Why Should You Do an SEO Audit of Your WordPress Site Today?

12 Minute Read
Written by: Branko Ilishev
Apr / 15 / 2022

An SEO audit is somewhat comparable to having your car serviced by a mechanic for a thorough inspection. As a result, simple tasks such as changing the oil in our car regularly are frequently used as “tricks” to extend the life of our vehicle. The same can be said for an ecommerce SEO audit, which can help boost your website’s life and improve your online presence!

A site SEO audit is concerned with reviewing the technological architecture of your website, the items on the page, and the parts that are crucial to optimize it in terms of visibility, usability, and conversion. Therefore, it is critical to carry out this procedure on a regular basis to improve the overall functionality of your website over time.

Nowadays, an eCommerce website is the most important source of conversions and the most reliable predictor of success. It increases revenue by driving web traffic and providing a seamless client experience.

Building a reliable eCommerce website is all about ensuring long-term Internet performance that meets and exceeds your consumers’ expectations on a consistent basis. In order to reach your target audience, you must have a well-thought-out marketing strategy that is based on industry knowledge and SEO-driven techniques, among other things. 

Keep in mind that optimizing your eCommerce site ensures you obtain more web traffic and helps you reach your target audience.

SEO elements and search engine algorithms are continually evolving. You should do a WordPress SEO Audit of your eCommerce website on a regular basis to ensure that you don’t overlook any essential modifications or upgrades, such as on-page and off-page optimization or vulnerabilities of your eCommerce website, which can be costly. 

An eCommerce SEO audit consists of a number of processes that monitor displays, analyze features, and provide recommendations for adjustments that will improve your website’s performance online. And these are only some of the many advantages you get by the eCommerce SEO audit checklist.

Your website may be excellent, easy to navigate, and well-designed, however, if the search engines are unable to read your site, Google will never index your site, and as a result, you will not appear on the search engine results page. And this is an enormous reason why you need an SEO audit.

Why is it essential to perform a WordPress SEO audit?

We can quickly lose track of the behaviour of these activities once they have been deployed when we build a website and regularly update it with fresh material and modifications.

Furthermore, because Google’s algorithm is constantly changing, as is user behaviour, it is vital to regularly evaluate your website’s performance to ensure that it continues to operate optimally.

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In this way, the Checklist audit SEO WordPress enables you to do the following:

  • Adapt to changes in the search engine algorithm
  • Optimize the indexing and positioning of your pages
  • Attract more organic traffic
  • Make strategic decisions
  • Maintain the overall health of your website

Using a WordPress SEO audit tool means getting these extremely important benefits for your site.

The Benefits of Conducting a Regular SEO Audit site

Find SEO Weaknesses

We’ll see many benefits of an SEO audit, so let’s start with the first one. Although it may seem obvious, the importance of this benefit should not be overlooked. It is possible to examine various elements (particularly on-page elements) to establish whether they are correctly optimized. 

For example, if you are aware that meta descriptions should be between 150 and 169 characters in length, you will be aware that yours are either too long or too short and that they should be revised.

However, WordPress and SEO have evolved significantly. Now, knowing how to SEO your site is not simply adding keywords in the appropriate locations on your web pages. A variety of factors, including technical performance and content quality, are now considered by Google when evaluating your site’s overall performance.

It’s vital to remember that Google adjusts its algorithms on a regular basis – and frequently. The specialists who are entrenched in the sector, such as those that develop SEO audit programs, are the ones who are best positioned to uncover and respond to these developments. That’s why it’s not a surprise why WordPress eCommerce SEO is so beneficial.

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Measurability

In order to determine the success of the work done on your site, whether you are a client employing an SEO service or an in-house consultant/marketer performing your own SEO, you will need to track the results. 

An initial WordPress SEO Audit will lay the groundwork for measuring all indicators and making improvements in the long run. Without knowing what the scenario was like previously, it won’t be easy to judge how your site has improved in the future without a WordPress website audit.

Prioritize Marketing

A WordPress site Audit is likely to bring to light several areas that need to be improved. It is tempting to study all of these proposals simultaneously, but it is better to break down specific jobs into mini-projects and prioritize them instead for an easier audit site WordPress.

Things that have an impact on usabilities, such as custom 404 pages, favicons, and the implementation of structured data markup, are tasks that will unquestionably improve the user experience for the end-user. However, I would recommend that you begin by concentrating on technical SEO issues that could be causing WordPress tech problems, such as crawling and indexing issues. 

A crawl of the site can assist in identifying any issues that may exist in this region. As a result, any extra optimizations you make may have less of an impact on overall performance than they would otherwise would. 

A similar scenario is applicable if you discover that your Bounce Rate is high and that you are having difficulty getting users to interact with your site after the first page. In this instance, it is possible that you will need to emphasize the conversion optimization of your landing pages. 

Track Keyword Ranking Progress

One of the most effective ways to measure how well your site is functioning through a SEO audit of a website is to keep track of the movement of the keywords that are associated with it. As you optimize your website, you should notice that your keywords rise up in the rankings. Negative motions, on the other hand, can signal serious issues or even legal consequences.

You can immediately evaluate how well your keywords have done over time by using a WordPress audit tool, which tracks keyword progress. You can also observe whether your site is heading upward or downward.

SEO keywords are the words that define your business and that users or potential customers can use to find you.

Use Google Adwords or Search Console to check if your keywords are working correctly. You will find a plethora of information about your users’ terms to reach you in these two places.

According to best practices, a site should not have more than one page competing for the same primary keyword. Remember that SEO is now semantic. Therefore, it’s best to think in terms of clusters of words and related concepts rather than single phrases. 

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Evaluate the Competition

A mini site audit is not limited to the sites that you own. You can do a WordPress SEO audit of your competitors in order to identify their advantages and disadvantages. The following are important facts to learn about your competitors:

What Keywords They Are Using

Find out what keywords they are using a service to see whether it is possible to rank for those keywords. If your competitors rank highly and have high domain and page authority, investing the time and resources may not be worthwhile. Instead, concentrate on the terms that they aren’t targeting. Avoid feeling remorseful about squandered possibilities.

Backlinks

Sift through your backlinks in order to determine who is connecting back to you from their site(s). Try to get a backlink from these sites, or better yet, replace your competitor’s link with one from your own site to see if you can receive more traffic to your site. 

Strategy

By examining your competitor’s website, it is feasible to understand their business audit WordPress model. If they have excellent material that garners backlinks and social media shares, a similar content strategy may be advantageous to your site. 

For example, suppose they successfully generate engagement on social media platforms. In that case, your audit WordPress site should look into their approach to social media in greater depth and try to glean some wisdom from their strategy.

Mobile Website

The mobile website of your competitors may be superior to yours. As a result, you should use this knowledge to guide your decision-making process.

Additionally, your site must be responsive, which means it must be obvious on all platforms such as desktops, smartphones, and tablets, in addition to being fast to respond. 

Detect duplicate content that causes you to lose web Positioning

In order to avoid losing search engine rankings, we must avoid using the same material on multiple pages of our website. The SEO audit allows you to identify duplicate material, and if this is the case, it assists you in removing it as quickly as possible in order to move up in Google rankings and avoid piracy, or, in the worst-case scenario, to receive a penalty. With an audit SEO site you will have the advantage of checking whether you have duplicate content regularly.

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Make sure your internal linking has no problems

When done effectively, internal linking may provide a great deal of value to our website, both in terms of SEO and user experience.

Search engines prioritize the user experience (UX), placing it practically beyond all other considerations. As a result, web pages with helpful internal links are ranked higher in search results.

Now, while linking internally between our website and blog sections, problems can arise along the way, such as broken connections, which can be frustrating.

In order to detect orphan pages (those that are not linked from other pages), we must perform a technical audit of our linking to determine how well our click depth is performing (the number of clicks a specific page earns from the home page), and, of course, whether or not there are any broken links. 

Know the quality of content on your blog and website

When you are creating a website from the ground up, it is common to make the error of not placing a high priority on the quality of the material that will be included on the website.

The WordPress SEO audit will therefore assist you in determining what measures you should take in order to optimize your SEO content. For example, adding or preserving keywords and enhancing the link-building approach.

Identify whether HTML tags are properly used

We shouldn’t overlook the importance of website content. Another essential thing to consider while conducting a WordPress SEO audit is the practical usage of HTML tags.

What exactly does this imply? When writing blog articles or even site structure, for example, the following considerations should be taken into account:

  • Optimize images
  • Search for keywords
  • Use H1, H2, H3, and H4 tags
  • Use of meta descriptions
  • Use “alt tag” or “alt” tag in images

When to do an SEO audit?

  • When you are launching a new online project and want to get off to a solid start in terms of SEO.
  • Following a site redesign.
  • In the case of a website that has been up and running for several years but is not yielding the expected outcomes.
  • In the event that a search engine algorithm modification is made public.
  • When technological advancements or changes in user behaviour take precedence in search engine results.
  • If the website experiences an unexpected and dramatic decline in traffic.

How long does a WordPress SEO audit take?

The statement “an SEO audit takes X hours” would be completely meaningless. After all, no two websites are alike, and each client’s technological and content-related requirements are unique.

Furthermore, the time it takes to do an SEO audit varies based on the size of your website, the type of tools you employ, and your level of knowledge.

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If you simply need to examine a few components of a new URL, you may finish the audit in a matter of minutes with minimal effort. On the other hand, an SEO audit can take several days if you need to analyze the design of a huge site with several thousand subpages. Luckily for you, there is also the yoast SEO audit as a plug-in that is highly beneficial. And it’s not about how long does it take for yoast SEO to work, but about being consistent and believing in the process.

The Bottom Line

An SEO audit is an excellent tool for identifying and diagnosing any issues or areas of weakness on your website and SEO WordPress in general. Your site’s aesthetic and functionality can benefit from this audit’s findings, which you can expect to get in complete report form. 

The necessity of an SEO audit should not be underestimated due to the numerous benefits it provides, such as regular monitoring, the capacity to respond to sudden dips in traffic, and the examination of your competitor’s strategy, which once you do it all, you will avoid the most common eCommerce website mistakes. It is evident that eCommerce SEO with WordPress is one of the most effective ways to rank higher, and with SEO site audits you will be on track all the time.

It’s not so much about how long does an SEO audit take, but more about doing it the proper way. It makes no difference whether you want to hire an SEO agency, use local SEO outsourcing, or create a strategy yourself – an SEO audit must be done first.

To explore other ecommerce platforms and learn how you can perform an SEO audit on them, take a look at the following blog posts:

About the Author

Picture of Branko Ilishev

Branko Ilishev

Branko is your SEO prodigy. He manages the SEO team and finds creative solutions for your online visibility problems by thinking out-of-the-box. He also translates the collected data of analytics into understandable information that gives you concrete insights.