What you need to know about website audits to improve SEO
The Raven study found 22% of page titles were duplicates and 17% of meta descriptions were duplicate across sites crawled . Fixing these can improve your click-through rates and avoid confusing Google. • Missing or empty titles/descriptions – these need to be written. Each page should have a unique title (50-60 characters ideally) and meta description (~155 characters) that include key terms and entice clicks.
An SEO audit enables you to examine your site’s overall performance. While most SEO audit services are “one SEO Anomaly and done,” our iterative approach allows us to make shifts and changes as we progress toward the end goal of your website optimization. Keep in mind when we perform the SEO audits, we are often making iterative suggestions as we find the most problematic errors in our review. All these tools and more come together to help us understand your current SEO position – and your potential for the future.
In this SEO audit checklist, I’ll walk you through the essentials of a technical SEO audit, from theory to practice. By taking these 12 essential steps, you’ll be able to fine-tune your website so that it not only impresses search engines but also makes users happy. Now that you’ve verified that all of your pages can be indexed, it’s time to search for branded keywords, which is the fourth step of our SEO audit checklist.
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What’s really interesting is how the marketing tone sometimes overshadowed the educational content – a big red flag for Google when it comes to financial advice. It currently ranks 9th for the keyword “how to manage stress”. The Google Search Quality Rater Tool has a detailed evaluation component of the report to get into specific issues that need fixing.
It will then scan your entire website to collect the URLs of each page. The generator will then send a file directly to your email, which you can copy and upload to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. Copyscape is a free tool that can check for duplicate content. Enter your URL to see if a malicious website has copied your content or is pretending to be your brand. It also analyzes your website’s vitals, enabling you to identify areas for improvement. Looking to invest more in your SEO marketing strategy but don’t know where to start?
- This is necessary because the performance of your competitors impacts your chances of achieving higher rankings for related keywords.
- Many websites rush straight into link building, generating hundreds or even thousands of low-quality backlinks with exact-match anchor texts, before laying any SEO groundwork.
- Technical errors like ones related to performance, SEO, mobile, and security, can negatively impact a customers‘ experience on your website.
- This invaluable information enables you to make informed decisions, refine your SEO strategy, and improve your website’s overall performance.
- Goals and budgets are often a factor when it comes to which option a company chooses (using tools or hiring a consultant or agency).
Using a tool like Keywords Everywhere can help you find keywords, but you still need to integrate them. Writing meta descriptions and optimized title tags will help with SEO by encouraging users to click on your page and telling Google what your page is about. For example, it’s suggesting that we rewrite our list of the best keyword tools because it used to rank in the top three for its target keyword but now doesn’t even rank in the top 100.
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The Google Search Quality Rater Tool takes all of Google’s complex guidelines and puts them into customised, actionable steps you can follow to improve your content and rankings. The improvement checklist is your road map to fix your piece of content step by step. Demonstrating strong E-E-A-T is essential for ranking any piece of content in Google’s organic search results. Contrary to popular belief, duplicate content doesn’t result in a Google penalty, though it does force search crawlers to make a decision about which page should be indexed and ranked.
The public sitemap is one that users can access to review the pages of your site, like the index of a book. 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. These elements also present problems from a usability perspective. Visitors are often looking for a very specific piece of information when visiting your site.