What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit evaluates how well your website is optimized for search engines. It identifies issues that could be negatively impacting your site's search engine rankings and uncovers opportunities for improvement.
For instance, consider a website that's challenging to navigate on a mobile device. Given that mobile-friendliness is a key Google ranking factor and mobile searches exceed desktop searches, such issues can significantly hinder a site's performance.
Starting Your SEO Audit: A Straightforward Guide
1. Making Sure Your Website Can Be Found and Read by Search Engines First, you need to make sure search engines can find and understand your website. Check your robots.txt file – it tells search engines which parts of your site they can look at. Also, make sure your sitemap is current and sent to search engines, so they know about all your pages. If there are any issues with search engines reading your site, you can find and fix them using tools like Google Search Console.
2. Ensuring Your Website is User-Friendly and Fast Next, focus on how easy it is for people to use your website. Make sure it's simple to navigate and makes sense in how it's organized. Your website also needs to work well on phones and tablets, not just computers. Plus, it should load quickly – you can check this with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and follow their tips to make your site faster.
3. Checking the Basics of Each Web Page Now, look at each page on your site. Each page should have a unique and clear title and a description that tells people what it's about. Make sure you use headings (like H1, H2) correctly to organize your content. The content should be interesting and useful, and your images should have descriptions (alt tags) and not be too big or slow to load.
4. Making Sure Your Content is On-Point Your content is important. Make sure you know what words people use to find each page (these are your keywords) and use them in your content. Look for any gaps in your content where you could add more useful information. Also, think about how your pages link to each other inside your site – this helps people and search engines find all your content.
5. Looking Beyond Your Website Your website's reputation is partly built on what other sites link to it. Use tools to see who's linking to you and make sure these are good-quality links. If you have a physical business location, make sure your local search details, like Google My Business, are up-to-date and accurate.
6. Getting Technical with Your Website Some technical things matter too. Check if your web addresses (URLs) are clear and describe what's on the page. Make sure you're not accidentally showing search engines multiple versions of the same page (this is what canonical tags are for). And see if you're using schema markup – it's code that helps search engines understand your content better.
7. Understanding How People Interact with Your Site Use tools to see what people do on your site. If they leave quickly or don't visit many pages, that might be a problem (this is what bounce rate and time on site are about). Also, check if people are doing what you want them to do on your site, like buying something or signing up (these are conversions).
8. Seeing How You Stack Up Against Competitors Look at what your competitors are doing with their SEO. Identify who they are and see what strategies they're using. Look for keywords they're using that you aren't – these might be opportunities for you.
9. Making a Plan to Improve Your SEO Finally, decide what needs the most attention and tackle those things first. Set clear goals for what you want to achieve with your SEO. Then, make a detailed plan for how to fix the issues you've found and how to make your site even better for search engines and users.
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