Performing an SEO audit can be intimidating. You probably aren’t sure where to begin and which areas to check.
SEO analysis tools are worth exploring as they help you identify issues that may be hurting your organic rankings. Usually, they come with features that you might also find useful, such as a keyword research tool.
Start with a free trial to compare them and then decide later which one to use as you launch a complete SEO site analysis. Here are some steps to include in your SEO audit process to boost your Google rankings.
- Crawl your website. Use tools for a spider to analyse your website. This spider looks into various elements of your website, such as the images and the CSS and javascript resources. It’s up to you how you want your website to be crawled. You can modify this by checking or unchecking ‘spider’ in the configuration menu. Once you’re done, you can click ‘start’ to begin the site audit. How long this will take depends on the size of your domain.
- Look into indexing errors. Once the analysis is done, you’ll find indexing issues within your website, such as broken links, broken images, and duplicate content. By putting in your URL, a tool can already identify if something’s wrong SEO-wise. It’ll generate an SEO initial analysis report or the specific URLs that need fixing. Check the URLs one by one until all of them have been corrected. Once you re-analyse the URLs again, they shouldn’t show the same issues anymore.
- Fix content issues. There are several things that can go wrong with your website content. It can be duplicated or the text is too short. Sometimes, the content isn’t really copied or a duplicate, even if the audit says so. This can be due to the category pages being published by default. What you can do is to hide the category from the search results. For thin, content, meanwhile, you can either beef it up or delete if it doesn’t serve an important purpose. Pruning content is also a part of an SEO audit process. You don’t always have to have a new blog posted daily. But you need to make sure that each one matters.
- Check website speed. Ensuring that your website loads fast helps improve user experience. If the pages of your website take too long to load, users might think something’s wrong and move to your competitors instead. Check the load time of your website and also test its mobile-friendliness. It’s a worthwhile move as consumers also use their mobile phones to perform searches. Once you identify issues, immediately work with a website developer to fix them.
These are only some of the steps to include in your on-page SEO audit checklist. No matter how great your new posts are, they can be pulled down by your site’s overall structure.
Potential issues can be present not only in the content that’s visible to visitors. A huge chunk of it may be on your site’s back end. They should be fixed immediately to help increase your organic rankings.
