Ten Steps to performing an SEO audit

A good website is one of the most important things that your charity can have, but a good website is not enough. To ensure that it is as effective as possible, it has to be easy to find – and that means it has to optimised so that it appears prominently in search engine rankings.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the art of ensuring that your website and its content rank highly in Google searches. If your charity website isn’t designed with SEO in mind then you are undoubtedly missing out on a huge amount of traffic.

Even if you’ve done a great deal of SEO work on your website, that doesn’t mean that the job is finished. You still need perform an SEO audit every three to six months to ensuring you are keeping abreast of search algorithm changes, and to provide a prioritised list of actions that you need to take to keep improving your charity’s search performance.

Here are ten steps to help you perform an SEO audit:

Step 1: Assemble the tools

To carry out an SEO audit you need a good SEO tool to scan your website and provide you with relevant information about how well it has been optimised, as well as any areas that need fixing or improving. There are many such tools available, including:

• AHrefs (low cost trial available)
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free and paid versions available)
• Moz Pro (free trial available)
• SEM Rush (free trial available)
• Ubersuggest (some functionality available free)
• You should also take a look at free Google tools such as Google Search Console

Step 2: Check for duplicates

One of the most common problems with SEO involves what Google and other search engines perceive to be duplicate sites.

For example, say that your domain name is yourowncharity.org.

You may be able to access your site at the following URLS:

http://yourowncharity.org

https://www.yourowncharity.org

https://yourowncharity.org

Even though these are all the same site, search engines may not recognise them as such. You can use a scanning tool to check that only one of these URLs is the main or canonical URL, and the others redirect (using a 301 redirect) to the canonical one.

Step 3: Make sure all of your site is being indexed

Open your browser and type "site: yourowncharity.org" in the search field to check out how many pages Google finds.

This ought to be the number of pages on your website, so if the result is very different then you should investigate further. For example, it might be because some of your pages are not being indexed, or Google may be having trouble because of the ecommerce functionality of your site.

Step 4: Watch your speed

Google takes the performance of your website into account when it ranks it. The platform does not like referring Google users to slow sites.

That’s because as the wait period while a page loads increases from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of the user "bouncing" – leaving the site and trying elsewhere – increased by 32%. From 1 to 5 seconds the figure is 90%, and from 1 to 6 seconds it’s 106%, according to Google.

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool or an SEO scanner to get a benchmark of page loading times and to see which pages are problematic and what can be done to speed them up.