An SEO audit is a critical first step if you want to increase traffic to your website through legal search engine optimization.
Unlike a traditional website audit, an SEO audit helps you analyze the factors that can improve your site's search engine performance. It's a specialized audit that considers your site's keyword rankings, historical search performance, and key technical factors.
If you're new to SEO auditing, the interactive instructions in this guide will put you on the right track so you can start optimizing your site in no time.
Before You Begin
There are plenty of ways to perform a complete SEO audit. Any number of tool combinations can help you gather the data you need, but what matters most is collecting the right data.
Some of the most popular tools include:
- Google Analytics: Provides comprehensive data on website traffic, user behavior, and engagement. It also helps track key performance indicators (KPIs) for organic search traffic.
- Google Search Console: Offers insights into website performance using Google search results.
- Ahrefs: A multifaceted tool for backlink analysis, keyword research, and competitor analysis.
- SEMrush: An all-in-one marketing toolkit offering features for SEO, content marketing, competitor research, on-page SEO, and more.
- Moz Pro: Offers site crawling capabilities to detect technical SEO issues.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: A desktop program that crawls website URLs to audit for common SEO issues.
- Small SEO Tools: This free SEO audit tool offers access to a variety of free tools and features but doesn't offer a way to export the data.
For our purposes here, we recommend that you use three different SEO audit tools.
First, you'll need to set up Google Search Console for your site. This is a free tool provided by Google that can help you monitor your website's search performance. If you don't have Search Console set up, you can follow this guide from Google.
Next, you'll need access to a tool called Ahrefs.
Ahrefs is a popular SEO audit tool with far more features and data than Google Search Console offers. It's a paid tool, but the value it provides is worth it for regular SEO audits. It can also make the audit process much easier since you'd have to gather a lot of data manually without it.
You should also use a spreadsheet to gather and organize the data you collect throughout the SEO audit process.
Before you begin gathering your SEO data, run a site audit in Ahrefs for your domain. This resource will provide much of the data you'll compile. If you've never run an Ahrefs Site Audit report, check out our guide on how to do so.
Optimizing Content
For many people, the real purpose of running an SEO audit is to see how your site compares to the competition on Google.
Look for Gaps in Your Content
A good place to begin your SEO audit, then, is to see which keywords your competitors rank for where you aren't ranking at all. Looking at your closest competitors' keyword profiles can help you understand what content you need to create to close ground with them.
To identify keyword gaps, go to the Ahrefs Site Explorer Tool and follow the walkthrough instructions below.
Competitor gaps aren't just useful during SEO audits. They're an important part of a good keyword research process.
After exporting your competitor gap, you're ready to move on to the more technical part of an SEO audit. This is where Google Search Console and Ahrefs Site Audit tool will come into play. You can check them in either order, but we'll start by looking at Search Console data.
Assess Organic Traffic Trends
Looking at your organic traffic metrics first is a good place to start with any SEO audit because it sets the tone for the rest of the assessment.
By looking at the overall organic traffic trend over 6 months or a year, you can get an idea of whether your site is in a good place or if there's a lot of work to be done. It helps you understand the situation as a whole. When you know how your site is performing in general, all of the other data from an audit starts to make sense in context.
To check your organic traffic trends, go to your site's Google Search Console account. Then, follow the steps below.
To make the most out of this assessment:
Choose Your Timeframe Wisely
- Historical Comparison: Beyond looking at the past 6 months or a year, compare this data with the same period in previous years to account for any seasonal variations or long-term trends.
- Recent Changes: Also, consider narrowing down to recent months or weeks if you've made significant changes to your website or if there's been a known algorithm update. This helps attribute changes in traffic to specific actions or external factors.
Segment Your Data
- By Page: Break down the traffic by individual pages to identify which ones are performing well and which are lagging. This helps in pinpointing specific areas of your website that need improvement.
- By Query: Look at the search queries driving traffic to your site. Identifying high-performing keywords and those with potential for improvement can inform your content strategy.
- By Device: With mobile traffic increasingly dominating the web, assess how your site performs on mobile vs. desktop. This could reveal crucial insights into mobile optimization needs.
Look for Patterns and Anomalies
- Peak and Troughs: Identify any spikes or drops in traffic. Investigate what caused these changes—was it a successful blog post, an algorithm update, or a technical issue on the site?
- Growth Trends: Are you seeing a steady increase in organic traffic, or has it plateaued or declined? A steady increase might indicate that your SEO efforts are paying off, while a decline or plateau suggests it’s time to revamp your strategy.
You can add the data that you exported to a spreadsheet, where you'll collect and organize everything from your audit. When you export from this view, Google Search Console provides a lot of data, and not all of it will be relevant. Sometimes, you may only want to record the traffic numbers at the start and end of your chosen period.
Look for Content with Declining Traffic
Besides looking at the overall traffic trends, another important SEO benchmark is to look for the pages on your site that aren't performing as well as they once did.
Looking at this gives you an idea of what pages may be outdated, low-quality, or irrelevant to searchers. It's a great way to earmark specific pages for a revamp or even removal. Here's how to run a basic content audit to find these pages in Google Search Console.
Unfortunately, GSC won't let you export these pages from the tool. That means it's a temperature check unless you build out another tool using Search Console's API.
An alternate way to find pages with declining traffic is to use Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool. Enter your domain into Site Explorer, then follow these steps.
With that export, you have a list of pages worth investigating further that you can manipulate in a spreadsheet.
Conduct Keyword Research Optimization
Armed with the knowledge you've gained during this process, your next step is to refine your content strategy.
Each page on your site, from blog posts to practice area pages, should include keywords that reflect the services you offer, challenges your clients face, and questions they might have. However, the placement of these keywords is just as critical as their selection.
To optimize for search engines and improve your visibility in search engine results, make sure your target keywords are:
- Integrated into Meta Tags: The title tag and meta description are crucial elements, as they directly influence your click-through rate (CTR) from the search engine results pages (SERPs). Incorporating your target keywords in these tags can drastically improve your content’s visibility and attractiveness to potential clients.
- Included in Meta Descriptions: Although meta descriptions don't directly influence rankings, they are your sales pitch to searchers. Although Google will often choose to extract its own meta descriptions from your content, it's still a good idea to include your own on a site's most important pages.
- Woven Throughout Blog Posts: Beyond merely mentioning keywords, use them in a way that adds value and context to your content. This means naturally integrating them into your headings, subheadings, and body text to maintain readability and engagement while signaling to search engines the relevance of your content to those queries.
- Used in Image Alt Text: Images enrich your content and improve user engagement. Including target keywords in the alt text of images contributes to your page’s SEO, making it accessible for both search engines and users with visual impairments.
Remember, the purpose of conducting keyword research optimization is not just to attract any traffic but to draw in the right kind of traffic—potential clients specifically searching for the legal services you offer.
Check Your Site's Core Web Vitals
Next, you can check your site's Core Web Vitals using Google Search Console.
Core Web Vitals are a set of 3 important page speed metrics that count as a ranking factor for Google Search. These measure your site speed and how long it takes for a visitor to interact with it after one of your pages loads. These metrics are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures loading performance by determining the time it takes for the largest content element visible in the viewport to fully load. For a good user experience, LCP should occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
- First Input Delay (FID): FID measures interactivity and responsiveness. It quantifies the time from when a user first interacts with your site (e.g., clicking a link or tapping on a button) to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction. An optimal FID is 100 milliseconds or less, ensuring that the site feels responsive to the user's actions.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures visual stability by calculating the amount of unexpected layout shifts of visible content elements on the page. A low CLS score indicates a stable and visually consistent browsing experience, with a recommended score of 0.1 or less.
Improving these Core Web Vitals is crucial for several reasons. First and foremost, they directly impact the user experience. Websites that load quickly, respond promptly to user inputs, and provide a stable view without shifting content naturally retain visitors longer. This not only increases the likelihood of conversions but also sends positive signals to search engines about the quality of your site, potentially boosting your rankings.
Here's how you can check these metrics in Search Console.
Measuring Core Web Vitals requires a certain number of visitors to come to your site. Each of these users must also have the Chrome web browser and opt-in to share anonymized data with Google. What this means is that if you don't get enough traffic, it's hard to get good field data on core web vitals.
Addressing the issues highlighted by these tools may involve optimizing images and videos, minimizing CSS and JavaScript, implementing lazy loading, and addressing any server delays. While these tasks can seem daunting, especially for larger sites, the payoff in terms of user satisfaction and SEO benefits makes the effort worthwhile.
Look for Pages with Manual Actions
Checking for manual actions is a simple process that can uncover big problems.
A manual action is when a human reviewer working for Google flags a page as noncompliant with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Spammy pages are often the target of manual actions. Google's algorithm suppresses pages penalized with a manual action from appearing in search results.
- Log in to your Google Search Console (GSC) account.
- Ensure you've selected the correct website property from the drop-down menu at the top-left corner.
- On the left sidebar, click on “Security & Manual Actions” to expand the options.
- Under the expanded “Security & Manual Actions” menu, select “Manual Actions”.
- Here, you’ll see a list of any manual actions issued against your site. If there are no issues, you'll see a green check mark along with “No issues detected”.
- For any listed manual actions, follow the details provided by Google to correct the issue and then request a review.
A well-maintained website isn't likely to have any manual actions to deal with, but it only takes a second to check. If you're running an SEO audit for a website that you don't own or where you're taking over for someone else, this is an important place to check.
After completing all of the Google Search Console steps, you're ready to start your site crawl in Ahrefs.
Make Sure the Pages on Your Site are Secure
The first thing to look for is easy to miss but still important.
Secure webpages have URLs with an HTTPS element. Pages that still use the HTTP protocol not only have trouble ranking in Google search results, but they're also insecure and vulnerable to hackers. The good news is that these pages are easy to find.
To verify the security status of your web pages, you can use the “Internal Pages Report” within Ahrefs.
How to Verify the Security of Your Pages
Start by navigating to the Site Audit section within Ahrefs and choose the project associated with your website. If you haven't yet set up a project for your site, you'll need to do so.
- Within the Site Audit dashboard, look for the “Internal Pages Report” under the Pages section. This report provides a comprehensive list of all pages crawled on your site.
- Use the filtering options to isolate pages that use “HTTP” in their URLs. This will give you a straightforward list of all non-secure pages on your site.
- Review the filtered list of HTTP pages. Prioritize updates based on the page’s importance, traffic it receives, and the type of information it processes. Pages that handle sensitive information, such as contact forms or checkout pages, should be at the top of your list for updates.
Add any pages that are sitting on an HTTP version to your spreadsheet. After you've finished your audit, you can work your way back around and redirect them to secure URLs.
You may also need to with your website’s administrator or hosting provider to implement HTTPS across your site. This often involves purchasing and installing an SSL certificate and ensuring that all internal links are updated to use the HTTPS protocol.
Make Sure the Pages You Want Google to Find are Indexable
If Google can't find pages on your site, you can't expect those pages to rank.
Some pages on your site may be tagged as "no-index." ages tagged with a "no-index" directive or that are somehow blocked from being indexed will remain hidden from search engine result pages (SERPs), disregarding their potential to draw traffic and conversions.
The Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool can aid in identifying and resolving such indexation issues effectively. Here's a step-by-step guide to make sure that the pages you want to be found are indeed indexable.
Start with Ahrefs Site Explorer
Navigate to Ahrefs Site Explorer, input your site's domain, and initiate the search. Site Explorer gives you a broad overview of your site’s performance in search engines, including backlinks, organic search traffic, and the indexing status of your pages.
Access the 'HTTP codes' Report
Within Site Explorer, find and click on the 'Pages' menu, then select the 'HTTP codes' report. This report categorizes pages based on the HTTP response codes they return. Here, you’re particularly interested in pages returning a status code indicative of being non-indexable, including but not limited to 200 OK pages with a 'no-index' directive.
Filter for 'No-Index' Tags
In the 'HTTP codes' report, utilize the filter options to show pages tagged with 'no-index'. These are the pages explicitly instructed not to be indexed. Review this list to ensure that it only includes pages you intentionally want to keep out of search engine indexes, such as certain legal disclaimers, policy pages, or internal use pages.
Check for Blocked Resources
Next, within Site Explorer, proceed to the 'Robots.txt' section under the 'More' menu. This section displays the directives found in your site’s robots.txt file, including any disallow rules that might unintentionally block search engines from crawling and indexing important pages.
Review Sitemap Entries
Compare the list of 'no-index' pages and those blocked by robots.txt with the URLs listed in your site's XML sitemap(s). Your sitemap should only contain URLs that you want indexed. If 'no-index' pages or URLs blocked by robots.txt are present in the sitemap, remove them. This helps prevent confusion for search engines and ensures your sitemap serves as an effective indexation roadmap.
There are some times when you'll want to add a no-index tag to certain pages on your site. Not everything should show up in the search results. But if a page you want to rank has a tag that prevents indexing, you'll want to resolve that issue after completing your audit.
Identify pages that are mistakenly tagged with 'no-index,' improperly blocked via robots.txt, or incorrectly listed in the sitemap. Prioritize these based on their potential impact on your site’s traffic and SEO performance. Then, you can begin the process of removing 'no-index' tags, adjusting robots.txt directives, and updating your sitemap as necessary. See our guide to performing a technical SEO audit for more detailed information on this step.
Assess Page Speed
Slow-loading pages can increase bounce rates and reduce users' willingness to engage with your content, which search engines interpret as a poor user experience.
Uncompressed images on your site, content-heavy pages, and pages with code scripts can cause some pages to load slower than users may prefer.
Page speed is a ranking factor that can often be improved with minor tweaks. Here's how to find various issues related to page speed in your site crawl.
Initiate Site Audit and Go to Performance Report
After setting up and running a site audit within Ahrefs for your website, navigate to the "Performance" tab of the audit report. This section compiles data related to the load times and sizes of your web pages.
Identify Slow-Loading Pages
Look for the report section that specifically lists out pages with longer loading times. Ahrefs categorizes these based on the severity of the issue, allowing you to quickly see which pages could benefit the most from speed optimization.
Within the Performance Report, Ahrefs provides detailed breakdowns of factors contributing to slow performance. These might include:
- Uncompressed Images: Large image files can significantly slow down page loading times. Ahrefs identifies these uncompressed images, enabling you to target them for compression without losing quality.
- Content-Heavy Pages: Some pages might have excessive text, images, videos, or other multimedia elements that contribute to the page being slower to load. Ahrefs helps identify these content-heavy pages for further optimization, like lazy loading for media or reducing non-essential elements.
- Code Scripts: JavaScript and CSS that isn’t minified or efficiently loaded can impact page speed. Ahrefs will spotlight these issues, offering you the opportunity to minify and optimize script loading.
Once you've added those issues to your spreadsheet, you can prioritize them to take action later.
Look for Pages with 400-Series Status Codes
If you've maintained your site yourself, you may not have many broken pages to deal with. But it's not uncommon to take down a page and forget to add a redirect. When that happens, you can end up causing a broken page, usually a 404 error.
To specifically find broken links, navigate to the 'Issues' tab in the audit report. Look for issues labeled as '404 page' (for broken internal links) and 'Broken external links.' Ahrefs categorizes issues based on their severity so you can easily identify and prioritize fixing them. Follow the steps below for an interactive guide.
Fixing 400-series errors is a quick operation in most cases. You just set up a redirect, and you're good to go. Adding the export from Ahrefs to your spreadsheet gives you a clear direction for some quick wins.
In addition to looking for broken pages to fix, you'll also want to make sure that they aren't a part of your sitemap.
Identify Pages that Should Not be in Your Sitemap
Your sitemap is a special page on your site that makes it easy for web crawlers like Google to navigate and index your content. Listing the pages you want added to the Google search index and rank is good for sitemaps. Including broken pages or pages you don't want to index is not helpful.
Sometimes, pages you don't want in your sitemap are listed there by mistake. Here's how to find those pages.
After exporting any sitemap issues and adding them to your list, there's just one more step to complete in Ahrefs.
Identify On-Page Issues
The last step is to perform an on-page SEO audit to look for errors in title tags, heading tags, and meta descriptions.
Headings and title tags are important pieces of information that Google uses to make ranking determinations. If either of these is missing from your page or is either too short or too long, it could impact a page's ability to rank.
Meta descriptions aren't as impactful on ranking, but searchers read them to determine if a page that's ranking in the search results is worth clicking on.
You can easily find issues with these on-page elements by using the Content report in your site crawl.
And that's it. After completing this step, your SEO audit is complete, and you're ready to move on to determining which opportunities to take action on first.
Putting the Pieces Together
With all these issues uncovered and exported to your spreadsheet, you've collected all the data for your SEO audit. Now, you should have a decent list of actions to take that'll help you start improving your site's performance.
Take some time to organize the data and decide where you have the time or resources to get started.
This is just a basic SEO audit covering the most common issues to look for. More exotic problems can crop up that are harder to diagnose and may take time to fix. In cases like these, you may need to rely on a more expansive checklist for SEO or call on an SEO expert to help you.
If you're an attorney and you need help with SEO audits or fixing issues that prevent your site from performing on Google, contact Rankings.io. Our attorney SEO experts have years of experience helping personal injury law firms grow their organic traffic and their law firms.
