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myclictadigital56 · 3 years

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How to Audit Your Website for Improved SEO and Conversions

What Is a Website Audit? A website audit is an examination of page performance prior to large-scale search engine optimization (SEO) or a website redesign. Auditing your website can determine whether or not it’s optimized to achieve your traffic goals, and if not, how you can improve it to increase performance.

When was the last time you gave your website a checkup?

How strong is your website? Grade it using HubSpot’s free Website Grader. If you’ve never before audited your website, it’s been a while since you have, or you’re planning a website redesign in the near future, use this post as your go-to website audit checklist to make sure your website is primed for maximum SEO and conversion results.

Keep in mind that in most cases, you’ll probably want to pair up with someone with a technical brain for this, whether that be someone in your in-house IT department or an outsourced party.

The Benefits of a Free Website Audit Before we dive into the things you should be keeping an eye out for as you’re auditing your website, let’s review some of the benefits of doing one. Here are some of the top benefits from a marketing perspective:

Website Performance Optimization Website audits usually evaluate a site not only for its content, but also for its technical performance.

As a result, an audit will give you a chance to inspect the robustness of your website’s technical framework and infrastructure, assess how friendly your website is to search engines, and determine how easy it is for users to navigate and intuitively find content on your website.

Search Engine Optimization By conducting a website audit, you’ll be able to identify any missed SEO opportunities and remedy any misguided or poorly executed SEO pitfalls (e.g. keyword stuffing, exact match anchor text links, etc.) throughout the content of your website.

image It will also allow you to re-focus your SEO efforts on users first and search engines second. This will safeguard you from constantly chasing changes to search ranking algorithms, meaning you won’t be applying misguided practices just to show up in the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Conversion Rate Optimization Thirdly, website audits enable you re-evaluate the effectiveness of your website in terms of lead generation and conversion. As a result, you’ll be able to spot any previously overlooked opportunities to convert visitors into leads so you can add relevant CTAs, as well as identify deficiencies in your landing pages so you can optimize them to boost conversions.

As you can see, assessing both the content and technical aspects of your website will open up opportunities to drastically improve the traffic and conversions your website generates.

The 4 Assessments to Make When Auditing Your Website Let’s talk about how to pursue each of the three benefits above, and what you should specifically be checking for in this four-part website audit.

But first, enter your website into HubSpot’s Website Grader – this will give you a general overview of your website’s strengths so you can gauge your focus on each of the assessments that follow in this article.

Homepage of HubSpot’s Website Grader, giving site owners a website audit of their domain’s strength

How’d you do? Got an idea of which website audit benefits you need the most? Here we go.

1. Website Performance Assessment In the first part of your website audit, you should be focusing on how users navigate your website – from your homepage, to blog posts, to landing pages, and any related content in between.

Make a list of the pages on your website and ask yourself the following questions to evaluate them for optimization opportunities:

Is Your Website Optimized for Maximum Usability? The more visitors you can attract to your website, the more opportunities you’ll have to generate leads and, ultimately, customers. But only if your website performs well.

As I’m sure you can imagine, just having a website does not guarantee results. As part of determining the overall efficiency of your website, your audit should check to make sure your site is designed with your visitors in mind. The design and overall navigability of your website should correspond with what a person would come to the site to seek out, such as more information on a business-related topic, resources, product/pricing information, testimonials, etc. This will largely depend on your individual business.

The main goal here is to make it easy for people to get to the information they’re looking for. As a result, you’ll likely see conversion rates improve on their own.

To audit your website for usability, consider the following:

Are all the main value propositions of our business easily accessible via our main navigations/menu items? Do we have a simple yet intuitive website design and page layout? Make sure pages aren’t too cluttered; littered with ads, CTAs, or links; or void of internal links altogether. Are your conversion paths and/or shopping cart or checkout processes intuitive? Are there a ton of distractions along the way that could be creating friction for your site visitors? You might also consider doing some user testing with members of your target audience to ensure you’re effectively surfacing the content they’re looking for, and that they find it easy to navigate to the parts of your website they’re interested in.

How Is Your Website’s Overall Speed? Are there excessive page sizes and/or long page load and server response times? Does your site go down frequently? Site speed can be impacted when image files are too large or HTML and CSS needs to be cleaned up, all of which can drastically improve your site speed.

Ultimately, fast-loading and optimized pages will lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions. To quickly check a web page’s load time, download MozBar, a toolbar by Moz that you can attach to your browser for simple page analysis every time you visit a website.

2. SEO Assessment Optimizing the performance of your website is crucial to holding onto visitors, but the above question isn’t the only one you should be asking. You should also audit the content you’re publishing to ensure it’s actually solving your visitors’ problems.

Is Your Website Content High Quality? As you evaluate your content for quality, think about it from your target audience’s perspective. Did this information leave me satisfied? Did it answer all of my questions? Does it give me all the resources relevant to this topic? Do I know what to do next?

Keep in mind quality content should appeal to the interests, needs, and problems of your buyer personas; be interesting and well-written, provide valuable, thorough and detailed information about a particular topic; and leave the reader with next steps (such as calls-to-action, links to resources, etc.).

If you’re still not sure if your content is high quality, evaluate it with this checklist:“ How to Tell if Your Marketing Content Is Actually Valuable.”

Is Your Website Search Engine Optimized? Make sure all your web pages are following on-page SEO best practices. To audit your content for on-page SEO, conduct a keyword analysis in which you do the following:

Consult your analytics to review keyword performance. Which keywords are giving you the biggest gains in traffic and leads? Assess how well you’re factoring keyword performance into your content strategy. How much relevant content are you adding to your website to target those keywords? Review basic on-page SEO elements like URLs, page titles, meta description, and copy. Make sure keywords are included where relevant. To help you conduct an on-page SEO audit of your content, read the “Step-by-Step Guide to Flawless On-Page SEO,” which also includes a free downloadable on-page SEO template to keep you on track.

3. Conversion Rate Assessment While high-quality, search engine optimized content is a great way to boost your traffic numbers, it’s what happens once those visitors are on your website that really counts. Unless of course, you don’t care about conversions (ha!).

Is Your Website Optimized for Lead Generation and Conversions? This is where optimized calls-to-action (CTAs), marketing offers, and landing pages play a major role in the performance of your website. Not only do they offer you opportunities to capture visitors’ information so you can follow up with leads, but they also keep your visitors engaged with your content and your brand.

To audit your website for maximum conversion potential, ask yourself the following questions:

How many marketing offers do I have in my content arsenal to gate behind landing pages? Do I have a variety of marketing offers that appeal to all my different buyer personas? Do I have any landing pages/conversion forms on my website to begin with? How optimized are those landing pages? Do I have conversion opportunities for visitors in varying stages of the funnel? Am I using calls-to-action effectively? Am I missing opportunities to include calls-to-action on various pages of my website? To learn more about CTA selection, check out our post, “ How to Select the Right CTA for Every Page on Your Website.”

4. Technical Assessment Once you’ve addressed the three primary goals of a website audit, it’s time to loop in a developer or someone from your IT department for a technical evaluation. You could also hire an outside agency – just be sure to do your homework first.

Keep in mind that there may be some carry-over from the three assessments above – website performance, SEO, and conversion rate. The technical evaluation, however, addresses all three to maximize the user experience (UX).

Here’s what you should be looking for in the technical assessment stage of your website audit …

Is Your Website Design Responsive? Does your website have a responsive design? Meaning, is it a mobile-friendly website? The usage of smartphones to access the internet is only growing. As of 2017, mobile devices account for half of all web page views worldwide. As a result, websites must be compatible with that growing demand.

For more on mobile compatibility, check out our “Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Mastering Mobile Marketing.”

Is Your Website Error Message Free? Are response code errors popping up all over your website where there shouldn’t be any? Calling out 302-, 404-, and 500-level response codes can be useful to tell users that something’s wrong.

However, having this happen is also an indication that someone isn’t cleaning up broken links and, as a result, leading users to dead ends. Find those error messages and clean up your broken links. Tools like Google’s Webmaster Tools or Xenu’s Link Sleuth can be very helpful for this.

Are Your Website URLs Optimized? Does your site have URLs of excessive length due to keyword stuffing? Do they contain session IDs and/or include tons of dynamic parameters? In some cases, these URLs are difficult for search engines to index and result in lower clickthrough rates from search results.

Learn more about SEO-friendly URL syntax practices in this helpful post from Search Engine Land.

Does Your Website Have Too Much Flash or JavaScript? Identify areas of your navigation that are entirely Flash or JavaScript. Search engines have challenges reading and accessing these, which could prevent your site from getting indexed.

Furthermore, these elements present problems from a usability perspective. Visitors are often looking for a very specific piece of information when visiting your site; if they have to sit through a 10-second visual introduction before they can find your hours of operation, you’re going to have a pretty frustrated visitor on your hands.

Is Your Site Structure Optimized for Search Engines? We already talked about site structure as it relates to accessing content and usability for users, but it’s also important to make sure your site structure is optimal for search engines. If pages on your site are not internally linked to from other pages on your site, those pages are less likely to be indexed.

Learn more about effective site structure for SEO in this Moz article.

Are You Defining How Your Web Pages Are Crawled and Indexed by Search Engines? This can be done through various methods that include everything from robots files and tags, to sitemaps. These measures are a way for you to guide search engines toward your website’s most useful content.

Robots Files or Tags The robots meta tag lets you utilize a granular, page-specific approach to controlling how an individual page should be indexed and served to users in search results. These tags should sit in the <head> section of a given page.

The robots.txt file, on the other hand, is a text file that allows you to specify how you would like your site to be crawled. Before crawling a website, search engine crawlers will generally request the robots.txt file from a server. Within the robots.txt file, you can include sections for specific (or all) crawlers with instructions (“directives”) that let them know which parts should or should not be crawled.

Public and XML Sitemaps Your website should also have public and XML Sitemap files. The public sitemap is one that users can access to review the pages of your site, like the index of a book.

The XML Sitemap is for search engines to review pages that get added to your site, all in one place. The usual location of a sitemap.xml file is www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml. The XML Sitemap is something every website should have; it offers an opportunity to tell Google and the other search engines what pages on your site you want to be crawled and indexed.

While search engines don’t guarantee they will abide by your sitemap, anecdotal evidence has proven time and time again that XML Sitemaps help provide insurance that your pages are found, and found faster – especially if your sitemap(s) dynamically update your new web pages.

Are You Defining Canonicalization of Content? The canonicalization of your website content is the final major technical consideration to make. To gain more control over how your URLs appear in search results, and to minimize issues related to duplicate content, it’s recommended that you pick a canonical (preferred) URL as the preferred version of the page.

You can indicate your preference to Google in a number of ways. One such way is to set the Canonical Tag (rel=“canonical”) in an HTTP header of a page. Be sure to have someone check that the Canonical Tag is properly implemented across the site by making sure it points to the correct page, and that every page doesn’t point to the homepage.

It’s important to establish an audit framework early on. Ask yourself questions ideally centered around gauging “How am I doing?” These questions may also include things like, “How does this compare to others, especially my competitors?”

Website audits aren’t easy, especially if you’re not totally tech-savvy. For additional resources, check out this article by Distilled, which highlights a list of tools to use as you conduct your technical audit; as well as this complete site audit checklist by SEER.

I also recommend passing the Google Webmaster’s Guide along to anyone implementing this kind of work.

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myclictadigital56 · 3 years

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The Definitive Guide to Running an SEO Website Audit (Part 1)

You know when you spend time and money working on your site to get it where you want it, but you’re still not seeing the traffic that you want?

Or when you’re always left wondering why your competitors have higher rankings than you do even though they have lower authority and poor UX?

The answer to your troubles is an SEO Free website audit. SEO audits can boost your site’s search engine rankings to attract more revenue, leads, and visitors.

Not sure where to start? Check out this definitive guide to running an SEO Free website audit to find out.

But first, we need to go over what an SEO audit is, exactly.

What is an SEO audit, anyway?You can think of an SEO Audit as an evaluation of a website that grades the site for its ability to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Audits are completed by checking each step on your audit list and finding any issues that need to be repaired or improved to boost your page’s search engine performance.

Think of it as a report card for your site’s “Googleability.” Your site might be wonderful, well-designed, and clean.

But if search engines can’t read your website, the pages you put hard work into may not ever see the light of day.

You can easily find your SEO score with an SEO checker.

pasted image 0 314But that’s not going to give you the insight that a full SEO audit can provide.

A full audit gives you an actionable plan that helps to:

Compare yourself to competitors and use your findings to your advantage.Identify what changes need to be made (and how to change them).Get a general overview of the SEO efficiency of your site.Uncover your website’s weaknesses and fix them.Set some expectations for your website’s future.You may not be able to improve every finding on your SEO audit all at once, but you can work on several factors over a period of time.

Here are the factors you should focus on during your SEO audit.

Factors to focus on in your auditBefore you can make any changes, you need a strategy that will work. There’s truly no limit to the things that you can improve with an SEO audit.

You can analyze keywords, improve technical aspects of your site, and more.

However, when people decide to run an SEO audit, they usually only care about one thing: improving rankings.

Everybody wants to be number one.

pasted image 0 296But getting to number one means focusing on a combination of several complex factors that all contribute to SEO in some way.

Before we dive into the specifics, you’ll want to boost technical SEO first.

Boost technical SEO firstThere are tons of things that you can check in your SEO audit with little-to-no effort if you get your hands on the right tools.

One of the most useful is Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

pasted image 0 270For a quick site check-up, this tool is all you need. Even the free version allows you to run tons of helpful checks.

To get started, run some quick Panda and Penguin checks.

Do some quick Panda & Penguin checks.

Panda and Penguin are algorithm updates created by Google. The goal of these algorithms is to serve higher-quality websites within SERPs.

Panda focuses on content and banners, while Penguin analyzes whether or not the links on your website are natural, logical links.

To do a quick check for Panda in your SEO audit, step back from your screen and take a good look at your website. Do you see a ton of banners?

Is your latest promotion or sale taking up every inch of the screen and covering up your content? Make sure there’s a balance. You don’t need to have five banners above the fold.

To do a Penguin check, use Majestic’s SEO tool to quickly check out your backlinks and find out if any questionable websites are linking back to your brand.

Screen Shot 2018 01 04 at 5.34.58 PMIf there are, go ahead and disavow those sites in your Google Search Console.

pasted image 0 302You can find more information on both Panda and Penguin here. Updates to these algorithms are ongoing and ever-changing.

Next, check out your page titles and beef them up a bit.

Improve page titles.

Page titles should hone in on a specific topic and contain some kind of branded phrase at the end, like a short website slogan or your site’s name.

Focus on checking and changing page titles by scanning them in Screaming Frog, like this:

pasted image 0 279Check this area for any missing page titles or duplicates. Add in “page title branding” where you can, which is as easy as adding your company name or your brand name to title pages.

Read more on page titles and branding here.

You’ll also need some high-quality meta descriptions.

Create good meta descriptions.

A meta description is a searcher’s invitation to your website.

A short, sweet, yet detailed meta description will attract more people to your site from search engine pages.

This is where you need to hook readers in so they’ll click over.

pasted image 0 299You can view and change all meta descriptions in Screaming Frog SEO Spider under the “Meta Description” tab.

pasted image 0 308Once you’re there, you can tell if any of your meta descriptions are duplicates pretty quickly. Most pages need to have a unique description, since every page is different.

The next step is to check out canonical URLs.

Don’t forget canonical URLs.

The canonical URL is the URL that lets Google (and you) know what the source of any given page is.

You can view canonical URLs by checking out the “Canonical Link Element 1” tab.

canonicals 600x167Check for any pages that are missing canonical URLs and find out whether the canonical URLs match up with the regular URLs for your pages.

Next you can use Screaming Frog to perform a complete crawl of your website. Here’s how.

Perform a site crawl to identify issuesCrawling your website gives you a bird’s eye view of any problems that might be lurking in the shadows.

For example, you may have set a few pages to “noindex,” which means that search engines can’t crawl your page.

That means you’re losing the opportunity to rank for that page (or any keywords you’ve put on it). You can’t build organic traffic to a page that you set to “noindex.”

A site crawl can help you find those pages.

There are also a few different page errors that you need to look out for.

For example, 404 errors occur when your page is ranking for a search term even though it doesn’t exist anymore due to a deletion or changed URL.

pasted image 0 316500 errors, on the other hand, are due to internal issues (usually a web server).

pasted image 0 324Screaming Frog can show you the status of your web pages, but it can also show the data of various SEO factors that might be hurting your rankings.

If you don’t want to use Screaming Frog, try Netpeak Spider. It’s a very similar tool at a lower price point.

pasted image 0 294After you’ve crawled your site, you need to focus on improving user experience (UX).

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myclictadigital56 · 3 years

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How to Perform a Technical SEO Site Audit in Just One Hour (End)

5. Check your site speed (10 minutes)People are impatient. Google knows this.

Your customers don’t want to wait around. The longer your page takes to load, the higher the chance your customer will bounce.

pasted image 0 54That’s why they are going to take into account site speed when assessing your rank. This change was recently announced and will begin in July 2018.

So how should you prepare?

You need to check your site speed. And Ubersuggest can help. Here’s how to get started:

Step #1: Enter Your URL and Click “Search”

Step #2: Click “Site Audit” in the Left Sidebar

Step #3: Scroll down to “Site Speed”

Ubersuggest displays loading time for both desktop and mobile devices. The results above show that my site is in the “excellent” range for both.

In addition to loading time, it also tests:

First Contentful PaintSpeed IndexTime to InteractiveFirst Meaningful PaintFirst CPU IdleEst. Input LatencyTake action if your website scores less than excellent or good.

You might need to optimize your images, minify JavaScript, leverage browser caching, or more.

Ubersuggest will outline just what you need to do to get better.

6. Leverage your analytics and compare site metrics (10 minutes)What you want to figure out here is whether your analytics service (e.g., Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, etc.) is reporting live metric data.

If it is, your code is installed correctly.

If not, your code is not installed correctly and needs to be fixed.

If you’re using Google Analytics, you want the tracker code to be placed above the header of each web page.

Screenshot 041218 114126 AMOnce you have an analytics service up and running, compare the metric data to the results of your earlier “site:rootdomain” search.

The number of pages showing in your metric data should be comparatively similar to the number of pages from the “site:rootdomain” search.

If not, certain pages aren’t properly accepting crawl requests.

Check your bounce rate

Google Analytics can be helpful when assessing your page’s bounce rate. You want your bounce rate to be low for it to impact your ranking positively.

A high bounce rate means that people aren’t finding what they are looking for on your site. This means you might have to go back and make sure the content is optimized for your audience.

You can check your bounce rate by logging into your Google Analytics account and clicking on Audiences > Overview.

Compare metrics with The MozBar

In addition, you can use Moz’s tool called The Mozbar to benchmark between pages.

The MozBar is a tool that gives you various SEO details of any web page or search engine results page.

The toolbar adds an overlay to your browser which has a number of functions.

For example, MozBar can be used to highlight different types of links that you view.

538cf87aa09941.68793286This is useful on its own, but it also lets you compare link metrics on or between pages.

It also comes with robust search tools to make your life easy.

With it, you can create custom searches by location, down to the city.

Page Authority is also supported by the MozBar.

It ranks each specific page from 1 to 100 in terms of how well it will rank on search engine results pages.

When doing an Free website audit , having a tool like this helps you quickly take the temperature of your site’s relationship with search engines.

The less guesswork you have to do, the better quality your SEO audit will be.

With version 3, you can even monitor social media activity.

538cfca503b921.177992277. Check your off-site SEO and perform a backlink audit (10 minutes)Backlinks are critical for SEO success.

This way, Google and other search engines will know that your page is particularly relevant and that other users will find it useful.

Remember that hyperlinks are not the only thing crawlers look for in off-site SEO.

Your site is also crawled for brand mentions. This is why it’s pivotal for you to pay attention to what’s happening both on and off your site.

Perform your backlink audit

Use a tool such as Ubersuggest to perform a backlink audit and assess the kind of backlinks you have going to your site.

Step #1: Enter Your URL and Click “Search”

Step #2: Click “Backlinks” in the Left Sidebar

Step #3: Review the Report

Backlink audits are helpful because:

You can assess your current link profile and see how it is affecting your site.You can identify areas where you can focus on getting more high-value links.You can assess your competitors’ number of backlinks and work to outperform them.But don’t just stop with your site’s backlink audit.

Your competitors were busy upping their own SEO capability while you were sleeping. Now, they rank above you on your most important search terms.

Ubersuggest can also help with this.

It allows you to see what keywords other sites are ranking for. It also shows what backlinks are going to those sites.

Basically, you want to explore your competitors’ backlinks and see how they compare to your own. Here’s how you do it:

Step #1: Enter Your Competitor’s URL and Click “Search”

Step #2: Click “Keywords” in the Left Sidebar

Step #3: Review the Results

This provides a clear overview of what your competitor’s site is ranking for. In addition to a list of keywords, you can review:

Volume – average number of monthly searches for the keywordPosition – position the URL is ranked in Google searchEstimated Visits – estimated monthly traffic the webpage gets for the keywordSD – estimated competition in organic search, the higher the number the more competitiveMake sure you’re engaging social media

Social media is a conduit for consistent backlinks and engagement. You can use it to support your SEO efforts.

pasted image 0 61You want to figure out which additional social media platforms are frequented by your target audience.

Simply put, social media can improve your SEO by:

Increasing the number of your backlinks. Those who discover your content on social media might be more likely to link to it.Increasing brand awareness, which can help with search queries including your brand’s name.Social media is an opportunity to increase traffic and mentions beyond what people are searching for on a search engine.

Social media saturation is also simpler than putting together a link-building campaign.

Use the Facebook Sharing Debugger to see what your web content looks like when shared on Facebook.

This tool also allows you to check your Open Graph tags.

ConclusionSearch engine optimizers debate the many different tools you could use to conduct an SEO audit.

But there’s one thing they all agree on: you need to audit your SEO performance to keep up.

Search engine algorithms, best practices, market trends, and competitors are always on the move.

Is your website up-to-date?

The one-hour SEO checklist helps you make those quick adjustments in between major SEO audits so that you can pivot your strategy quickly and address issues.

Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool to begin your audit with a crawl.

Eliminate duplicate content with Copyscape.

Make sure your website doesn’t have duplicate versions, search your own site to see what results appear, and conduct on-page SEO checks.

Monitor your site analytics through Google Analytics or download the MozBar for quick access to metrics.

Check your off-site SEO, scout the competition, and make sure you’re engaging social media platforms.

When you’re done, reassess your SEO strategy and build an encompassing brand strategy around it.

The more you fill your website and social media presence with valuable and well-organized content, the further you’ll push your most relevant search terms.

If you’re consistent, your SEO ranking will take off like never before.

What technical SEO elements do you review regularly?

#Free website audit

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myclictadigital56 · 3 years

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How to Perform a Technical SEO Site Audit in Just One Hour

Before we start, let’s consolidate the most important parts of the audit:

What are the key elements of an Free website audit ?There are three key factors to look at during an SEO audit:

Back-end factors such as hosting and indexingFront-end factors such as content, keywords, and metadataLink quality and outside referencesSometimes, you won’t have the time to address each pain point.

So, when deciding which audit insights are worth taking action on, I like to use the 80/20 rule.

The most important part of your site’s SEO is the part that your incoming traffic actually sees.

That’s all washed away if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, though.

With the introduction of the mobile-first index, you need to make sure you understand how your site performs on mobile to ensure proper placement on SERPs.

Due to 60% of all searches happening on mobile, Google has adjusted their algorithm to begin crawling on mobile sites.

pasted image 0 69Keeping this in mind (and checking to ensure your site is mobile-optimized) will help evaluate where you stand once you complete your one-hour mini-audit.

Here are the eight steps you need to take to perform your SEO site audit in less than an hour.

1. Begin your audit with a crawl (5 minutes)The most important part of the SEO audit is the crawl.

Before you do anything else, start a crawl of your website. You can use Ubersuggest to make it a simple process. Here’s how you do it:

Step #1: Enter Your URL and Click “Search”

Step #2: Click “Site Audit” in the Left Sidebar

Step #3: Let the Scan Run

Upon completion, you’re provided with the following:

Crawling is useful for identifying problems with your website, such as duplicate content, low word count, unlinked pagination pages, and excess redirects. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for a list of “Top SEO Issues.”

If you find anything here, click on it for more information and advice on how to fix it. For example, my website has 32 pages with a low word count.

I can then review these pages to determine if I need to add more content.

What does this all mean?

In short, it gives you a glimpse into how the Googlebot is crawling your site.

Manually search your site

By doing a few Google searches, you can quickly approximate how well your website is ranking.

How many of your pages appear in relevant search results?

Does your site appear first when you search for it by name?

Overall, where does your site appear in the results?

To figure out which pages are actually being crawled, you can use a “site:rootdomain” search to see what shows up.

Here’s an example of this concept in action.

Screenshot 041218 071802 AMMissing pages don’t automatically mean that your site is un-crawlable, but it’s useful to understand what’s happening behind the scenes.

Your website doesn’t need to be at the very top of your searches either. It will ideally show up in the middle of the first page or higher.

2. Make sure only one version of your site is browseable (5 minutes)Your site needs to work with all permutations of the same URL.

If your website has multiple “versions” of itself, you are sending search engines a mixed message about how to crawl your site.

Basically, the crawlers don’t know which one is the right one.

And if search engines don’t even know how to show your site to prospective traffic, your site’s SEO ranking will be negatively impacted.

This could be a mobile and desktop version warring with each other.

Or it could be the incongruity between a duplicate “https” version and a non-”https” version hurting its SEO ranking.

The impact of an HTTP vs. HTTPS on a site’s SEO has always been a hotly-contested debate in the SEO community.

Some sites that use AdSense for a revenue stream have seen a decrease in revenue after making the switch to HTTPS.

For example, Crunchify’s revenue decreased 10% after switching to an HTTPS site.

However, it seems that websites without SSL protection are being deprecated on Google SEO moving forward.

Google is even taking steps to make it more known which sites have SSL protection and which do not. Chrome is marking pages as “Not secure” to make it clearer.

pasted image 0 56With this recent change from Google, it seems you will need to make sure that your website only uses “https.”

3. Conduct on-page SEO checks (10 minutes)When evaluating your site and the results from your crawl, there are many things you need to check to ensure that your site is correctly optimized.

To start, look for duplicate pages, headers, and title tags.

If you’ve published a lot of content with similar themes, like me, some seemingly-unrelated content will show up in your crawl.

That’s okay. You’re looking for duplicates of the same content.

You can use a tool such as Copyscape to help assess potential SEO problems arising from duplicate content.

Screenshot 041218 112147 AMFrom there, closely examine a few key criteria that Google evaluates in their rankings.

Page Titles and Title Tags

A title tag is an HTML code that relays to search engines the title of the page. This information will be displayed on SERPs.

It looks something like this:

pasted image 0 59You’ll want to make sure these are relevant to the content found on your page. The content should also be positioned in a way that answers what your target audience is seeking.

The optimal length for title tags is between 56-60 characters.

You can use a pixel width checker to make sure that your title isn’t causing truncation.

Meta Descriptions

Although your meta description doesn’t affect your ranking, it still is incredibly important.

You should make sure your meta description draws in your customer. It should be compelling, engaging, and give a taste of what the user will find on the page.

pasted image 0 71Google recently expanded the limit for descriptions from 160 to 320, which now provides you with even more real estate to draw in a click.

Clear Hierarchy

You’ll want to make sure your content is organized, with a clear hierarchy on the page.

That way, it will be easy for Google to analyze your site and index it for search.

pasted image 0 66Keyword Placement

Every page on your site should have a focus keyword that is included in the first 100 words.

For example, in this post about social proof, it’s included twice in the first 100 words.

pasted image 0 72This helps Google understand what the post focuses on.

But don’t stop there.

There are plenty of other places that you should insert your keyword to impact your listing’s ranking.

While keyword stuffing will penalize you, you can still be strategic about where you place your keywords on the page.

pasted image 0 68Overall, on-page SEO checks are incredibly important, but they are only one part of your overarching SEO strategy.

4. Manage your internal and external links (10 minutes)I’ve mentioned that sites with logical hierarchies have improved SEO rankings.

That’s why it’s important to check your internal and external links.

Often web pages can be deleted or moved, which can result in broken links on your site.

But don’t worry. You don’t have to do this manually.

Integrity and Xenu Sleuth both are downloadable tools that can help you identify your broken links on your site. (Note: Integrity only works for Mac.)

While both tools are very easy to use and simple, I’ll use Integrity as an example.

Once you download it, add your URL in the text bar at the top of the page and click “Go.”

pasted image 0 73Then the tool will begin testing all the links found on your site and provide you with the results.

pasted image 0 75In the top-left corner, you can see a snapshot report outlining how many links were checked and how many were considered bad.

Depending on the size of your site and how many links you have, you might consider viewing the results by link, page, status, or flat view to help you comprehend the results.

You’ll want to go to your site and change any links marked in the red shading with the “404 not found” label. These can negatively impact your SEO.

Google does score clicks from internal and external links differently, although both have their purpose in improving your SEO.

#Free website audit

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myclictadigital56 · 3 years

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How much should an SEO audit cost?

What is an SEO Audit?

SEO AUDIT

An SEO audit is the process of analyzing how well your web presence relates to best practices - it is the first step to creating an implementation plan that will have measurable results.

The purpose of the audit is to identify as many foundational issues affecting organic search performance as possible. The Free seo audit will reveal:

Technical SEO issues

Website structure issues

On-page SEO issues

Potential off-site problems

User experience issues

Content gaps and opportunities

Competitive marketplace insights

An audit is a standard procedure that should occur on a regular basis – It is essentially a “health check” for your website.

What an SEO Audit Should Be:

First and foremost, an audit should be comprehensive. It should cover both structural and content components affecting your SEO visibility. It should provide a “big picture” view of what is happening in your current state. Any missing pieces could result in unnecessary or improper recommendations.

Your audit should be easy to understand. As a business owner, you should be able to connect the dots as to how SEO issues are affecting your online priorities, goals, or revenue. Any and all recommendations should clearly ladder up to your over-arching business objectives.

Finally, your SEO audit recommendations should be actionable. There should be a clear path to completion; prioritized with projected impact and effort associated with each recommendation. The output of any SEO audit should accurately convey an easy to follow roadmap.

What an SEO Audit Should Not Be:

An SEO audit should not be rushed. It simply takes time to uncover root causes of the issues affecting your online health. Depending on the size of your site, a proper audit can take anywhere from 2-6 weeks to complete. Due diligence is required when making major changes to any website, and an SEO specialist must conduct a thorough investigation to make accurate, impactful recommendations.

An SEO audit should not be “one size fits all”. While some technical elements are required for all websites, a situational analysis should be performed at the outset of an SEO audit to hone in on areas of focus for that site.

SEO Audit Document

What Is Analyzed in an SEO Audit:

While SEO audits may vary slightly, each one should analyze basic technical SEO “table stakes” such as sitemaps, server errors, and metadata. At a high level, an audit should cover off on accessibility, indexation, and optimization.

In an SEO audit at Three Deep, our experts analyze over 193 different SEO elements across the following categories:

Technical Audit

Indexation analysis

Status Codes

Redirects

Page Speed

URL Structure

Robots.txt

XML Sitemap

Canonical Tags

Duplication

Crawlability

Legacy Domain Issues

Off-page Analysis

Mobile SEO analysis

International SEO analysis

On-Page Audit

Site Content Structure

Keyword Research

Page Copy Theme Analysis

Keyword Use

Meta Data Analysis (Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Heading Tags)

Schema

User Experience

Images & Video

Internal Linking & HTML Sitemap

Server Log Audit

Crawl Budget Analysis

User Agent Analysis

image The information captured during the auditing process allows our team to make accurate, impactful recommendations for your specific website and situation.

What to Expect During and After an SEO Audit:

As previously mentioned, an SEO audit can take anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks. During this time an SEO specialist is analyzing and uncovering SEO opportunities on your website. However, bi-weekly or weekly check-ins keep you and your team in the loop as to the progress.

In any given website audit, there are a few low-hanging opportunities discovered. When these types of insights are unearthed, our team will pass them along right away. This provides an opportunity to recover visibility while the remainder of the audit is carried out.

After the audit has been completed, your team will be invited to a presentation in which your SEO specialist will talk through the findings and recommendations. The Three Deep SEO team will walk you and your team though the roadmap to completion so you know what to expect and when. In addition, you will receive a comprehensive analysis of your site’s health. All of these are customized to you and your specific situation.

Why It’s Important to Audit Your Website on a Regular Basis:

Your website is the “hub” of your online brand – so, it’s important to have regular checkups to ensure everything is in order. It’s also important to note that your website is a living digital property, it’s typically not stagnant for long periods of time. In any given year, content is added and/or removed from your site. It is for this reason that audits should occur on a regular basis. We recommend that websites be audited at a minimum of once per year. That allows your teams to fix critical issues as they arise.

There are other parts of SEO which you should pay attention to after your audit to make sure you stay competitive. After all, the technical foundation isn’t the end of the road for SEO success. It’s important to pay attention to your competition’s SEO activity, keep an eye on the newest search engine best practices, and maintain local SEO best practices if your business depends on customers visiting a physical address. All of these are elements of a successful SEO strategy and should be corollary to your audit and ongoing SEO maintenance.

#free seo audit

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