How To Do a Complete SaaS SEO Audit [Actionable Guide]

If you’ve been struggling to make your content perform and bring results for your SaaS business, it may be due to many reasons.

Fortunately, carrying a SaaS SEO audit for your website can help you understand what draws your website down and why it’s underperforming.

Otherwise you might be working on your SEO activities without getting any significant results, which can lead to much time wasted.

In today’s article, we’ll guide you through the SaaS SEO Audit process to help you improve your website performance and set it up for future growth.

What is an SEO Audit, and Why It’s Important?

An SEO Audit is a process of analyzing your website to uncover issues that prevent its search engine rankings.

These issues range from difficulties with crawling to factors causing low rankings. 

Carrying an SEO audit for your SaaS website is crucial to preventing competitors from outranking you and understanding why your goals aren't being met.

On the other hand, SEO Audits give you a clear understanding of what you need to do to improve your website’s SEO performance.

Additionally, conducting keyword research and analyzing your competitors are essential steps.

Now, let's delve into the necessary steps to perform a comprehensive SaaS SEO audit and improve your site's ranking.

To see the significance of an SEO audit improvements, check out how we grew the SaaS AI tool from 0 to 60k monthly organic traffic in 7 months. 

How to Perform an SEO Audit for SaaS Businesses

There are several areas you should focus on during the audit:

• Technical SEO that focuses on technical website issues like slow loading times or messy code.
• On-page and off-page tactics and their implementation.
• Content audit to evaluate the quality and relevance of your content.

Let’s cover each of those to help you improve your website.

Technical SEO Audit

A technical SEO audit helps you examine the technical aspects of your website related to SEO, ensuring search engines like Google can effectively crawl, index, and rank your pages.

By resolving technical issues, your website's performance can progressively improve over time.

But first, you need to analyze the website and see if there are any issues.

We use a step-by-step process that helps us decide what to do with different web pages. 

• Is the site indexed well by search engines?
• Does it load fast enough?
• Is the structure and organization correct?
• Are the URLs SEO-friendly and consistent?
• Are there any redirect problems?
• Is there duplicate content?
• Are images and multimedia optimized?
• Is the code optimized?
• Is the XML Sitemap set up correctly?

Here are the main steps to get answers to these questions:

1. Check for crawlability and indexability issues 

Ensure your pages can be properly crawled and indexed by search engines.

Within Google Search Console, you can see how many and which pages on your site are indexed or if there are pages that haven’t been indexed yet.

You can also get insights about the reasons why pages are not indexed so you can fix if there are any indexation issues.

Note: It’s important to make sure Google is indexing only one version of each page and that it’s indexing the right one. 

2. Audit site architecture and internal links 

A well-organized site architecture facilitates navigation for users and helps search engines understand the relationship between different pages.

On the other hand, internal links distribute link equity across your pages and signal to search engines which pages are most important. 

To make sure everything is properly structured and connected, you should review the structure of your website's pages and examine how they are linked together. 

Here’s an example of a proper structure:

Make sure visitors can navigate your site smoothly by checking for broken links(404 errors), redirect issues, or orphan pages that are not connected to any of your pages.

You can use different tools(such as Screaming Frog or Ahrefs) to identify broken links or orphan pages that need to be included in your internal linking strategy.

Note: Ensure your pages are properly linked together, are linked to an XML sitemap and include an HTML sitemap in the footer.

3. Analyze Page Loading Speed 

Your website's loading speed can impact both your search engine rankings and conversion rates, making it a crucial SEO factor. 

The more time your pages take to load, the more visitors will leave. 

To address this, I recommend you use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights by Google Developers, GTMetrix, webpagetest.org, or Google Lighthouse. 

How do you know that your speed is good?

Here’s a broad scale to keep in mind:

• A score of 90 or above is considered fast, 
• A 50 to 90 score is considered average, and 
• A score below 50 is considered slow.

However, having a score of 90 and over doesn’t always mean that your speed is optimal for Google.

Note: Don’t forget to check Core Web Vitals within the GSC, as these are the most important factors that Google considers when determining your website performance.

Here are some steps to help you improve your website's loading speed:

• Enhance server response time by fixing slow database queries, routing issues, or insufficient memory. An optimal server response time is under 200ms.
• Optimize your code by removing comments, unnecessary formatting, and code.
• Use a page speed service such as Cloudflare or a compression plugin.
• Minimize redirects to reduce loading time.
• Compress and optimize images to ensure they are less than 100kb.

4. Ensure mobile-friendliness

With a significant portion of web traffic coming from mobile devices, it's essential to ensure your website is responsive on smaller screens. 

But that’s not all.

In October 2023, Google announced that they finished transitioning to mobile-first indexing. 

This means that Google now initially crawls and indexes pages from the mobile browser perspective.

So optimizing mobile webpages for good performance is now a must to rank well in search results.

To identify and address any issues with the mobile devices, you can use Google Search Console's Mobile Experience Report.

It will show you pages that need to be improved from the perspective of loading speed.

To analyze mobile pages more in detail, use Google Lighthouse which will show you specific elements that should be improved for better responsiveness.

5. Resolve duplicate content issues

Addressing duplicated content prevents Google from displaying the wrong version in search results or encountering indexing problems. 

Implement sitewide 301 redirects or use canonical tags to resolve these issues.

Here are the crucial steps to use if you identify any problem:

• If a 404 page has external links, redirect it to the right page
• If a 404 page has both external and internal links, redirect it to the right page and remove internal links
• If it's a 302 redirection, change it to a 301(302s should only be temporary)
• If a page is marked as "noindex" but found in the sitemap, remove it from the sitemap
• If there is a 301 redirected link on the sitemap, make sure to include the relevant one
• If a page gets traffic but lacks internal links, add internal links

Meanwhile, it's essential to look at both on-page and off-page SEO aspects.

So, let's get to it.

On-Page SEO Audit

An on-page SEO audit involves checking if your pages are set up to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) and attract more traffic.

Here are some key on-page SEO factors to review:

1. Optimize titles and headings

Ensure your title tags contain your target keyword, and avoid using duplicate titles. 

Structure your content with clear headings and subheadings.

Keyword example: “cold emails”

2. Check meta descriptions

Meta descriptions provide a brief summary of your web page's content and influence whether users will click on your page within the search engine results page. 

Make sure to check for duplicate meta descriptions and make adjustments as necessary.

Here’s a guide that can help you optimize your page titles and meta descriptions to boost your website traffic.

3. Optimize URLs 

Keep your URLs simple and concise, avoiding random numbers or dates. 

Also, consider including your target keyword to help Google understand your page's relevance to search queries.

4. Optimize images

Relevant images can enhance your web pages and attract more traffic. 

Add descriptive alt tags to your images to provide context to search engines.

Also, make sure to compress them to be below 100 kilobytes.

You can use a tool such as Tinypng to compress images easily.

5. Add schema markup 

Schema markup provides additional information to search engines about your page's content. 

It can help your business appear in featured snippets and improve your page's click-through rate (CTR).

Here’s the checklist that can help you optimize your on-page SEO:

Page Titles

• Every page needs its own distinct title.
• Keep it short, about 50-60 characters wide or under 600 pixels.
• Make sure it describes what the page is about.
• Put your main keywords towards the beginning of the title.

Headers

• Start your main keyword with the H1 tag.
• Include your keyword in the H2 tag too.
• Don't repeat header tags unnecessarily.
• Avoid overusing keywords (keep them around 3% to 5% of the text).

Images

• Use the exact keyword for the alt tag of one image.
• Avoid using the same name; vary the keywords for other alt tags on the page.

This is how proper content SEO Audit helped us increase traffic to our client within a single article.

Here, the issue was a bad meta Title and meta Description.

Even though the content was pretty good, it couldn’t grow properly as those shitty Metadata weren’t attracting any clicks.

So improved them, analyzed the data gathered, and did some slight changes within the headings to optimize the article, which resulted in amazing growth in just 10 days from changes.

From 5-10 clicks per day to 100+ daily clicks.

Looks pretty amazing, right?

However we would never understand the issue without an audit and deep analysis of the data and content.

Content SEO Audit

A content audit involves checking and reviewing all the content on your website to improve its performance and meet your readers' needs and questions. 

This includes everything from the written content on your blog to the photos and videos you've uploaded.

Conducting a SaaS content audit means carefully assessing your content assets to make sure they match your business goals, connect with your intended audience, and help boost conversions.

Here’s the usual process of it:

For the content update process, we rely on a content SOP to identify issues and assign tasks. 

Here are some of the conditions we include in our content SOP:

• If multiple pages target the same keyword, merge them into one page.
• If a page gets less than five sessions per month and no conversions, rewrite it.
• If a page gets less than five sessions per month but has received backlinks, redirect it to a relevant page.
• If the content is of high quality but lacks backlinks, focus on acquiring backlinks for it.
• If the content is less than 1000 words and doesn't cover a topic thoroughly, rewrite it.

You can improve your content performance easily with our complete SaaS content audit checklist.

Off-Page SEO Audit

Off-page SEO audit involves monitoring activities that occur outside of your website to impact rankings and traffic.

Here are 4 key elements of an off-page SEO audit:

1. Referring domains

The quantity and quality of backlinks are crucial indicators of trust, content quality, and authority to Google. 

Tools like Ahrefs can help you analyze your backlink profile and identify any broken links. 

You can then reach out to these sites and propose your content as an alternative.

How many websites are linking to yours? 

If the number is low, you should work on improving your link-building strategy to gather new high-quality backlinks.

3. Domain authority 

It's crucial that your backlinks originate from trustworthy websites, as this greatly influences your search engine rankings. 

Ahrefs assesses your links and provides a Domain Authority score. 

You can then disavow any low-quality or spammy links.

4. Competitor analysis 

Examine the backlinks of your top-ranking competitors. 

From there, you can reach out to the websites linking to them and propose collaborations. 

Similarly, if you notice broken links on a competitor's site, you can offer your content as an alternative.

SaaS SEO Audit Tools To Simplify the Process

Understanding analytics and performance problems can be time-consuming without the right tools. 

Here are 3 tools to streamline your SEO audit process.

1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool from Google. 

It helps you keep track of, manage, and fix issues with how your site appears in Google Search results.

If you’re not using Search Console for SEO insights yet, trust me, you’re overlooking something really important.

GSC gives you helpful insights into how Google sees your site and lets you know how well your site is doing in search results.

2. Screaming Frog 

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a tool you can download to check websites of any size quickly. 

It shows results in real-time and offers SEO suggestions. 

This tool focuses mainly on technical SEO and can find common issues.

It locates: 

• broken links, 
• redirects, 
• server errors, 
• URLs blocked by robots.txt, and 
• other technical elements. 

This tool can help you spot problems with metadata, duplicates, and word counts on pages.

Additionally, it creates XML sitemaps to help pages get indexed faster and provides visualizations of your site's structure for internal linking and URL assessment. 

What's great about it is that you can export key SEO details to a spreadsheet for further analysis.

Note: The free version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs on multiple websites. 

For more features like scheduling and integration with Google tools, you can upgrade to the paid plan.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs offers a site audit tool to uncover on-page and technical SEO issues on your website. 

It examines all pages, providing an overall SEO score, identifying potential problems, and presenting data in charts. 

The tool assesses performance across 140 SEO parameters, including social tags, content quality, and links. 

You can customize the analysis by excluding specific pages or sections and easily share reports.

Conclusion

It's important to regularly run an SEO audit to keep your website healthy and maintain its position in search engine rankings. 

Incorporating SEO audits into your routine SEO strategy allows you to address problems efficiently and find opportunities you might overlook to drive more traffic.

If you haven't done an SEO audit yet, a good approach is to seek help from a specialized agency that focuses on SaaS SEO.

They can provide expert guidance to ensure you get the most out of the audit.

‍Contact our team today to schedule your SaaS SEO Audit and start optimizing your website's performance.