What is an SEO Audit?
With SEO audit Italy I refer to a very specific operation to scan, review and evaluate the performance of an online project, highlighting any errors, problems encountered, the relationship with competitors and, in summary, all the technical aspects and content that influence the performance of the site and its positioning on Italian web search engines.
In our field, the SEO Audit is a global, technical and diagnostic SEO analysis on the website which serves to have as clear a picture as possible of the state of health of the project.
My job is performed through a set of various analyses, explore the technical, structural, content and competitive aspects of the site, both internal and external, and their possible influence in terms of positioning on Italian web search engines, to discover SEO-level problems that hinder performance, such as structural deficiencies and errors that do not allow for correct scanning and indexing of resources, therefore in view of the overall website optimization.
What is the SEO audit for?
Through this SEO check, it is possible to discover the strengths and weaknesses of a site, with the aim of making corrections and developing an effective SEO strategy to maximize the results of one’s work and increase the organic traffic that comes from Google Italian research.
Essentially, therefore, this process serves to ensure that your website can be seen, crawled and classified by search engines, and is a central element of technical SEO activity, the area of site optimization work that focuses on the technical factors, in fact, that can make pages more or less easy for crawlers to crawl.
SEO audits are a great way to create action plans to find and correct problems, identify opportunities for internal improvement, and also discover elements that can help you outperform competitors while creating better customer experiences.
How an SEO audit is done
The purpose of the SEO audit Italy is therefore to identify as many fundamental problems as possible that affect the performance of the organic search on Google.it, noting in particular:
- Technical SEO issues
- Problems with the website structure
- On-page SEO issues
- Potential off page issues
- User experience issues
- Content gaps and opportunities
Possibly also presenting competitive analysis insights and providing details on aspects such as performance (also in light of the most recent parameters of Google’s Core Web Vitals ), mobile optimization, health of internal links, problems with images, page status (in particular for pages with 404 and 301 codes), URL structure, canonical tags, sitemaps, server errors and metadata, also covering higher level factors such as accessibility, usability, effective indexing and possible optimization areas.
Website analysis, why is so important?
As I said, with this SEO audit Italy operation it is possible to check the website in a precise and detailed manner, of any nature (blog, eCommerce, information portal and so on) to verify that all aspects of the project are functioning correctly, for example by analyzing the level of content, on page and off page SEO and link profiles, verifying that Google spiders track the site without problems and that search engines are able to read the sitemap, but also by examining the browsing experience offer to users and potential customers.
A complete website checkup
I monitor the optimization status based on the known and presumed SEO positioning factors, to indicate the path to follow to climb the SERPs for the reference keywords.
Carrying out this survey, therefore makes it possible to discover the weak points of a project that underperforms, highlighting the problems and discovering the causes, which can be generated by an inefficient technical configuration, for example by reporting images that have not been optimized, absent sitemap, lack of use of CDNs, or more generally difficulties in terms of User Experience, slowness in displaying pages (that speed is a ranking factor!) or mobile usability problems (an issue that is particularly heart to Google).
In addition to the SEO test, this function is also used to determine the site’s position within the sector, to make a comparison with competitors and to identify content on which to focus for improvement.
SEO audit checklist, the phases of the analysis
In general, I start from the study of the site structure, proceeding with the analysis of pages and code to evaluate the main ranking factors, passing through the analysis of the competitors, and concluding with the verification of the contents and the variables that make a website optimized and performing.
At the end of the operation, you receive an evaluation document in which the problems encountered are listed, categorized, contextualized and explained in detail, including through practical examples, with an indication of priorities for corrections and suggestions for solving these problems.
Website health testing activity
The SEO check starts from the very structure of the project and from the on-page SEO checks, which are the most technical and longer-lasting ones, aimed at outlining what concerns about the website as such (and therefore the code, the contents, the loading speed ) and highlight critical issues related to site architecture, HTML code and user experience.
For example, technical answers are obtained to questions about navigation within the site, the logic of the links, the efficiency of the sitemap, the presence of broken links and semantically ordered content, checking through various tests in the robots.txt files that the search engines are allowed to crawl only selected pages.
No less strategic is the elimination of duplicate content, an operation to be performed on a periodic basis if new content is added to the site: the goal of optimization is to prevent the website pages from generating duplicate urls, an eventuality that confuses the crawler and is considered a serious error (in this case it is possible to enter the Rel Canonical).
Again in the field of on page SEO it is possible to try to improve already published texts from an SEO perspective, also analyzing the contents produced to find out if only the best keywords have been identified (in terms of search volume and competitive potential) and how possibly intervene in this sense.
What the Off-Page SEO test evaluates
With a view to Off-Page SEO analysis on the other hand, all matters involving activities and conditions that are external to the site, but which influence its performance and performance, are examined in depth, starting with backlinks and passing through brand authority, mentions, shares and popularity on social networks.
By making an SEO Audit, it is possible to know how many and which links the site receives, view an overview of the anchor text used for the links and learn more about the brand’s situation on social networks; this activity on external factors serves to perfect the SEO strategy, obtaining ideas for optimizing the link acquisition campaign and strengthening the site’s brand.
If you want to have an SEO Audit of the Italian situation of your website, contact me!
