Understanding SEO Audit: How To Read An Audit Report

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You have a business website and implemented SEO to rank it higher in engine result pages (SERPs) to enhance its visibility online. What now? You still have to keep an eye on how your site is performing. To do that, you should carry out a website SEO audit regularly.

An SEO audit report is one of the most effective resources you may have if you’re attempting to increase website traffic or your exposure on search engines like Google. Consider it your website’s health check-up, providing a clear picture of what’s doing well, what isn’t, and where you can make improvements.

But here’s the thing: simply having an SEO audit report is insufficient. To get the most out of it, you must comprehend the significance of the results and how they affect the functionality of your website. Insights from that report have the potential to drive growth, ranging from technical issues hindering your progress to content opportunities that can enhance your rankings.

The better you understand the audit, the more informed your SEO decisions will be—and the faster you’ll see tangible results. This article will discuss how to understand a website SEO audit.

What is a Website SEO Audit?

A website’s SEO audit involves employing SEO tools to analyze and report on your website’s on-page and off-page SEO health. The checks are based on established search engine optimization strategies and ranking signals that influence your website’s ranking in search results.

These reports may highlight problems that could negatively impact your user experience and ranking. There may be significant issues you are unaware of, but there may also be simple, quick fixes.

Many free tools are available on Google, so you don’t need to be an expert to obtain an SEO audit. Popular brands like Moz and SEMRush also offer affordable (and comparable) monthly memberships for larger sites, more sophisticated features, and ongoing SEO work.

Analyzing a Website SEO Audit Report: What Does it Cover?

An SEO audit report is a comprehensive document that assesses different aspects of your website. It gives a detailed analysis, emphasizing your site’s strengths and shortcomings. A general SEO audit report usually includes the following key areas.

Mobile Friendliness

Mobile optimization is essential since a large portion of online traffic comes from mobile devices. The audit ensures your website is mobile-friendly, allowing users to navigate it easily. Maintaining mobile visitors on your website requires a smooth browsing experience.

Indexing and Crawling Issues

Your web pages need to be properly crawled and indexed by search engines to achieve higher rankings. In addition to identifying indexing problems, the audit ensures that non-indexed pages are correctly blocked. This procedure makes it easier for search engines to find and rank your content.

Website Loading Speed

Site speed is critical for SEO since it affects user experience and search rankings. The audit compares the loading speed of your website to Google’s recommended benchmarks. If your website loads slowly, the audit identifies the reasons why. Finding these problems enhances the functionality and general SEO of your website.

Organic Search Traffic

The audit report assesses your organic search traffic over the previous 14 months. It classifies traffic by location and top search queries to provide information. This breakdown shows which keywords generate visits and where your traffic comes from. Knowing these trends enables you to improve the performance of your SEO strategy.

Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are crucial to SEO since they significantly affect the visibility and rating of your website. The audit offers a comprehensive assessment of the quality of your existing backlink profile. It also evaluates their relevance to make sure it complements your SEO plan. Improving your website’s authority and search rankings depends on understanding the quality of backlinks.

Broken Links

Broken links negatively impact both the user experience and the overall SEO performance of your website. The audit finds any links on your website that are broken or prone to errors. Identifying these links is essential to ensuring a seamless browsing experience. Resolving these enhances search engine rankings and usability.

Keyword Ranking

Competitor Analysis

Knowing your competitors’ SEO techniques is critical to improving your own. The audit examines the backlink profiles and keywords that your rivals rank for. You can use this information to identify opportunities and weaknesses in your SEO approach. Analyzing these criteria helps you make informed decisions to enhance your website’s performance.

Website Architecture

Website architecture has a huge impact on user experience and SEO performance. The audit determines whether every webpage can be accessed from the homepage in three clicks or less. Additionally, it guarantees that the site makes the most crucial pages easily accessible. This assessment enhances the site’s overall efficacy and navigation.

Opportunities to Improve Site Content

An SEO audit report of a website provides opportunities to improve the content to boost its online presence. The audit pinpoints places where the content on your website needs improvements. It emphasizes contemporary copywriting techniques to increase interaction and lower bounce rates. Making content more reader-focused increases overall site efficacy and user experience.

Understanding SEO Audit: Errors and Warnings

Knowing various terms associated with SEO audit is crucial to understanding your audit report and taking necessary actions to address the issues. The list below includes the most common SEO terms you may encounter throughout your site audit and is organized by urgency. You can then prioritize fixes and choose whether you need outside assistance.

SEO Audit Errors: High Priority Fixes

These are the major SEO audit terms; if you spot any warnings, take immediate action to address them.

4xx and 5xx Errors

These are the errors that a visitor would see when attempting to access your website. The visitor cannot see the desired content and is directed to either your site’s 404 page or a server error notice in their browser. In any case, your website appears to be malfunctioning, and users will not enjoy it.

How to Fix: Immediately troubleshoot server issues with your host or implement redirects for page errors.

Broken Internal Links and Images

This issue is straightforward: it points to broken images or links on your website. Since links to broken pages or content lead to 404 errors, this list frequently includes URLs similar to the 4xx errors.

How to Fix: Find any broken photos and replace them. Similarly, update the links on any pages where they are present.

Broken JavaScript and CSS

JavaScript and CSS are the foundation for your website, much like a house’s frame. It affects how your website functions and appears, and you can probably identify the issues on the impacted pages.

How to Fix: This problem usually needs the assistance of a technical SEO specialist or your website’s developer to fix the scripts unless you know how to code.

DNS Resolution Issue

DNS is short for “domain name service.” This problem indicates that the crawler—whether it’s Googlebot or something else—can’t connect to the server that hosts your website. No one can access it at all because of a technical problem, such as the server going down.

How to Fix: You must immediately get in touch with the host of your website.

Incorrect Pages in sitemap.xml

Your sitemap should be accurate since it tells search engine bots where to look for pages, the hierarchy, and essential information like the last time a page was updated. SEO tools like Yoast automatically generate and update a sitemap.

How to Fix: Use a plugin to fix any of the following problems with your website’s SEO audit, or make changes and submit it again manually to Google Search Console:

Sitemap not found
The sitemap file is too large
Incorrect URLs in sitemap
HTTP URLs in an HTTPS sitemap

Issues with Mixed Content

When you have a secure website (HTTPS), but part of the elements on a page or pages are not secure, you have mixed content. It is usually a picture or other file, although it can also include embedded components hosted somewhere else. Visitors may leave the page after receiving a browser warning that it is not secure.

How to Fix: Find that content and fix it because search engines prefer secure websites.

Redirect Chains and Loops

A redirect allows a visitor to transition from one URL to another almost effortlessly. Chains and loops may result from an outdated website or improperly handled redirection. When a page redirects to another page that also redirects, it creates a chain. On the other hand, a loop causes the browser to time out by pointing to one or more pages, then returning to the initial page, and so on.

How to Fix: This issue can be addressed in your site’s redirection plugin (if using WordPress), on your site’s host server, or within the code.

Slow Page (HTML) Load Speed

Slow page loading significantly affects user experience and your site’s ranking. If a search engine has to spend too much time on your website, it will not crawl other pages during that visit because a sluggish page wastes the crawl budget. Naturally, visitors won’t like slow-loading pages, resulting in a high bounce rate.

How to Fix: Use Page Speed Insights to check your page’s load times and go over the suggested fixes. Image optimization frequently aids in better page load timings.

SEO Audit Warnings: Medium Priority Fixes

These SEO audit terms are referred to as “quick wins” because they are simple to rectify and maintain once you are aware of them. Although they don’t immediately affect your score on their own, they may indicate a lower-quality website when combined. They are also associated with other ranking variables, such as user experience and security.

Broken External Links

If this term shows up in your website’s audit, it means that some of the links in your pages lead to dead ends. An otherwise positive user experience could be ruined if the visitor encounters a 404 error on the target website.

How to Fix: You only need to remove or update the links.

Duplicate Content, Meta Descriptions, or Title Tags

Duplicate content may not directly result in a penalty, but it may cause only one impacted page to appear in the search results, with Google choosing which one to display.

How to Fix: Duplicate content frequently occurs accidentally and can be readily corrected by removing or amending the affected text.

Duplicate Content in H1 and Title

During the website SEO audit, this term indicates that the content in the first line that employs “Heading 1” formatting and the page title is the same.

How to Fix: Whether it was an error or a failed attempt to double-tap the long-tail keywords, the header needs to be changed.

Links Lead to HTTP Pages

We already know that search engines highly favor secure websites. You will receive this warning if your website is secure but any of your articles or other content links to an HTTP website.

How to Fix: If your content is older, the other website has likely switched to HTTPS by now, so all you need to do is edit and add the “s.” If not, you have the option to replace it with a secure source, remove it, or leave it in place.

Long or Short Title Element

This warning will appear if your page titles are too short or too long, as most devices will truncate them in search results. Having a longer company name that appears with each page title may make this inevitable. Although it isn’t directly harming you, you may lose clicks if the fancy title of your blog post is too long for search results to read.

How to Fix: You might consider editing the title and adding a redirect if you alter the URL.

Low Text to HTML Ratio

If your website’s SEO audit shows a low text-to-HTML ratio warning, it indicates that the page has more code than the copy. Depending on the content, this may affect site speed, user experience, and content quality.

How to Fix: Simple solutions include boosting copy or decreasing extra code.

Low Word Count

The quality of the content is at issue here. Google may view pages with little to no copy as having “thin content,” indicating that it is of little to no value. These pages can potentially lower your site’s ranking and rank negatively.

How to Fix: Companies can consider adding substantial supplemental material, such as case studies and blog sections, to augment a few low-count landing pages.

Missing ALT Attributes

Text snippets that screen readers narrate for visually challenged website visitors are known as image ALT attributes or tags. It explains what’s going on in the image and may (but need not) contain keywords.

How to Fix: Ensure that your images include ALT tags and optimize the filenames to enhance visibility in Google image search results.

Missing H1 or Meta Description

Conversions, user experience, and SEO all depend on your meta descriptions and h1 headings, the largest heading size. Page titles, headings, heading hierarchy, and meta descriptions are all tools that search engines can use to rapidly determine the purpose of copy.

How to Fix: Headings let readers skim your content, while meta descriptions help you get clicks by describing your content in search results. Therefore, ensure that the H1 heading and meta descriptions are not missing.

Nofollow Attributes in Outgoing Internal Links

Building links with high-authority sites is essential to SEO. The code for a nofollow link prevents authority from being passed from the source to the destination.

How to Fix: While there are valid reasons for using nofollow outbound links, you should nearly always utilize internal linking to share page authority within your own website.

Temporary Redirects

Permanent redirects (301s) are most commonly utilized, while temporary redirects (302s) can be used in situations such as a website redesign. You will miss out if you use a temporary redirect because it won’t transfer SEO authority from the old page to the new one.

How to Fix: You must either remove temporary redirects or convert them to permanent ones.

Uncached, Uncompressed, or Unminified JavaScript and CSS Files

These issues in your website SEO audit report relate to the coding of your website and how fast a visitor can load it. Caching helps your site’s highly requested elements load more quickly during a user’s session by storing them in the user’s browser.

How to Fix: For faster page loading, the code is made smaller by compression and minification. Remember that Google prioritizes mobile site speed.

Other SEO Terms and Warnings

A website SEO audit report may contain warnings primarily for your information; you do not have to address them, and they may even be deliberate. However, as previously stated, these types of warnings are related to user experience and site structure, both of which can impact rankings.

Blocked From Crawling

This warning is for search engine-blocked pages on your site; they cannot be indexed and should not appear in search results.

How to Fix: Check this warning to make sure the concerned URLs should be blocked, as blocking is helpful in many situations.

Orphaned Pages

If this alert appears during your SEO audit, it indicates that certain pages (known as orphaned pages) on your website do not have internal links pointing to them. This means they are inaccessible to visitors and search engine crawlers, making them less likely to be found and indexed. If there is no way of finding this content on your website, it may result in a poor user experience.

How to Fix: Tools like Screaming Frog and SEMrush can help identify orphan pages.

Page Crawl Depth More than 3 Clicks

A website’s SEO performance may suffer if a page takes more than three clicks to reach from the homepage (crawl depth). Search engine crawlers may consider such pages less significant and bypass them throughout the crawling process, reducing their visibility in search results.

How to Fix: Cutting down on clicks can be a smart strategy if you want your main content to be immediately accessible. However, additional clicks are required in several situations to acquire information at every stage.

Permanent Redirects

You can have as many redirects on your website as you want. However, a lot of redirects can cause your site’s server to lag, resulting in slower page loads.

How to Fix: Ensure your redirects are appropriate and required; avoid loops or chains!

Robots.txt not Found

This file on your website includes detailed instructions on how search engine crawlers should scan your site, including nofollow directives, pages that are prohibited from crawling, and more.

How to Fix: If there aren’t any sections that require special instructions, a robots.txt file might not be necessary.

Too Long URLs

Search engines do not have a bias for either lengthy or short URLs. This warning relates to the shortened and somewhat disorganized way your URL will appear in search results and browsers. A lengthy URL will dilute the keywords you used. It is not a problem otherwise.

Contact Hashe Computer Solutions for Free Website Audit Today!

Don’t worry if all this SEO stuff seems daunting; you don’t have to do it by yourself. At Hashe, our expertise lies in assisting companies in understanding and improving the SEO of their websites. Whether you want to boost your rankings, tackle any technical issues, or simply get a better grasp of your current audit report, we’re excited to assist you! What’s the best part? To get you started, we provide a free website audit. Let us work together to take your website to the next level!

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