The 5 Step SEO Audit Process For A Successful 2020 (+45% traffic)

The 5 Step Common Sense SEO Audit That Anyone Can Do!
Unless you have extensive technical website SEO knowledge, it's very hard to do a true technical SEO audit.

So I created the 5x step common sense audit process and applied it to this blog to show you how it works.

It's pretty simple for anyone to follow-

Listen to your visitors
Manually observe problems
Perform technical spot checks
Scan your site with an SEO audit tool
Create a plan of attack
If you can do each of these, you will be able to build a solid SEO foundation that will likely have a positive impact on your traffic levels.

seo audit process
Sure it lacks the depth of a full audit.

BUT:

Stepping through this process will help anyone that is suffering from declining or a plateau in traffic.

Step # 1: Listen To Your Visitors
The first stage in any proper SEO audit is to ask for user feedback. Search engines put a high focus on user experience in their search results.

This should be done before you use an SEO audit tool to evaluate your website.

So I first wanted to know 3x things about my audience:

1. What content did they want to learn about?
2. How did they want to consume that content?
3. What did they like (or dislike) about my current site?

To find this out, I conducted a simple reader survey where I asked my readers each of these questions. You can use social media for this too.

The majority told said they wanted to learn about these 4x topics:

Reader survey
… and they wanted to learn about them in this way:

Reader survey results
These two questions gave me the foundation for a new content strategy.

To double down on creating high quality:
Written content
Video content
… that talks about SEO, traffic and making money – it's what you said you want so it is what I decided to give you.
My readers also told me what they liked – and didn 't – about the blog.

Free SEO Website Audit Report to improve your blog - Mobile & tech for sale

Here are some of the stand-out comments about the site:

What readers liked:
Easy to understand
Lots of free information
Content is helpful first, sales generator second
Detailed step by step process
Comprehensive
Video tutorials
Covers both sides of the coin
Real life examples / case studies
Downloading the videos / posts as PDFs
Transparency & brutal honesty
Intent on educating readers
Original ideas
What readers didn't like:
Design looks dated
Cluttered with graphics
Thumbnail designs are dated
Too many colors, looks cheap
Hard to find and refer back to tutorials
Search results are terrible
Too many popups & popoverst that interrupt learning
Some content is out of date
Needs more real life examples
How to know which post / tutorial to integrate and when
Low frequency of blog posts
All of which are very fair and accurate points which were noted. The power of social media should be the friend of any small business owner.

With reader feedback complete, we can move onto our own manual observations…

Step # 2: Manual Observations
My next step was to manually check each of the observations above.

The most common complaint was things like-

“Your blog is hard to navigate and I struggle to find the content I need. It's like you have all the pieces of the puzzle, but none of them are joined together!”

I went through the site thoroughly and found this to be true.

There was no clearly-defined path between content for either users OR search engines.

It was a mess:

MW Blog old design
And I was clicking through the blog, I felt like it had become sluggish. Worse still:

It was really slow on mobile with some awful formatting issues.

In comparison to other sites, it felt like my blog had become this guy:

Outdated
I needed to overhaul the site.

However, there were a few more checks I needed to do first.

Contact: free website audit