Hundreds of ranking factors determine the success of your website in the search results of Google & Co. An SEO audit helps you to identify the weaknesses of your website in order to initiate targeted countermeasures. We explain step by step how the SEO audit works and which tools you need. You can also download the entire guide as an e-book here.
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is the ultimate test of your website to assess the current level of search engine optimization and technical optimization. Roughly speaking, all on-pageand off-page factors of your website or online store are checked down to the smallest detail.
More specifically, SEO experts use checklists, online tools and their own experience to evaluate the content, structure and performance of your website. But content and backlinks also have to pass a number of tests. An SEO audit therefore focuses on evaluating the search engine friendliness of your website.
A catalog of measures is usually drawn up from this. This catalog lists all the weaknesses and potential opportunities of your website. If you decide against having an SEO agency fix the problems, you still have the option of implementing individual measures from the catalog yourself. But SEO audits are also an opportunity for agencies to:
- Expanding the service portfolio
- Convince customers of technical and content-related measures
- Informing potential customers about the status of a website
An SEO audit is the basis for your strategy for the coming months. With an SEO audit, you can identify the weak points of your website and then rectify them in a targeted manner.
The right content as a basis
It's not just about the technical optimization of your website. Your content must also be right and fit your target group so that you can be found on Google and other search engines. See the tips in our e-book Content marketing for agencies and freelancers.
You need these tools
To ensure that an SEO audit is comprehensive, you should make sure you have access to the most important analysis tools and services. These include Matomo (a privacy-optimized alternative to Google Analytics), otherwise Google Analytics itself, the Google Search Console and access to your Google My Business entry.
The more data you have available, the better your chances of getting to the bottom of any inconsistencies. You should choose at least the last six months or the last 12 months as the period for the analysis.
What is Matomo or Google Analytics for?
With services such as Matomo or Google Analytics, you can evaluate user behavior and views outside of organic search on your website. You get an overview of how people interact with your web pages and from which sources users access your web pages.
What is the Google Search Console for?
The Search Console provides you with information on how your website is performing in the search results. You will also be informed about 404 errors and technical problems (e.g. incorrect structured data).
More data from the Search Console
For pure website views in the search results, the data from the Search Console is more suitable than from Google Analytics. Google Analytics may only be operated in compliance with data protection regulations via opt-in, which means that a certain proportion of visitors cannot be recorded by Google Analytics.
Are paid tools recommended?
Yes and no. Different SEO tools fulfill different goals. Some are suitable for evaluating your backlinks, while others focus on your content or the technical status of your website.
Most paid SEO tools have a huge advantage over their free competitors: they have much larger amounts of data and can output significantly more information on keywords and backlinks. The data is also often accurate to the day.
Free SEO tools are often limited, the data is not up-to-date or limited in its suggestions, as daily, millions of queries and the associated storage ultimately also cause costs. Good all-in-one solutions for an SEO audit are tools such as:
- Semrush (from €99.95/month)
- Ahrefs (from 99$/month)
- Sistrix (Optimizer Module) (from 99€/month)
- Ryte (from 99€/month)
A technical audit and crawlability check is best carried out using tools such as the "Screaming Frog Spider". Backlink audits, on the other hand, are carried out with tools such as Ahrefs, Majestic or Semrush. Here, however, you need additional knowledge about link building and link quality in order to differentiate between harmful and good links.
Free SEO tools: Screaming Frog Spider
When it comes to the technical evaluation of your website, the Screaming Frog Spider is the standard in the SEO industry. However, the tool is mainly aimed at advanced users. The good news is that the program is currently free for up to 500 crawled URLs. That's enough for most small agencies, companies and blogs.
Another difference to the tools mentioned above: The Screaming Frog Spider is an executable program and turns your tool into a crawler. Services such as Google Data Studio, the Search Console or Pagespeed Insights can also be linked via extensions.
Neil Patel's Site Audit
Neil Patel's Page Audit (part of the SEO tool "Ubersuggest") offers in the free version the possibility to have 150 urls evaluated or to carry out 3 searches per day. Note: The tool cannot keep up with the above tools in terms of the number of tests.
However, the most serious errors on a website are reliably tested. This makes Neil Patel's SEO tool worth a look for most small companies or blogs.
Data from the free Google services
My tip: In the meantime, services such as Google's Search Console have improved so much that a comprehensive SEO audit can already be carried out using the free Google product range.
Many of the SEO tools mentioned above have free versions. However, the number of results in each tool is limited. If you don't have a budget for paid use, then I recommend combining many free tools. In order to find as many errors as possible despite limited data.
SEO Audit: The structure
An SEO audit can be divided into different categories. Some recommendations are implemented directly on your WordPress website (crawlability, speed, etc.) while other optimizations (backlinks, web hosting, etc.) are carried out away from your web pages. For each recommendation, I link to a suitable resource to help you fix the problem yourself.
Crawlability & SEO
Your aim is to check whether all the content on your website can be found, which areas of your web pages are intentionally excluded and how your website is displayed in the search results. We also check which information can no longer be retrieved by search engines. It also checks whether your content adheres to a semantic structure. In other words, whether the structure of your website is comprehensible for search engines.
- Tools: Search Console, site audit tools (Semrush, Screaming Frog Spider etc.)
- Difficulty level: Easy
Important criteria for indexability are
- Your website can only be accessed via https, the http://-Version redirects.
- A valid SSL certificate is activated.
- All content and links have a secure connection (https:// instead of http://), keyword mixed content. Alternatively, see this tutorial.
- All pages have a unique title tag. The title tag is different from the H1 heading (over-optimization).
- Each page has only one H1 heading. Duplicate H1 headings should be removed.
- All pages have an inviting and unique meta description. Meta descriptions can be changed using Yoast SEO, for example.
- There are no 404 pages (not found), as the corresponding urls are forwarded correctly.
- There are no links that lead to 404 pages (both internal and external links).
- Important pages are not excluded from crawling. Instructions for this: Configure Noindex in Yoast SEO.
The following criteria are equally important:
- The robots.txt is valid and only contains as many instructions as are actually needed. Instructions: robots.txt explained by Semrush. Tip: Yoast SEO can create a robots.txt for you.
- Your sitemap is linked in robots.txt.
- If rich snippets, FAQs or other schema features are used on the website, then these should be tested regularly in the test tool for schema markup or in the Search Console.
- All internal links use the dofollow attribute.
- Your images have alt tags (see the instructions for image optimization).
- There are hardly any forwarding chains or redirect chains.
- Urls are short and contain the keyword you want to rank for. Stop words in the urls are avoided.
- URLs use hyphens and no underscores (hyphens are used to separate words).
- In the best case, all content can be accessed with 3 clicks.
In addition, unused post types, taxonomies and categories (e.g. generated by WordPress themes or plugins) are excluded from the search results in order to save crawl budget. This is possible with Yoast SEO, see this tutorial for the correct settings.
The whole thing can be extended indefinitely. Very specific topics such as href-lang tags, AMP or canonicals have been deliberately omitted from this list so as not to add to the complexity. You can deal with these topics as soon as all the other components of the SEO audit have been completed.
Display on mobile devices
As Google separates the search results into two different indices (mobile and desktop) - and therefore evaluates both the mobile view and the desktop view of your website separately - the mobile view of your website should also be error-free. Even in 2022 and in times of mobile first, when mobile visitors to a website often make up around 70 percent, the focus of many developers and web designers is still on the desktop version.
The result is poor rankings in mobile search results, less traffic and a loss of potential customers. In the B2B sector, however, desktop views are often still superior to mobile views.
- Tools: Search Console, your browser's developer tools, Google Lighthouse or your mobile device
- Difficulty level: Medium
Finding errors in the mobile display
Your goal should be to fix all display errors on the mobile version of your website. Display errors such as content that extends beyond the edge of the screen or fades out must be fixed. You should avoid hiding content on the mobile version of your website but showing it on the desktop version. This is because the mobile version is probably displayed to most users and is used by Google as the main version for determining your content and evaluating rankings.
You can test all urls and elements of your website on your own mobile device. However, there is a risk that the version of your website will still be displayed incorrectly for other device sizes or screen resolutions.
Variant 1: Analyze warnings from the Search Console
Fortunately, Google informs us about critical display errors directly in the Google Search Console:
The problem with this method is that only critical errors are reported. Elements that are not clickable or adapted to the UX are not recognized and reported.
Variant 2: Use browser developer tools
Most web browsers offer another option in the developer console. There we can simulate the display on other devices. Oliver Pfeil has written an article about this on wp unboxed: Mobile responsive web design - how mobile optimization works. You can find more information about the method here:
Technical problems and speed
Anyone who has followed SEO developments over the last 10 years will remember apocalypse scenarios such as Mobilegeddon. Announcements that have thrown the entire SEO scene into turmoil. Mobilegeddon didn't happen... but it's no secret that Google has been putting a lot of effort into making websites faster on the web for years. At the same time, Google is encouraging webmasters not to flood the Google index with low-quality pages.
The time it takes for a page to load completely has become an important ranking factor. And Google has launched a number of free tools to help developers optimize their own loading times. As the loading time has an impact on the user experience of your website, loading times have a passive effect on the evaluation of user behavior. E-commerce sales in particular suffer from slow loading times, as Amazon published in a study.
Optimizing the speed of a website is an art in itself, and one that many developers don't like to take on. This is because troubleshooting is time-consuming. But even without an expert on your side, there are a few tools you can use to quickly improve the speed of your WordPress website. See the 10 most important adjustments to your WordPress performance.
Another tip is to opt for specialized WordPress hosting. Raidboxes has specialized in fast loading times with its premium WordPress hosting. It is not important to achieve a score of 100/100 in Google PageSpeed with every page. However, the urls that play the biggest role in the success of your company should have the shortest possible loading times:
- Landing pages
- Service pages
- Shopping carts and product pages
Tools such as GTmetrix and Pagespeed Insights quickly provide you with recommendations on how to optimize your website.
Although the values from PageSpeed Insights are a good indicator, they do not provide any information about the actual loading time, as described in more detail in this e-book.
- Tools: GTmetrix, Pagespeed Insights, Google Lighthouse, Search Console
- Difficulty level: Difficult
Here are some tips on how you can increase the speed of your WordPress website:
- A fast call-up of your WordPress website. The TTFB (time to first byte) key figure should be as low as possible.
- The WebCore Vitals in the Pagespeed Insights tool should also be optimized.
- Optimization of LCP(Largest Content Paint).
- Optimization of CLS(Cumulative Layout Shift). Tools such as the Layout Shifter Generator help you to identify such errors.
- High-performance and specialized WordPress hosting for your WordPress projects.
- Ideally, your website uses modern technologies such as server-side caching, compression or supports modern image formats such as webP to reduce the loading time of a website. See the tips here under "Performance and SEO".
- Alternatively, a plugin such as WP Rocket can be used to optimize speed or create a cache (see the tutorial on WP Rocket settings).
- Are JavaScript and CSS files compressed?
- Your images are also compressed and the image width does not exceed the maximum width of the website.
- Your WordPress version is up-to-date and you are using a current version of PHP.
- You avoid too many WordPress plugins and deactivate those whose functions are not used or can also be solved without a plugin (see http:// replace with https://).
You can find further information in the following articles:
- Tips for high-performance managed WordPress hosting
- WordPress hosting and website speed comparison
- E-Book: Measuring webpage speed correctly
- PageSpeed Insights - How to optimize your website
Your backlink profile
Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors in Google search results. A high-quality link to your website is like a recommendation in real life. Unfortunately, we cannot filter who recommends us and for what reasons. And on the internet, where many processes are automated or anonymized, not every "recommendation" is a helpful one. Possible reasons for this could be
- These are purchased backlinks from dubious sources
- Or a spam attack with the aim of damaging your website
- The referring website is no longer maintained and the information is no longer up to date
- The referring website has been sold or not renewed and is now spam
Google is now very good at assessing how high-quality a backlink is. And which one comes from spam. But the systems are not yet perfect, so sometimes you have to help "manually".
Fortunately , with the Disavow tool, Google offers a way to permanently exclude harmful links from the calculation of your rankings. And lo and behold, just a few days after using the Disavow tool, we were already seeing significant results:
The image shows the ranking of a customer after tens of thousands of links from spam domains have been "devalued" in the Disavow tool. For all other backlinks, the higher the quality of the source and the better the match to the topic of your website, the better the quality of the backlink. See also this tutorial from the Ahrefs team. It explains very well what to look out for in a backlink audit and how it can be carried out.
- Tools: Search Console, Majestic, Ahrefs, Semrush Link Audit
- Difficulty level: Very difficult
Option 1: Find and remove backlinks manually
To do this, go to the Google Search Console. Under "Links" you will find the widget "Top referring websites". There you will find a list of all domains that link to your website:
In the overview of all referring domains, you have the option of exporting these domains to a table. From there, you can analyze each domain individually:
The disadvantage of this method is that the Search Console only exports the root domains and not the subpages of the referring website. This only gives you a rough overview of the backlink profile.
Option 2: Have an SEO tool analyze the backlinks
SEO tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs also provide you with tools to analyze the quality of your website's backlinks. Ahrefs is likely to give the best recommendations of all the tools.
In Semrush you will find an overview of your backlinks under the menu item "Backlink Audit". Here you can see the percentage of these links that come from toxic (low-quality) sources. Most important, however, are the lists under the "Audit" tab.
This is where Semrush evaluates exactly why a URL is considered toxic. From there, you can either mark it as "safe" or move the URL or the entire domain directly to disavow.txt. You can then upload it to Google.
Once you have done this, you should be notified a few hours later via the Search Console that the disavow file has been successfully transferred. Don't forget to give SEO Tools full access to your Search Console and Analytics data. This is the only way to get a detailed list of all your backlinks. Here is a checklist:
- Is the linking domain thematically related to my website?
- Is the linking domain a spam website (pornographic content, scam, fake websites)?
Check most linked pages and linked anchor texts
In the Search Console you will find the "Links" tab. There you will see the widget External links -> Most linked pages. Open this report:
Now you can see which of the URLs on your website are linked to the most by others. As a rule, your homepage "/" will be linked to most often. The simple reason for this is that people prefer to link brands rather than whole groups of words.
However, we now analyze the number of links that refer to subpages. Such links are usually an indicator of high-quality and topic-relevant links that Google and other search engines rate as particularly good. Take a closer look at the following screenshot:
231 backlinks point to the homepage "/", but hardly any to the important subpages. There are no backlinks at all to the subpages of the services. As a search engine optimizer, I would now conclude the following:
- The quality of the subpages is poor, so they are not linked to by other people. There is no incentive.
- Services have not ranked so far because there are no thematic backlinks to the subpages.
Finally, let's take a look at the "Top referring text" widget. You can also find this in the Search Console under "Links":
In the best case scenario, you will find a list of anchor texts that refer to your domain, brand or the authors of your website. These natural links are essential for search engine optimization, as mentions on the web promote trust with search engines. They help you build authority for your brand.
Anchor texts with keywords that are particularly important for your page should appear directly after this. For example, services or products. From the anchor texts, we can read that important keywords are currently still being neglected. This also reinforces the assumption that the services have not yet received any backlinks. There are also anchor texts from foreign domains that may indicate spam. These should be examined more closely.
Traffic and rankings
Every SEO audit aims to increase your website's organic traffic in the long term. Therefore, in this step we will examine the current rankings of your website and the traffic from Google Analytics.
To do this, first open Google Analytics. In the menu item Target group -> Overview, get an overview of the number of visitors over the last 12 months. Deselect the "All users" segment and replace it with "Organic traffic":
In the best case scenario, your website's ranking should increase constantly. If your website's traffic has stagnated or even collapsed, then you need to research the reasons for this slump. One cause could be that this website was affected by a Google update.
Unfortunately, Google does not notify the operators of websites whether an update has had a negative impact on them. Maintenance and control is the responsibility of the webmaster. However, you can use Google Search to check for updates and announcements in the relevant period:
And lo and behold, major SEO magazines are immediately noticed, reporting an update on August 1, 2018:
Now you know that your website was actually affected by an algorithm update. This gives you the opportunity to find out more about the causes and effects. And exchange information with those affected in order to restore your website's ranking.
Alternatively, you can call up Semrush's organic search and enter a domain of your choice there. Known updates from Google are also noted in the diagram. They give you a direct indication of why the traffic slumped at that time:
Unfortunately, Analytics does not show any data on the current keyword rankings of your website. To obtain this data, you will need to use a paid SEO tool or the Search Console. The larger the SEO tool's keyword database, the better your analysis will be.
To obtain data on the ranking of a website, we open the organic search in Semrush again. The following example shows that everything has been done correctly so far. And that the domain's rankings are constantly improving. We also get an overview of our URLs: For which keyword or in which position do they rank?
If you click on one of the keywords, you will see a list of all the important data for this search query. You will also see a list of the top 10 results. In other words, you can see your competition.
The task of our SEO audit here is to tap into new traffic sources and evaluate the current rankings. This is the only way to tap into keyword opportunities and increase website traffic in the long term. Analyze what your competitors who are ahead of you are doing better. This could be better content, a better tool or simply better backlinks.
So as not to go beyond the scope of this article: In my article Keyword research for SEO success, you will find a complete guide to finding your most important keywords. There, I show you step by step how to carry out keyword research using your current rankings and generate new traffic.
What do you do when traffic stagnates?
Your traffic is either no longer developing because no new content is being published on the website, or because your website is no longer rising in the rankings. In this case, I also recommend a competitor analysis for each keyword. Or to develop new keywords by means of keyword research.
Has it been a while since your last post was published? Then we also recommend refreshing all content by updating it.
What do you do when traffic has collapsed?
If you can't find any signs that your website has been affected by a Google update, then another assumption is likely: your website has fallen victim to a technical error. Trace back all your changes using the principle of reverse engineering.
Check whether any pages were changed or deleted weeks before the traffic slump. Or have you added new WordPress plugins or a new theme or carried out updates? Whatever the reason, you need to find the cause using the process of elimination.
- Tools: Google Analytics, Matomo, Search Console
- Difficulty level: Easy - Medium
Content and text quality
Search engines love fresh content! It is not without reason that every SEO strategy now includes regularly updating content on the web and adding new information. And your visitors will also be pleased to receive up-to-date content. See the tips in the e-book Targeted content marketing.
This also keeps the content of your website up to date. And you reduce the risk of your competitors stealing first place from you with new content. There is nothing worse for search engines than sending searchers to a website with outdated content. After all, the job of search engines is to give users the best possible answers to their search queries. If they bounce from your website, it reflects badly on the search engine. And it's not good for your user experience. In other words, it has a negative impact on your ranking.
This is precisely why you should regularly subject your content to a content audit. In a content audit, you analyze all content on your website to determine whether it:
- Offer added value for visitors
- Have the latest content at your disposal
- No duplicates of other pages are
- Have organic traffic
- Can be combined with other pages
- How the user experience affects this URL
As a rule, you then create a list of all URLs and decide whether a content:
- Deleted
- Merged with another URL
- The following can be updated
- Or whether no manual action is required
You can easily maintain a content audit within a spreadsheet or Excel table. In Google Analytics, you can also examine each URL individually for dwell time and bounce rates. The values provide information on whether your visitors rate the content of a website as useful or unhelpful.
To do this, go to the Google Analytics Behavior -> Website Content tab. There you will find a list of all URLs and the most visited pages:
Want to find out more about the content audit? The book "Think Content" by Miriam Löffler is ideal for this. It contains numerous tips on content marketing and the right content strategy.
Do not overlook meta titles and meta descriptions
During a content audit, many webmasters only focus on the superficially visible content of their websites. They often forget to adjust their meta descriptions and meta titles as well. These are the short texts that are later displayed in the search results. They are intended to encourage users to click on your result.
To check the metadata of your website: Call up the Google search and enter the command "site:yourdomain.xyz" in the search mask. You will then receive a list of all your indexed pages. Here you can see which meta descriptions and meta titles are too long or too short.
Optimize click through rate
Always provide informative content on your pages. At the same time, make sure that your search results are as attractive and exciting as possible for users. Meta information is no longer an active ranking factor. However, the number of people who click on your result can still have a passive effect on your positioning. The keyword here is click-through rate (CTR).
Alternatively, use a tool like the Screaming Frog Spider. It crawls all URLs of your website and shows whether meta descriptions are too long or even missing:
With a plugin such as Yoast SEO, you can edit the meta information of a URL directly in the WordPress editor. The plugin also shows you whether you have adhered to the character limits that apply to the meta title or meta description. The following criteria apply to the content:
- Each subpage only has one H1 tag. This tag is short, concise and clearly describes the topic of the website. If you have several, you should change this.
- The content is subdivided into further topic-relevant headings.
- The content is unique and not duplicated on the website.
- Do all pages have an appealing meta title? Avoid duplicates.
- Do all pages have an appealing meta description? Avoid duplication here too.
- Is all the content on your website unique and of high quality?
- Do all internal and external links refer to valid websites?
- All texts fulfill the user's search intention.
- Important for search engine optimization: Texts link to other subpages.
- Texts contain an author box and fulfill the YMYL and EAT guidelines if your pages can be assigned to a sensitive subject area (law, finance, medicine).
- URLs have fewer than 300 words. Pages with little content are usually an indicator of poor research ("thin content") or a lack of quality, so that the user's question or search intention is not answered.
- Links in the main content have descriptive text.
- Are all images on your website retrievable and do they not trigger a 404 error?
- Each image also has a descriptive ALT attribute. This is important for search engines to understand the content of an image, as well as for an accessible website.
The ratio of text to HTML should also not be less than 10 percent. Anything else may indicate overloaded code, caused by WordPress Page Builder, for example.
The Local SEO Audit
A local SEO audit is the optimization of local subpages, the optimization of your Google My Business entry and the entry in business directories. A local SEO audit is easy (but quite time-consuming) to implement, as external sources are mainly checked to see whether they match your optimized Google My Business listing. It becomes more complex if your company has changed its location in the past.
Make sure the company name is the same. For example, if it is "Naturheilpraxis Rostock", then it should also be the same on the website and in all directories, including the company details. However, companies often use aliases such as "Anja Musterfrau Naturheilpraktikerin", which can lead to confusion in the search results.
We highly recommend the blog of the Whitespark agency, which publishes very detailed tutorials (PDF) and case studies on optimizing your local results.
- Tools: Google My Business, Whitespark, Yext (for German-speaking countries)
- Difficulty level: Easy
Questions you should ask yourself during local optimization:
- Is there a suitable listing in Google My Business for every location?
- Is the data for each location in Google My Business up to date?
- Are the right business categories selected on Google Maps?
- Does the Google My Business entry have sufficient and high-quality photos or videos?
- Is your company listed in Germany's most important business directories?
- Is the company data in every business directory entry up-to-date?
- Is the information in each business directory entry relevant?
- Interface to link building: If your services or products are only offered in this region, are there also backlinks from the region that are important for local rankings? For example, from local newspapers, mentions or cooperations?
Hardly relevant for rankings in local search results:
- Google My Business Posts / local posts
- Availability for questions or a chat function
- Keyword stuffing in the company name (possibly even against the Google My Business guidelines)
Sequence of measures
That's a lot of recommendations, but where do you start? Not all of the above - rather general recommendations - will have a big impact on the positioning of your website. Sometimes it's just a small number of issues that prevent a subpage from ranking. SEO experts have more experience in correctly assessing the costs and benefits of a recommendation.
The important thing is to always be aware that your WordPress website never has to achieve a 100/100 score. Over-optimization generates more costs than actual, sustainable benefits. If only because rules, recommendations and their weighting can change at any time.
To ensure that you can get the most out of your search engine optimization, even as a beginner, I recommend the following order of processing:
1. fix warnings in the Search Console
Google - as the judge of your success - already warns you about critical errors in its own tool, the Search Console. That's why you should definitely follow up on these warnings.
2. global instead of minimal changes
Instead of concentrating on optimizing a single URL, you should initially focus on those tasks that automatically have an impact on all URLs. In other words, your entire website.
If you improve the speed of all subpages in one fell swoop, for example by compressing all images, this will have a holistic effect on the success of your project. The first successes from such optimizations motivate you to delve deeper into the matter.
3. critical errors in audit tools
Most tools for an SEO audit categorize the errors found according to how serious they are. Here is an example from the Semrush tool:
Proceed as follows to rectify the errors:
- Critical errors must be corrected in any case. They affect the rankings of your website the most and can have negative consequences.
- Medium errors have a less drastic effect than critical errors. They either have a passive effect on the ranking of your website or they influence the user experience. This in turn has consequences for the ranking of your website.
- You should also observe the hints, even if they are not mentioned as problems.
In the latter case, Semrush will recommend actions for which the tool cannot accurately assess whether the settings made are actually intended. For example: Should a certain page really be marked as noindex?
4. your content remains the most important criterion for your ranking
The motto "content is king" is still the most important. No matter how optimized your website is with the best backlinks, it won't do you any good if your content is poor. If the above recommendations are not successful, you should focus your optimization efforts on the content of your website. After all, good content remains the most important ranking factor in organic search results.
Unloved stock photos and copied texts from various authoring platforms can ultimately be the difference between your content standing up to the competition. Or, as Google itself explains in this YouTube video: "Create great content that performs well in Google search results".
Do you think you have met all these requirements? Then it makes sense to read up on specific optimization measures, such as link building.
Conclusion: regularity leads to the goal
There are thousands of changes to the search algorithm every year, with small adjustments being made at regular intervals. New functions are constantly being added to the search results of Google and other search engines. But the basic rules of search engine optimization usually remain the same.
Your changes should always aim to improve the user experience. An SEO audit helps you to do this. It is therefore advisable to carry out such an audit at least once a year. Did you like this guide? Then download it here as a PDF and share it with others.
Your questions about the SEO audit
What questions do you have for Dominik or about the SEO audit? Feel free to use the comment function. Would you like to be informed about new articles on the topic of online marketing? Then follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or via our newsletter.
Wow, this was really helpful article Dominik. I'm really glad I found this article since SEO is something I struggle with a lot! Thanks!