SEO is not something you can set and forget.

No matter how beautiful and functional your website is, it has to be findable.

And for it to be findable, you need to play (and win) the SEO game, which requires constant attention, tinkering, and keeping up with the latest search engine algorithm changes. 

Staying on top of search engine search pages (SERPs) is hard work–but it pays off. Retaining that number one spot atop a SERP is like standing atop the podium at the Olympics. You wave at the crowd as they cheer endlessly for you…

Okay, maybe it’s not exactly like that. 

But if you want to take home gold and retain top SERP positions, then you need to check your SEO strategy’s vitals now and then. 

That’s where an SEO audit comes into play. 

What Is an SEO Audit?

Search Engine Optimization, SEO for short, are the efforts related to optimizing your website to rank higher in search engines like Google or Bing. This leads you to obtain more brand visibility and awareness. 

An SEO audit, therefore, is the process of conducting a detailed analysis of your website’s performance in search engines. 

The goal is to uncover areas of your website that require attention. Once you have this information, it’s easier to create and follow a strategic plan to get you to a better SEO end-state. 

Let’s say your website currently ranks 15th for a search query, and you want to rank closer to the top spot and earn visibility as a thought leader. Your first step should be to conduct an SEO audit to find out why and where your content ranks low, and what you can fix to launch it to the top position. 

SEO audits are not just about finding blog posts you want to rank and keyword-stuffing them full like a Thanksgiving turkey. It’s about looking at the three components of SEO through a strategic lens: 

• On-page SEO: An SEO audit helps you identify opportunities for optimization across individual web pages, blog content, keywords, meta tags, headers, and internal linking. 
• Off-page SEO: An SEO audit takes you through your site’s backlink profile and shows how other reputable websites link back to your site. 
• Technical SEO: A thorough SEO audit includes checking the website’s backend structure, such as its crawlability, indexability, site speed, mobile-friendliness, and security. 

A comprehensive audit could be the key to uncovering valuable information that can take your company’s website from the bottom to the top of SERPs. 

Why Are SEO Audits Important for Fintechs?

For fintechs that wish to stand on top of the SERP world, an SEO audit is a non-negotiable step in your marketing and SEO plan.

Conducting an SEO audit has many specific benefits, making it well worth the effort:

• Maintain a competitive edge: Since the fintech sector is highly competitive, SEO audits help fintechs stay ahead of competitors by identifying opportunities to improve their website’s search performance.

• Build trust and credibility: SEO audits help fintech websites maintain credibility by ensuring they are secure, fast, and free of technical errors that could undermine user confidence. 

• Ensure compliance: SEO audits can help fintechs ensure that their websites follow SEO best practices while remaining compliant with legal and regulatory standards.

• Boost organic traffic: An SEO audit is the prerequisite to achieving sustainable SEO results. Fintech companies that undergo an SEO audit can usually expect to see an increase in their organic traffic, which typically has a higher return on investment (ROI) over time than paid media.

• Get ahead of potential technical issues: SEO audits identify problems on the backend of your site, allowing you to fix them before anything catastrophic happens. 

The underlying theme is this: SEO audits are powerful tools that provide data-driven insights into your content and digital marketing strategies, which can propel your marketing—and your brand’s—growth to new heights. 

SEO Audit Checklist

While an SEO audit is a foundational part of any comprehensive SEO strategy, the exact steps and order in which you conduct it can vary widely depending on your website and unique goals.  

That’s where a strategic partner can help build the most efficient SEO audit for your business.

SEO specialists who have worked with companies similar to yours can understand the areas that require attention and what changes can impact your web traffic and rankings most. 

Regardless of the sequence of your audit, there are some basic tasks you should never skip. 

1. Run a Site Crawl

A site crawl is one of the foundational elements of your audit.

It simulates how search engines navigate your website and flags issues in your SEO setup, such as broken links, blocked pages, slow-loading elements, duplicate content, sitemap issues, or pages that are difficult to index. 

Running a site crawl—or a site crawl audit—can be as simple as entering your site’s URL into a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or reviewing your Crawl Stats Report from Google Search Console, which gives you information about Google’s crawling history on your website. 

2. Identify Indexing Issues

Pages on your website will only appear in search engine results if properly indexed. If you want a specific page to appear in a search, you need to ensure that it doesn’t accidentally contain a noindex tag or include a broken redirect. 

Tools like Semrush and Moz make identifying index issues easy, but usually come with steeper price tags. Google Search Console offers a Page Indexing report that shows which pages on your website are indexed and which are not.  

When reviewing your report, you should look for common indexing issues, such as 404 errors, redirect errors, incorrect URLs blocked by the robots.txt file, and server errors.

3. Analyze Site Speed

How fast your website and its pages load impacts your ability to rank significantly. Slow websites can frustrate users, leading to higher bounce rates and reduced trust—an important factor for fintech and financial services companies. 

Google measures site speed by looking at your Core Web Vitals—a set of metrics that show how user-friendly your site is. There are three metrics that make up Google’s Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes for the largest content on a webpage to display. Since large elements take longer than smaller elements, LCP is a valuable measure of page-load time. 
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures the time between a user’s first interaction with a web page and the browser’s response. A good FID is usually less than 100 milliseconds. 
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures instabilities in your web page layouts during page load. In other words, CLS is a metric of how much a web page unexpectedly moves around, interrupting a user’s browsing experience. 

Use a free tool like PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to analyze your page load time. Then, fix issues slowing down your page speed, like unoptimized images, large, uncompressed media files, poor server performance, and unnecessary plugins, among other things. 

4. Conduct Competitor Analysis

Looking at your competitors can reveal gaps in your SEO strategy and uncover new keywords, content opportunities, and backlink sources.

While you may not be able to peek under their websites’ hoods directly, tools like Semrush or Ahrefs can identify gaps in your keyword and show you keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t. This allows you to create and optimize content strategically to rank higher in search results than your competitors.

However, competitive analysis can tell you more than just keywords. It can help you identify gaps in your content strategy: what you should write about, how you should include different types of content, and so on. After all, filling these gaps can help you capture additional search traffic.

Finally, competitive analysis is helpful to understanding backlink opportunities.

5. Analyze Backlink Opportunities

While we’re on the subject, backlinks are links to your pages on other people’s websites. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the more likely you are to be viewed by users (and search engines) as an authority. 

Having backlinks is important, but the quality of those backlinks can impact your ranking. 

For example, if another site with high domain authority links back to your site, it indicates to Google that a high-quality site puts its faith in you. On the flip side, a low-quality backlink can seem bogus and indicate to Google that you’re not trustworthy. 

Analyze your backlinks to identify opportunities to build or reclaim links and eliminate toxic ones that may harm rankings. Leverage tools like Ahrefs or Majestic to identify low-quality backlinks to disown, and find new opportunities to build high-authority links. 

6. Look at On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is just as important as technical SEO and off-page SEO.

To ensure your on-page SEO is in tip-top shape, part of your site crawl should involve looking at on-page elements like HTML tags, meta descriptions, title tags, headers, keywords, and internal links, and ensuring they conform to best practices. 

Semrush’s On-Page SEO Checker and Ahref’s On- and Off-Page SEO tools can help you run an entire site audit and identify issues with your on-page SEO.

7. Check Mobile Friendliness

Since 92.3% of users access the internet from their mobile phones, Google prioritizes mobile optimization and penalizes sites that are not mobile-first. In fact, Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it prioritizes the mobile version of a site in search rankings.

In a nutshell: all your web pages should be fully mobile-responsive. Whenever you release a new web page or content, always be sure to test navigation, forms, loading speed, and the overall user experience from your mobile device before officially launching. 

Though Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing tool has been retired, Bing’s Mobile Friendliness Test Tool can help you identify areas of your mobile SEO that need improvement.

8. Track Keyword Ranking 

Regular keyword rank tracking helps you measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts over time and reveal new opportunities to target high-performing keywords.

Effective keyword rank tracking involves examining both long-tail keywords and high-traffic, high-competition keywords to get a holistic view of your ranking potential. Tracking keywords helps you identify where you’re losing ground compared to the competition so you can optimize content and add value for readers. 

Semrush’s SEO offering includes keyword rank checkers and position tracking tools, and Ahrefs offers a free keyword rank checker that shows key information to help you understand your rankings in context. 

9. Fix Broken Links

Have you ever landed on a web page that screamed “404” or “this page does not exist” right back at you? 

Frustrating, right? Yup, that was a broken link. And, as you likely experienced, it can hurt browsers’ user experience—and SEO results. 

SEO audit tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs are helpful to find and fix broken links. You can easily fix broken links to important pages by setting up 301 redirects, which signal to a browser that an old URL should permanently redirect to a new URL. 

Bake this activity into regular content updates on your product pages and blog pages, so you double-check that all internal and external links work appropriately. 

10. Optimize Website Architecture 

Website architecture refers to the overall structure of your web pages as determined by internal links. 

Think of your website architecture as a very orderly, structured family tree. Your homepage sits at the top; the next level down is usually the content you link in your navigation. From there, all your subpages are linked appropriately to key topic areas. 

A well-organized site architecture improves both crawlability and user experience by providing logical, easy-to-follow navigation and URL structure.

It’s usually easiest to organize your website architecture before you have a website. But it’s not too late to fix architecture issues if you already have a website.

And as you add new web pages over time, be sure to check if your architecture makes sense, set up a clear internal linking structure, and use breadcrumbs to improve and articulate navigation. 

11. Ensure Security Best Practices 

Following security protocols is one of the best ways to help users feel safe on your site—improving their user experience and garnering more trust for your brand. 

Hypertext transfer protocol (secure)—or HTTPS, for short—is one of the best ways to ensure safety. HTTPS is inherently encrypted, which means all communication between a user’s browser and back is safe from those attempting to hijack the data for malicious reasons. Its older counterpart, HTTP, is not encrypted, making it less safe from potential cybercrime. 

As part of this process, check that your site’s SSL certificate is valid. This certificate allows websites to use HTTPS and demonstrates the site’s security in the browser. 

Lastly, conduct regular vulnerability testing to keep your site safe from security breaches and other potentially harmful activities. This is particularly important for fintech and financial services institutions with access to consumers’ personal and financial information. 

CSTMR: Your Partner in SEO and Beyond

Conducting a thorough, accurate SEO audit means juggling several moving parts.

You will need more than a handful of SEO audit tools, an interest in digging into the finer details, a data-driven mindset, and experienced technical know-how. 

If that sounds overwhelming, you don’t have to go at it alone. Our SEO specialists at CSTMR are ready to help. 

With over a decade of experience helping early-stage, emerging, and established financial services companies navigate the complexities of digital marketing and SEO, we understand how to conduct an SEO audit that yields significant insights and helps you transform your marketing. 

When you’re ready to kick off your SEO audit, schedule a free consultation with our team to learn how we can help.