Fixing issues improves site speed, indexing, and mobile usability. A thorough SEO audit shows how well a site follows best practices. It highlights errors that prevents a website from reaching its full potential in search rankings. Doing an audit helps website owners create a plan for improvement, supporting long-term success in organic search results. Given you’re optimizing for search engines, it’s key to understand how much organic traffic you’re driving through them. Use Google’s Rich Results Test tool (free online) on a few pages to see if any schema is detected and if there are errors.
Get a Prioritized List of Issues and Recommendations
In the past, too much duplicate/common content would see your whole site slammed. But these days any penalty is likely to be a little more granular (i.e. they’ll drop a page, not your entire site). Generally (although not always), it’s best to have some indexable text content on a page. Canonical links are important for ensuring Google indexes the correct version of a webpage. And if you link internally to 3 other pages, each of them is going to get a third of the “link juice” that page has to pass on. I worked my way through the report until all the anchor text issues were fixed.
The Only 3 Content Management Systems You Need to Know
Even if the page seems fine and smooth visually, check its code anyway. Although the crooked code is not visible to users, Google can still see what’s under the hood. And if a search engine stumbles upon unreadable code, say goodbye to a decent loading speed and the first positions in the SERP. Search engines use titles and meta descriptions to form a search snippet. As the snippet is what users will see first, it greatly affects the organic click-through rate. From an SEO perspective, improperly configured redirects can also prevent search engine crawlers from indexing and ranking your pages.
The first step is to check whether your website is penalized by Google. Your rankings will be negatively affected if your website is under a manual or algorithmic penalty. To perform an SEO audit, you’ll need the help of Google Search Console and SEO audit tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, or others.
We’ll discuss a few of these areas in more detail throughout this guide. But performing a site crawl is a quick way to assess lots of aspects at once. Running a website crawl is the most efficient way to gather lots of useful data about every page of your website. We are a digital marketing agency that works with the fudamental goal of increasing profitability and profit to our clients’ investment in SEO Anomaly an ethical and conscious way. Conduct thorough assessments of both on-page and off-page factors, making note of potential improvements. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses — and careers.
Step #3: Improve Your On-Page SEO
- In this post, I’ll cover what a website audit is, the different types of audits, how to conduct an audit, and ways to use information from an audit to improve your SEO and conversions.
- Next, you need to make sure that your content is popular among readers and other bloggers.
- An SEO audit also looks at outside variables like backlinks and rival tactics to identify areas for improvement.
- I tested the same piece of content in both ChatGPT and Claude.
The paid version, known as the ‘Licensed’ version, is priced at £149.00 per year. “SEO Site Checkup will assign your site an overall letter grade and identify the most important fixes to help you improve.” The more profitable your project is, the more expensive each error costs. Google Search Console and Google Analytics collects valuable data about your website. You can upgrade or downgrade your plan at any time (including during the trial) within the ‘My Account’ area of your account.
That means you should look up phrases that include your brand name followed by your product or services. There are several files on your server — like .htaccess, robots.txt and sitemap.xml to name a few — that dictate how search engines access and index your content. Optimizing these files, so they are configured appropriately, can have a huge impact on your rankings (which is why we prioritize them as a part of our technical SEO audit services). It helps you find technical issues, track keyword rankings, and improve your content strategy. Understand your competitors and monitor your SEO progress with custom reports. Overusing exact match keywords or a lack of diversity in anchor text can trigger red flags for search engines and negatively affect your search rankings.
An optimized meta title can improve your organic rankings and increase the CTR for users. Each page should have a unique title that includes the topic (or keyword) that that page is meant to target. Performing an SEO audit regularly helps maintain your website’s health and search visibility. Systematically checking indexing, technical performance, on-page SEO, and backlinks, helps you to address any issues before they affect your rankings. Implementing practices makes sure your site remains competitive and well-optimized for search engines. On-page SEO elements like meta tags, headings, and internal links are essential for communicating the relevance of your content to search engines.
You can ask Google to recrawl your page using the URL Inspection Tool. Broken links disrupt the user experience because they don’t redirect to other pages, so it’s important to find, report, and repair them using your preferred site audit tool. To check your website’s mobile friendliness, use Google Lighthouse to run an audit for performance, accessibility, SEO, and progressive web apps (PWA).