Search engines like Bing and Google try to provide the most optimal search results for their users. As there are billions of pages on the internet, they must assess where your page or website fits into the grand scheme of this architecture. Because of this, entrepreneurs spend thousands on hiring professionals who help them optimize their sites. SEO is an ongoing process that requires frequent updates and continuous work. It’s not humanly possible to optimize every element of your site at once; only through continuous SEO audits can a site start to rank higher.
What Are SEO Audits?
An SEO audit is like scanning to check the status of your website’s health and performance in search engines. It analyzes both off-page and on-page factors, technical and also content-related elements. In simple words, they assess the weakness and strengths of a page or website. An entrepreneur uses the results of the SEO audit to devise their strategies so that they can improve their online presence, rankings, and traffic and avoid penalties. While entrepreneurs can conduct an SEO audit themselves, there can be an element of bias that could stop them from being self-critical. This is why a lot of businesses prefer to hire professional SEO services to perform SEO audits.
SEO Audits Can Be Confusing
Search engines like Google have algorithms that have hundreds of factors that determine the ranking of your website. Keeping track of every single one of them can be quite overwhelming, especially if you’re a beginner in SEO and still learning the ropes. Because of this, many people get lost in this complicated maze of an SEO audit and just give up. Fortunately, you only need to understand which ones of these factors are the most critical.
When conducting an SEO audit, here are some key areas you should focus on.
Mobile-Friendliness
This is one of the most critical things you should look at in an SEO audit because more people use their mobile phones to access the internet than ever before. If your web pages are not responsive, you will miss out on a lot of potential customers and revenue. Google gives more importance to sites that provide an optimal experience to mobile users.
Quality of Content
Your content must be unique, informative, and engaging to get traffic and keep the visitors interested. Pay more attention to quality rather than quantity in your content creation strategy. Also, make use of compelling visuals such as infographics and videos to supplement your written work.
Use meta descriptions that are appealing and compel the users to click on the link. Utilize good keyword-finding tools to identify them and then be spot on with keyword placements. Also, make sure the content is relevant and informational. If a person is looking for apples, but your site sells oranges, then there is no chance you will rank for “apples”. Don’t try to make it very self-promotional, and be creative with your Calls to Action. Try to post content as regularly as possible.
Duplicate Content
A key metric in technical SEO is duplicate content because it indicates how consistent and cohesive your website’s content and architecture are. If a site has identical or near-identical pages scattered across the site, it becomes hard for Google to understand which page is more important. This error can lead to your site being penalized by Google.
Page Speed
In this fast-moving world where time is money, no one likes to wait, and this includes search engines. User experience is key—websites that take forever to load have high bounce rates as users abandon that site for one that is faster to load. Google uses data on metrics of user behavior like click-through rates and bounce rates to judge a website’s importance.
Domain Authority
Google’s PageRank algorithm, named after the company’s co-founder Larry Page, measures something called “authority”. It’s a measure of how important and trustworthy a given page is. The higher the authority of your website is, the higher Google will rank it. It does so by accessing the quality of the links to the website. A simple way to increase your authority is through guest blogging on sites with high domain authority and getting them to link back to your site. You can check the domain authority of a website for free here.
You can hire SEO services to help match you with sites with high domain authorities.
Site security
In the era of rampant cybercrime, the security of a website is critical for SEO rankings. Hackers are after customers’ sensitive data, which is why site owners must take the necessary precautions to protect their websites. One of the simplest ways to boost website security is to have an SSL certificate. Also, only work with a web hosting company that has a proven record of providing quality services.
Crawlability
Making your site crawlable for Googlebot to crawl is important for SEO ranking. One of the best ways to make your website more crawlable and help you improve your SEO is simply submitting your sitemap to Google and putting more links to the most important pages on your site.
Joseph Dyson is a highly experienced marketer working for a reputable SEO management services provider in San Diego, Search Berg. Through their SEO service for websites, they help small businesses improve their search engine rankings.