What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a complete evaluation of your website from a search perspective. A better grade from Google helps you to appear more prominently in the SERP. The audit will reveal areas of improvement and enable your brand to reach top SERP positioning.
An SEO audit should be conducted quarterly, depending on the brand's goals. In fast-moving industries or when competing for AI placement, monthly reviews are now becoming the norm.
Conduct a competitive SEO audit
A robust SEO audit starts with researching competitors and potential buyers. Take time to dig into data and understand how competitors are capitalizing on the SERP. With this data, determine where you rank compared to competitors to strategize how to improve SEO. GROWL’s audit process always includes an in-depth, thorough investigation into the competition and buyer personas. Use these three tips to get you started with an initial competitive SEO audit.
Understand buyer personas and pain points
The goal of SEO is to get noticed in the SERP and drive traffic to your site. Thus, the first step should be considering your buyer personas and their pain points. In other words, consider what they’re searching for, their knowledge of your product or industry, and keyword trends. By understanding your target audience and their search behavior, you can identify competitors. Modern buyer research should also account for how people phrase queries in natural language—especially as AI tools favor content that aligns with conversational searches.
Identify competition
Most companies already have insight into who their competition is. Beyond your top, toe-to-toe competitors, it’s vital to consider what pages your brand is competing within search. A competitor SEO audit will expose what keywords your pages are competing against, how it rank, and cross-competitor authority scores. This secondary list allows you to discover hidden competitors or revamp site messaging. You should also analyze how often competitors appear in AI-generated search results—this is your AI Share of Voice. Brands with strong domain authority and structured content tend to show up more frequently in SGE snapshots and other generative results.
Test user experience (UX)
User experience (UX) is often overlooked in an SEO audit; however, UX defines functionality and bounce rates and is a powerful foundation behind rankings. Often, a site’s path from the homepage to the end conversion is not as intuitive as you would think. Consider if your pages have consistent messaging and design to match your brand and a fluid structure. Remember to account for mobile visitors (this ties into SEO) along with CTAs. AI systems also consider engagement metrics and page performance when selecting content for summaries. Strong UX increases the chance that your site is not only ranked but also cited in AI-generated responses.
By leveraging areas of improvement based on the competitor review, your site will stand out against the rest. Remember to think like a user who knows nothing about your industry and easily guide them to their answer. Google will reward you for it!
Get technical with SEO
Everyone wants to be number one when it comes to ranking on a search page. To be number one, you need to optimize several different elements within your site. Beyond defining the foundation – personas, competition, and UX – it’s time to take a look at the technical side of SEO and improve your SERP ranking. Also, technical SEO now plays a role in AI readiness. A well-structured site is more easily crawled, indexed, and interpreted by both traditional bots and AI algorithms trained on structured content.
When it comes to SERP ranking, it’s critical to follow Google’s guidelines. Google continuously updates its algorithm to promote valuable, search-friendly information. While auditing content, use these tips to rank highly within the Google algorithm:
Clean up your pages
Examine your full site and determine if pages are overwhelming viewers. By instituting heat maps, you can evaluate how users are interacting on your pages. Content clarity also supports better AI citations. Overloaded pages or buried insights are less likely to be included in AI summaries. On the backend, review backlinks and evaluate the sites that are linking to your content. If junk sites are too often linking to your pages, Google takes note.
Audit your page titles
Across your pages and content pieces, it’s crucial to gauge if your titles are helping your ranking. During this phase of the audit, you must check title length and keywords and build robust meta descriptions. Remember to strategically construct a single H1 title.
Crawl your site
A site crawl gives you an aerial view of your website and a Google perspective into what might be keeping your site from performing well on the SERP. The crawl will discover issues, including 404 errors and nonindexed pages, which, in turn, help identify why a site is not performing. Also, look for schema markup opportunities. Structured data can boost your eligibility for featured snippets and improve your content’s performance in AI-powered search.
Leverage Google Analytics
Never discredit Google Analytics as a tool. From finding top pages and page views to keywords and CTRs, Google will give insight into your SEO. For example, when looking at organic traffic, you can see your site’s performance over time by looking at the data trends. You can identify a problem from the spike in a downward trend.
Google also examines how your data is structured. The structure of the content on your page will determine if a user can find the information they are looking for with little hassle. Modern analytics tools can also provide insight into AI discovery and engagement, showing how users interact after clicking through AI-powered summaries.
Amp up your keywords for improved SEO
Keywords are the bread and butter of SEO success. While GROWL recommends in-depth keyword auditing and research, a few easy tips can be implemented.
- Search your business name and see where you rank. Do the same for your top industry keywords.
- Search industry trends and competitor keywords. Then, add them across your site. Remember to keep keyword distribution even, or it will hurt your ranking.
- Use keywords across social media, including Google My Business. Need help getting set up on GMB? This GROWL guide has you covered.
- Build up keyword ranking organically, then launch PPC keyword ads.
Now is the time to audit your SEO through a new lens. Request a free web assessment to see how your website ranks, and how visible your brand is in AI-generated search experiences.