November 4, 2025Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Strategies for AI-Driven Search
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Behind every search engine query is a potential customer. However, if your website isn’t being found online, how will customers know that your business exists? An SEO audit can provide insight into the health of your website’s search visibility so that potential customers can be led right to your business.
What Is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a comprehensive evaluation and analysis of a website’s search engine optimization (SEO) performance. It involves a systematic review of various elements that influence a site’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal of an audit is to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement within the website’s SEO strategy.
By conducting an SEO audit, businesses and website owners can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their current SEO efforts, allowing them to make informed decisions to enhance their online presence and better align with search engine algorithms. Ultimately, an SEO audit serves as a strategic tool to refine and optimize a website’s online visibility, driving organic traffic, and improving overall search engine rankings.
The Importance of SEO Health
The importance of SEO health cannot be overstated in today’s dynamic digital landscape. SEO health is a direct reflection of a website’s ability to perform well in search engine results, influencing its online visibility and accessibility to a target audience. A website with robust SEO health is more likely to rank higher on search engine results pages, attracting organic traffic and potential customers.
By regularly monitoring and maintaining SEO health, businesses can ensure that their online presence remains competitive and aligned with ever-evolving search engine algorithms. Additionally, a healthy SEO profile contributes to a positive user experience since search engines prioritize well-optimized, relevant content.
In essence, investing in SEO health is fundamental for businesses seeking sustainable online success—it not only enhances visibility and reach but also establishes credibility and trust among users and search engines alike.
How to Do a Website SEO Audit
It can be hard to figure out what the best resource is to use for your SEO checkup. There are free resources all over the web, as well as software and plugins designed specifically for auditing your website’s SEO performance.
The Best Free SEO Tool
AHREFS offers a free tier that provides valuable insights into your website’s SEO health. AHREFS is reliable and provides up-to-date SEO data through tracking metrics such as site health analysis, on-page SEO recommendations, backlink analysis, content analysis, and competitor benchmarking.
The Best Paid SEO Tool
SEMRush is a paid tool that provides valuable insights into your website’s SEO health. It provides all the benefits that a free tool supplies; however, since it is a paid resource, it comes with other benefits that can help you outside of just SEO standing.
Factors to Consider in a DIY SEO Audit
Once you have figured out which tool you want to use for your SEO checkup, run a test on your website. After a few minutes, you will receive an SEO health score ranging from 0% to 100%, a description regarding your overall grade, and any factors that are holding back your website’s performance.
Google considers more than 200 factors when determining how to rank search results. Here are the top items to consider when running through an SEO audit checklist.
Meta Descriptions
What they are: Meta descriptions are HTML tags that provide a brief summary or description of the content of a web page. These descriptions typically appear in SERPs beneath the title and URL of a page. The main purposes of meta descriptions are to give users a preview of what they can expect to find on a particular page and to encourage them to click through to the website.
What to look for: You’ll want to confirm:
- Each page has a meta description
- The description is between 120 and 160 characters
- It contains at least one keyword relevant to the page
- The text accurately describes the page. If it doesn’t meet these requirements, rewrite the description so it has all four elements.
Title Tags
What they are: A title tag is an HTML element that defines the title of a web page. It is displayed on SERPs as the main clickable headline for a given search result. In addition to being visible in search engine listings, title tags are also displayed in the browser’s title bar or tab when a user is viewing the page.
What to look for: Title tags should use the main keyword of the page and be between 50 and 60 characters. If you have space, include your location and/or your company name in the title.
Keywords
What they are: Keywords are specific words or phrases that people use when searching for information on search engines. Keywords play a crucial role in helping search engines understand the content of a web page and match it to relevant user queries. Strategically using the right keywords can enhance a website’s visibility in search engine results and drive targeted traffic.
What to look for: Use this time to see where your site is ranking on your targeted keywords. You can increase rankings by optimizing pages that are falling behind on your target keywords.
Backlinks
What they are: Backlinks, also known as inbound links or incoming links, are links from one website to another. When a website links to another site, it is considered a backlink for the receiving site. Backlinks are a crucial element of SEO and play a significant role in determining a website’s authority, trustworthiness, and search engine rankings.
What to look for: We recommend against “buying” backlinks, as some of these offerings can be misleading and may not help you as much as you’d hope. Writing good, credible blogs and articles and sharing them on multiple channels helps to increase your odds of receiving good backlinks.
Page Speed
What it is: Page speed refers to the amount of time it takes for a web page to load completely. It is measured in seconds and represents the total time it takes for all the content on a page to be fully displayed in a user’s browser. Page speed is a crucial factor in user experience and has become increasingly important for SEO health. It directly influences how users interact with a website and can impact search engine rankings.
What to look for: Page speed can be caused by a host of factors, and if you’re consistently facing slow page speed, you may need to build a new website with modern features and infrastructure to increase speed and rank better on Google. However, if you’re looking for an easy fix, you could take a look at your images. Large image files are a common reason for slow page speed, and reducing the size of images could improve page speed without a complete overhaul.
Core Web Vitals
What it is: Core Web Vitals are a set of specific metrics Google uses to measure user experience on a webpage. They focus on three areas: loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. The three metrics are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures how long it takes for the largest visible element on a page (usually an image or block of text) to fully load.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): measures how quickly a page responds after a user interacts with it, like clicking a button or link. (This replaced First Input Delay as Google’s responsiveness metric in 2024.)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures how much a page’s layout unexpectedly shifts around while it’s loading, like text jumping down the page as an image pops in.
What to look for: Google’s benchmarks for a “good” score are an LCP under 2.5 seconds, an INP under 200 milliseconds, and a CLS score under 0.1. You can check your site’s Core Web Vitals for free using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. If any of your pages fall into the “needs improvement” or “poor” range, common fixes include compressing images, reducing third-party scripts, and setting explicit size attributes on images and embeds so the page doesn’t shift as it loads.
404 Errors
What they are: A 404 error is an HTTP status code that indicates that the server couldn’t find the requested web page. In other words, when a user tries to access a page that doesn’t exist on a website, the server responds with a 404 status code, and the user sees a “404 Not Found” error page. This error is a standard response when a server can’t locate the requested URL.
What to look for: You can discover any 404 errors in your Google Search Console dashboard and take care of any redirects to correct these. Once all redirects are complete, you should be good to go, but we recommend checking for 404 errors periodically, especially after optimization or creating new webpages.
Other Things to Consider
While these are the biggest elements, many other factors need to be addressed during an SEO health check. Other factors include:
- Mobile Usability: When building your website or a new page, it needs to be responsive on all screens (especially mobile), not just a laptop or desktop screen.
- Alt Text: Images require alt text for both SEO value and accessibility purposes. Keep alt text below 120 characters, and use keywords when applicable.
- Internal Linking: Your webpages should link to each other. For example, if you’re writing a blog about one of your services, link that service in a relevant paragraph to boost SEO value.
- Content Structure: You want your content to flow naturally and easily. Websites should be built to be easily navigated, no matter how big or small.
- Social Media Widgets: Social media is becoming more and more relevant in SEO. Help to boost your visibility and SEO value by including social media widgets on your website.
- Image Optimization: Large, bulky images can slow down a webpage and hurt its SEO. Make sure your images are high quality and ideally under 200 KB.
How Often Should I Conduct an SEO Audit?
How often you should conduct an SEO audit is dependent on your business’s goals and strategy. However, companies of all sizes tend to perform an audit either every quarter or every other quarter.
If you perform an audit too often, you could be wasting valuable time. But if you don’t perform an audit enough, your SEO health could be dwindling without you even knowing.
How Can I Track AI Overview Data through Google Search Console?
One of the biggest questions we’ve been getting recently is how to track AI Overview (AIO) rankings through Google Search Console. AI Overviews are still very new, so everyone in the marketing industry is trying to determine the best way to accurately measure these results.
What we do know is that Google Search Console now includes a dedicated Generative AI report within the Performance report. This report shows how your site performs when it appears in Google’s AI-powered search experiences.
However, one of the biggest limitations of this data is that GSC is currently only showing you how many impressions you received. That means you can see when your content was shown as part of an AI Overview, but you can’t tell whether users actually clicked your citation. GSC provides visibility into exposure, not engagement, so it’s important to interpret AI Overview performance accordingly.
Boost Your SEO Game with PHOS Creative
SEO can be an overwhelming process, and one that seems to be ever-changing. Luckily, you don’t have to do an SEO audit alone. At PHOS Creative, our SEO experts can do an audit of your website for you. The best part? We can implement the needed changes for you! Our team provides you with a detailed report of what we found, what takes top priority, and our plan to get you back on track. Get the rankings you’ve been looking for, and begin the conversation by getting in touch with our team today.
