Introduction
As an SEO, there’s nothing worse than telling your client that their site is not performing as well as it could be. If you’ve ever been in this situation, you know how frustrating it can be—but luckily, there are ways to audit your website and make sure everything is working properly. Here are our top tips for auditing your SEO and making sure everything is good to go:
Our SEO services company are not limited only to one website platform, we cover magento, wordpress, drupal, html site, shopify ,etc.
Audit your site structure
Site structure refers to the way your website is divided up. It’s important that you audit your site structure because it can impact how easy it is for users to find what they’re looking for on your website, and also how well search engines understand the content of your site.
The following are some things you should look out for when auditing the structure of your website:
- Is there a clear hierarchy?
- Are pages accessible from multiple entry points (like menus)?
- Does each page have a purpose or goal? If not, why not?
Remove duplicate content
Duplicate content is a problem for SEO if it’s not properly handled. To ensure that your website doesn’t get penalized for duplicate content, you need to make sure that the duplicate content on your site isn’t being indexed by search engines.
You can check this with Google’s Duplicate Content tool, which makes it easy to audit your website and see what pages contain duplicate content. The tool will tell you how many instances of each piece of duplicate content there are on the page, as well as providing suggestions for fixing the problem
Find and repair broken links
Broken links are a big problem for SEO as search engines do not like them. They can be hard to find, but once you know where to look, they’re fairly easy to fix.
The first step is to go through all the pages on your website and make sure that every link is working. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog or Xenu Link Sleuth (which is free) to crawl through all the pages on your site and report back broken links.
Once you have a list of broken links, it’s time to fix them—but how do you know which ones need fixing? Well, if there’s no obvious reason why the link isn’t working (e.g., maybe someone deleted an image), then it’s probably fine—if it’s not too old or anything like that. Otherwise just re-upload that resource file over again and test it out!
Review the site’s title and meta description tags
Meta description tags are the most important on-page SEO element. They appear in search results and give visitors an idea of what your website is about. This means that they are a great opportunity to convert visitors into leads, so you should spend some time making sure they’re engaging and informative.
Meta descriptions also have another use: they can help boost click-through rates (CTRs), which can affect where your site ranks on search results pages (SERPs).
They can be difficult to optimize because Google doesn’t tell us exactly how many characters we should use or what keywords are best for meta descriptions, but there are a few things we know for sure about meta descriptions:
- Meta descriptions must be unique for each page on your website; you cannot duplicate content across multiple pages because Google penalizes websites that do this by lowering their ranking in SERPs
- They must not exceed 160 characters; anything above 160 characters will be truncated by Google when displayed in SERP listings
- They should contain the main keyword from each page’s title tag
Check how many pages are getting indexed and what keywords they’re showing up for
It’s important to know how many pages are getting indexed and what keywords they’re ranking for. This will tell you if your site has a lot of content or is only updated intermittently, as well as help determine how much effort is being put into SEO at any given time.
You can find out this information with a tool like Google Search Console or Ahrefs (both free). The latter also allows you to see the number of backlinks your site has, so it’s a good idea to use them both together if possible.
To check search engine results on either tool:
- Go to the website in question and type [your keyword] into the search bar (e.g., “how do I get rid of cockroaches”).
- Click on “Top Pages” under “Search Analytics” on Search Console or “Pages” under “Performance” on Ahrefs; this will bring up all of the pages that rank for that specific term in Google’s database. Note which ones aren’t yours—these could be competing sites using similar keywords for their content!
Audit your internal links to make sure you have a solid linking strategy in place, with keywords as anchor text.
You should also check the internal linking structure of your website. Are you linking to your most important pages? Do you have links with relevant keywords as anchor text? If not, then consider adding some of these in order to make sure that search engines are able to find the content they’re looking for.
Make sure you have an XML sitemap set up, and that it’s submitted to Google and Bing.
An XML sitemap is a file that contains a list of all the URLs on your website. This includes images, pages, and any other content. The purpose of this file is to make it easier for Google and Bing to crawl your site.
Some popular XML sitemap generators include:
- Google Sitemaps
- Bing Webmaster Tools
Analyze your site’s robots.txt file to make sure indexing isn’t blocked inadvertently by anything in there.
The robots.txt file is a file on your website that tells search engine robots what they can and cannot index. It’s not uncommon for people to accidentally block parts of their website by mistake, so it’s a good idea to check whether this is happening on yours.
If you don’t know where the robots.txt file is hosted, Google has an amazing tool called Fetch as Google that will tell you exactly what the URL for it is and show you what content it contains: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/fetch-as-google
Ensure your images have alt-tags in place. This is a great way to target long-tail keywords that people might search for when looking for something specific.
Ensure your images have alt-tags in place. This is a great way to target long-tail keywords that people might search for when looking for something specific.
For example, if you own an amusement park and you want to rank for the phrase “amusement park”, you could add this image:
Alt-tag:Amusement Park
But what if someone wants to know about your boating rides? They may search for “boat rides” instead of “amusement park”. That’s ok! You can use the alt-tag on your boating ride photo to target them as well:
Alt-tag:Boat Rides
Use these tips to audit your SEO and make sure you’re good to go with SEO.
To audit your SEO, you need to make sure that you’re following best practices. Here are some tips to help you:
- Use these tips to audit your SEO and make sure you’re good to go with SEO.
- Make sure you have a solid linking strategy in place. The more outbound links you have, the better it is for search engine visibility. The problem is that most people don’t know how many external links they need for their site’s SEO strategy until after they’ve done all of their research. If this sounds like something that describes your situation, just keep reading! We’ll talk about how many external links are enough (or too many) in just a minute; but first…
- Make sure you have an XML sitemap set up. When someone visits one of your pages on their mobile device or uses voice search on their computer, it’s often difficult for them discover exactly what information is available on any given website without knowing where everything else might be located within its structure (which can be especially true if there aren’t any navigation menus). This process gets even harder when there’s no way for Googlebot / BingBot / AlexaBot etcetera etcetera ad infinitum (sorry!) access every part of each individual page because those robots only see what we tell them they may see – not necessarily all other content which could otherwise exist within our markup language.”
Conclusion
With these tips and tricks, you’re bound to have an SEO audit like a pro. Check out our other blog posts and learn more about SEO!