The term ‘let me Google it’ has become a worldwide phenomenon, it’s the quasi-equivalent of searching for a word, term or meaning in an Encyclopedia using the Dewey Decimal System. Google is so good at their job that SEO has had to branch out into many facets and is no longer all about cloning your site using the same content with varied URLs. Yep, that’s how they did SEO back in the day!
But we are not here to go into the history of SEO and how it was managed back in the day (Ugh, age is showing). Instead, let’s talk about site auditing and the importance it brings to your business by hyperfocusing on the elements that need to be addressed and how you can improve your search results. So what is a website audit?
According to HubSpot: A website audit is an examination of page performance prior to large-scale search engine optimization (SEO) or a website redesign. Auditing your website can determine whether or not it's optimized to achieve your traffic goals, and if not, how you can improve it to increase performance.
Simply put, website audits are necessary to see what the problem areas are of your website and how they can be improved to maximise the potential of your website. So in a New York minute, introducing our favourite SEO Auditing tools that we use almost as much as we use our mobile phones!
I am not gonna lie, I use Ahrefs the most here at SEIRIM. Aside from pointing out the issues brought about in doing a website audit, it has so many other rich features that make SEO what it is today.
I just want to say that even if we super love using Ahrefs, it goes hand in hand with Google Search Console and there are a few features that work particularly well in helping to improve your SEO.
Checking issues on a website can be time-consuming so Screaming Frog actually makes it a bit easier by giving you a detailed version of what needs to be done and addressed. In lieu of Ahrefs and Google Search Console; we at SEIRIM also love to use Screaming Frog for our QA process as well!
SEMRush is a tool that I have used a few times and also one of our faves here. SEMRush is just like Ahrefs except that it has a few other features which help to improve search rankings.
Aizhan works like Ahrefs and is one of the more used tools for SEO in China. Now it’s a little hard to talk about Aizhan since the whole site is in Chinese (a language I don’t speak a word of!). From what we have discovered and researched is that Aizhan works like Ahrefs and is one of the most used tools for SEO in China. Aizhan is pretty okay to run an audit on but mainly recommending to use Aizhan when you need to work on Chinese SEO (not an easy feat but super helps with a Chinese colleague!)
Think of Baidu Webmaster Tools as the Chinese equivalent of Google Search Console.
The most important aspect I see here is that it supports crawling, URL submissions, and robots testing. The site is fairly beginner-friendly and will crawl your entire site and evaluate the webpages for any errors due to redirects, servers, robots and your usual 404 errors.
Just like Google Search Console, they even have a fancy toolkit that lets you clear obsolete content and it allows you to define error pages for 3 types of errors, namely HTTP 404 errors, soft 404 errors, and HTTP redirects due to errors. There is also a meta tag which tells Baidu that this page is obsolete: <meta name="baidu-deadlink" value="1">. They make it easy, don’t they?
And so there you have it, a little sneak peek on the tools we use at SEIRIM.
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