out what caused them
So pay special attention to this metric when comparing your site with competitors. Once you have your site’s data, you can add competitors to compare side by side. Head to the “Compare domains” tab and select up to four competitor domains. If you’re not sure who your main competitors are, pick the domains the tool suggests. Benchmarking allows you to see exactly where you stand when compared to your competitors and identify opportunities for improvement. Check the Google Search Console “Search results” report from the sidebar to see your total clicks and traffic trends over time.
- This table view format allows you to quickly see which areas of your website are performing well and which areas need improvement.
- An on-page SEO audit would include checking meta descriptions, meta titles, image alt text and compression, and more.
- The next step is to see how people perceive and interact with your site.
- If you have traffic drops coinciding with major updates, this can tell you what areas likely need your focus.
- A robots.txt file tells search engine spiders which pages they can crawl so they won’t overload your site.
The next step before doing a deeper analysis is to check your organic traffic. Login to Google Search Console and view the “Search Results” report. Learn how to do an SEO audit of your website to identify problematic areas. Use our SEO audit checklist to fix issues and improve your SEO. Sometimes “penalties” come in the form of unknowns, without manual actions, and teams are left to try and figure out what issues may be causing a loss in rankings.
Furthermore, in your crawl results it will show you how many links are pointing to each page and how many are pointing out to other pages (inlinks and outlinks). You will want to keep an eye out for pages that have too few links going to them or too many links going out. An awesome set of SEO tools can make or break the success of your audit and drastically decrease the time it takes. Considering the reasons to do an SEO audit, it is critical to know that almost any time is the perfect time to do an SEO audit. SEO Anomaly The bottleneck is simply the reward based on the time it will take to complete.
But quality matters far more than quantity, and bad backlinks can actually hurt you. This tool compares your website to your competitors in several ways, including by keywords, organic traffic, and more. It also provides data-driven recommendations for moving past your competition. With an SEO audit, your business can start improving your online visibility in search results. As mentioned, an audit provides your company with insight into your keyword strategy. With that perspective, you can discover your most and least valuable keywords, as well as new keywords.