An SEO audit is when we will go through your website and look at its performance for search engines. We will want to make sure the website is optimized to rank high in Google searches and surpass your competitors.
Last year, an average of 71% of searches resulted in an organic click. While Pay-per-click campaigns can be powerful, they aren’t as effective as organic rankings. I should also mention that while getting organic takes more time, it’s a lot cheaper.
SEO has a lot of moving parts, but two main ones are onpage and offpage. Offpage SEO includes your domain authority based on links and social proof. Onpage is how your website is optimized for particular keywords and phrases. Onpage SEO has a lot of factors making it a continuous and never-ending journey to keep your website fully optimized and performing well organically.
Unfortunately, Google doesn’t give away all of their algorithm secrets, leaving experts to conduct tests, look at studies and stay up-to-date on the current trends to know the best ways to optimize websites for rankings. Some factors are clear as day that they make an impact. Others can be somewhat controversial and depend on the person as far as how much they believe a certain factor is weighted by Google.
Every SEO audit can be different. Since no one is 100 percent sure It might depend on the SEO expert to decide what they think is most important based on their experience. These are the things I find important to look at when doing an SEO audit. These different factors can make a huge difference when they get cleaned up and optimized properly. I believe these are good places to start when trying to get your website to rank higher in Google searches.
URL structure and internal links
URL structure and internal links tell the search engine a story about your website. You want your website to be mapped out in a way that it is easy to find your content and tells a story to the search engines. One common rule is to not have any content deeper than 3 levels.
For example, a page of a certain juice recipe could be found by going through
Home > Recipes > Juice. You don’t want content to be too deeply hidden in your site, so it’s best to keep it organized and the site structure solid and light.
Content Analysis
We must make sure your content is optimized in your SEO audit. If you have a list of keywords you would like to rank for, we could see if it’s optimized properly for those. If you don’t, we will do keyword research in the future once we have an idea of where your website is now. For now, we will look for thin or duplicate content as well. All content on your website must be unique and valuable.
Image Analysis
Images are a big part of your website. If you have had a website for awhile, there is a good chance there is many. It’s important we make sure these images are optimized by looking at their size, load time and alt tags.
Alt tags are especially important since search engines can’t “read” images. They rely on alt tags to describe the image to them it knows what the image is about. We also want to make sure ALL pages on the site we wish to rank have good quality images.
Header tags
Header tags help the search engine know what the page is about. If your page titles are not properly coded to let Google know it is the header of the page, this could cause a lot of issues. This is especially true since these coding mistakes tend to be on every page on the website.
Page speed
Users love fast websites. If your website loads very slowly, it is likely that users will bounce right off your website and go somewhere else where they can get what they’re looking for faster. On your onpage seo audit, we will run a pagespeed test and find what needs to be done to ensure your website loads the fastest possible.
Index status
There is a way to not index your website. You can tell Google not to crawl it with certain settings and sometimes it can be the default setting for certain content management systems. If your website is coded for this, it means it will block Google from seeing or knowing your website exists. This is a sure way your site will never rank. We want to be sure this is not the case.
Metadata
Metadata is a language attached to each website that helps Google determine what the content on the page is about. An SEO audit should always look at the titles and meta descriptions on each page. It is common for pages to have none or pages to not have unique descriptions for each page. We will want to look at these and make a plan for optimization if needed.
Onpage SEO is a major ranking factor for Google. If your onpage optimization is not done well, there is a low probability you will rank.
I highly recommend you allowing a professional complete your SEO audit. It is a one-time cost that could (and should) completely turn your website around and give you an idea of what needs to happen to get your website ranking. Once you have an audit finished, if you have the time, you could use one-on-one training or immerse yourself in free resources to learn how to optimize your website.
While you still need to look at crawl and metadata issues, one quick way you could take a look at how well your pages are optimized, download the yoast plugin on WordPress to help guide you through basic onpage SEO optimization.
If you need help with an SEO audit, visit my pricing page to see if I can help. If you already have an audit finished, but need help with your next steps, I offer one-on-one training to help guide you through optimizing your website on your own.
In the meantime, stay tuned for more SEO content coming these next couple of months!
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