How to do an SEO audit on your own website

Do you get emails or messages from “SEO’s” saying that you website isn’t ranking well and they can help you rank? Or perhaps they have done an SEO audit of your website and found all these issues making it sounds like it’s the end of the world as you know it?

Many of the companies that are reaching out to you like this are trying to sell services or are using their tools to perform the audit. And when I mean “tool” some online tool they may have created where you stuff the website into it and it spits out results based on a number of parameters that are checked on your website and compared against whatever standard that company feels is “best”.

Examples of tools that can perform this type of SEO audit are SEMRush, Ahrefs, SpyFu, Ubersuggest, and many others. You can even use these tools yourself and perform an audit, but it will usually cost something. There may be free versions but there may be limitations in terms of the number of keywords searches you can perform, or the amount of information that is provided, etc.

How to do your own SEO audit on a budget?

There are some free tools that you can start with.

The first is Screaming Frog. Download it and use it! It will give you a lot of information about your website, especially related to on-page SEO.
- Some parameters about your website that Screaming Frog is great for are,
  - Title tags
  - Meta descriptions
  - Slugs
  - Headers, H1, H2….H6
  - Image sizes
  - Alt text
  - And much, much more.
PageSpeed Insights is another tool by Google that is free. It will give you information about your page speed on mobile and desktop.
I am going to assume you have the Google Search Console property on your website already and it’s collecting data. If not, tsk, tsk! Get the property on your website as soon as possible! From GSC you can get a lot of great information related to error codes and core web vitals, among other things.
- Error codes are the important to look at because you don’t want 404 errors on your site because this means there are webpages related to your website floating around out there that don’t lead to anything. This isn’t good for your website and potential visitors. If you do have 404 error code, then you’ll want to create a 301 redirect for these page urls so that they are redirected to a live page when someone mistakenly ended up on the guilty 404 page url!
- Core Web Vitals relates to your page speed and in turn user experience. There may or may not be enough data for GSC to provide this information. If there is, great. If not, go back and us the PageSpeed Insights tool.
- You can also check to see if you have uploaded an XML sitemap to GSC while you’re in here. This is important. Why? Google is going around crawling the internet one webpage at a time. It may or may not get to all your webpages depending on what and how it’s crawling. An XML sitemap is a list of all the webpages you want to be considered, indexed, by the search engine, Google in this case. Not including an XML sitemap in GSC is not the end of the world. Google will still eventually crawl all you pages and index them, but it will take awhile. Including your XML sitemap means if Google chooses to look at it, it will crawl and index all the pages on that XML sitemap which means it won’t have to slowly and randomly find them on the internet. It’s worth including.
If you’re using a content management system to build your website, like Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, WordPress, etc. then you can probably go into the backend and start looking around at the “SEO” components and see if they’re filled out. If they are not filled in, fill them in. If they are filled in but YOU did not fill them in, go back and YOU fill them in according to “SEO best practices”.
- There is usually a place where media and images are stored, and you can view each image. If you’re able to find this place, go there and look at each image.
- If the image name is a string of numbers of letters and isn’t descriptive at all, change the name. The search engine can “understand” words. So if you give your image a name that reflects the image itself, the search engine will have a better understanding of what that image is and will be able to consider it in search results when someone is searching for something related to your image. But if you just leave the image name as the default string of letters and numbers, the search engine has no idea what means. So do yourself a favour and change the image names to something more meaningful.
- If the image file size is MB large, try and reduce the size to KB in size. Large image file sizes will slow down the load time of your webpage which results in a poor user experience.
- If there is no alt text associated with an image, include an alt text for each image. What exactly is alt text? Alt text, or alternate text, is the text that displays when, for whatever reason, the image cannot be displayed when the webpage is loaded. If you do not have any alt text, nothing will be displayed and just a blank spot where the image should be. Another good reason to include alt text is for accessibility reasons. Not everyone using the internet can see and so use readers. These readers will read the alt text to describe the image to the person. If there is no alt text, your image will not get read. Ideally, you want to include alt text that describes what is going on in the images. Thing of writing a very brief story of the image for the alt text. Another great part about alt text is it uses words which the search engine can read and again consider your image, webpage, in search results when there is a query by a user.
Ahrefs has a free backlink checker tool that can be used to see what backlinks your website has. You can also see the backlinks in GSC as well.

These are free ways to get information about your website and perform and SEO audit on your own. If you’re willing to invest a bit of money, I would highlight recommend Ubersuggest’s lifetime membership. If you have a single website, it’s a great deal. The lifetime membership is a one-time fee and you can use all the features forever. There is a website SEO audit tool that you can use that will spit out several issues, good and bad, related to SEO for your website. This doesn’t mean don’t go through the above free tools. These free tools will or will not confirm the information a paid tool provides.

There are many other parameters that can be considered when doing at SEO audit on your website. I suggest keeping it simple to start and looking for the “quick wins”, “low hanging fruit”, the things that you can fix easily and quickly, even if it seems tedious and time consuming. It will make a difference over time. How you fix the issues and what “best practices” are, is another post! If you can’t wait, there is a lot floating around on the internet about best practices for title tags etc. Google is your friend or stay tuned for a future post outlining best practice.

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Lani Haque

I enjoy learning and sharing that knowledge.Sharing has been in many forms over the years, as a teaching assistant, university lecturer, Pilates instructor, math tutor and just sharing with friends and family.Throughout, summarizing what I have learnt in words has always been there and continues to through blog posts, articles, video and the ever growing forms of content out there!