How to Conduct a Semantic SEO Audit?

Do you want to improve your visibility on the web? Attract organic traffic and make a living from your online activity? Be relevant in the eyes of Google? I invite you to discover without further delay how to perform a semantic SEO audit to improve your performance on the Internet. To make this technical analysis more concrete, I share with you an example of a semantic analysis carried out on our site.

🚀 Express reading: what will you learn in this post?

In this blog post, I will show you how to use SEOQuantum's crawl tool to perform a comprehensive semantic audit of your site. I will analyze the problems encountered and provide you with solutions to optimize the factors that penalize your organic search ranking.

Using a semantic audit example, I propose to discover how to analyze the crucial points that follow:

• analysis of content;
• control of on-page technique;
• verification of linking;
• details of all internal pages;
• overview of the skeleton of the audited site.

❓ What is a semantic audit?

A semantic audit, sometimes called a content audit or editorial audit, allows you to check the relevance of a website and the quality of its content. This in-depth study is therefore essential for improving your organic search ranking and is an integral part of a complete SEO audit.

Performing a semantic analysis means discovering the optimization elements to be applied to your site to make it more visible on Google:

• determine the level of expertise in your field;
• discover the consistency of your pages (keyword clustering);
• understand the relationships between each of your pages (internal linking);
• know the penalizing factors for your organic search ranking;
• plan priority improvements.

If this key element is so important, it is because search engines also carry out a semantic study to analyze the pages published on the Web. In 2011, the update of Google's algorithm, known as Panda, shook up the search results pages. The fight against keyword stuffing has since translated into a new way of considering a text and a site as a whole: the semantic field.

👀 Semantic audit: SEOQuantum example

Do you want to know how to perform a semantic audit in just a few minutes? It's possible with SEOQuantum's semantic crawler tool!

At a glance, you discover the performance score of your site as well as numerous areas for improvement. You can also export the complete crawl and linking data to an Excel workbook to gather all this information in a single document.

In the header of the semantic report, you clearly see the themes on which the site is relevant. You also discover the dominant anchors of your internal links, which is a revealing element of the main topics you address.

Below these first groups of information, you have access to 3 detailed categories of analysis, accompanied by optimization tips. The study focuses on content, on-page technique, and internal linking.

1. Content and semantics

In this section, we analyze the semantic relevance of all the analyzed pages as well as the key factors for your page to be indexed on search engines. To push the analysis on a case-by-case basis, you can then use the SEOQuantum semantic analysis tool.

Orphan pages

Analysis: 2 orphan pages appear in the audit report. This means that they are present in the sitemap.xml file, but they are not linked to any other page by internal links.

Advice: adding links to these URLs will help increase their notoriety.

Pages without contextual links

Analysis: 42 pages are not pointed to by hypertext links contained in the text itself. This is despite the fact that they appear in the sitemap.xml file.

Advice: the same recommendation as for orphan pages, you should add links to these pages to improve their popularity.

Weak semantic signal

Analysis: 3 pages have a weak semantic signal. This means that the theme of the subject addressed could not be clearly identified.

Advice: rework this content by focusing on a particular theme and placing varied expressions that are representative of your main query.

Cannibalized content

Analysis: we do not have any pages affected by a case of SEO cannibalization, which would imply that they compete with each other.

Advice: if this had been the case, it would be necessary to update the content of one of the affected pages to differentiate it from the other.

Duplicate content

Analysis: no page contains duplicate content.

Advice: if this were the case, the texts would need to be rewritten to avoid being penalized by search algorithms.

Pages with less than 500 words

Analysis: 27 pages with content less than 500 words were identified during the semantic audit.

Advice: increasing the length of the content will allow for better detailing of the subject and, thus, improve its chances of appearing in Google's top results.

Difficult content readability

Analysis: according to the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, 5 contents are considered difficult to read.

Advice: shortening sentences, simplifying vocabulary, broadening the lexical field, or using more transition words are good ways to facilitate reading.

2. On-page technique

In this part of the semantic analysis report, we check the technical elements present on each of the studied pages. To learn more about ranking factors, I invite you to read the following article: Checklist for on-page and off-page SEO (technique, content, and external links).

Title tag

Analysis: all analyzed URLs contain a title tag. However, 2 SEO titles are too short and 8 are too long.

Advice: this element is very important in terms of SEO. Each page must be filled in with a unique title (H) of a length between 50 and 60 characters (maximum 512 pixels).

Meta description tag

Analysis: 5 meta descriptions are empty, 13 are too short, and 6 are too long.

Advice: the indirect influence of this tag on SEO is significant. Indeed, it is a key factor in improving the click-through rate (CTR). Ideally, it should contain between 150 and 160 characters (maximum 920 pixels).

4XX errors

Analysis: all pages were accessible during the semantic crawl.

Advice: if you encounter a 4XX error, you should check the accessibility of the page.

3XX redirects

Analysis: the semantic audit did not reveal any 3XX redirects.

Advice: a redirect causes a loss of SEO juice. Be sure to avoid them as much as possible!

3. Internal linking

The connections between all the pages of your site are crucial for your organic search ranking. Creating internal links is therefore essential to provide complete information to your reader and help indexing robots crawl your entire site. Let's look at the measures displayed in the semantic audit example conducted for the writing of this article.

Low relevance between anchors and pages

Analysis: 23 link anchors do not match the subject addressed in the content of the targeted pages.

Advice: for good internal linking, anchors must reveal the theme of the targeted URL. Be sure to correct those that are not well optimized.

Pages with a significant number of links

Analysis: we do not have any pages containing more than 200 internal links.

Advice: a simple page is favored by users and search engines. If you have too many links, you can simply remove some of them.

Pages with no links in their content

Analysis: 20 contents without internal links were found during the semantic audit.

Advice: according to the reasonable surfer theory, internal linking represents the skeleton of your website. Do not hesitate to add some links to your pages to refine your area of expertise.

Long content with low PRi

Analysis: 114 long contents (more than 500 words) have a low Internal PageRank (PRi) (less than 19).

Advice: create more internal links pointing to these contents.

Short content with high PRi

Analysis: one short text (less than 500 words) has a too high Internal PageRank (greater than 38).

Advice: you could either add textual content to this page or deindex it.