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How to Perform basic SEO Audit : A step-by-step Guide (For Beginners)
SEO Audit is similar to “SWOT” Analysis (Strength - Weakness - Opportunities - Threat). SEO Audit is important for making your website rank in the search engine with more visibility successfully.
Essential step for Small Businesses to reach a significant amount of visitors is to perform SEO Audit frequently .
Improve your Conversion rate, organic traffic, search ranking and potential customers through website audit.
Importance of an SEO Audit
- Checking your website’s health and fixing issues gains more traffic and sales.
- Helps in analyzing your website and identifies the scope of your website.
- Improves your conversion or number of people requesting for your products or services.
Simple steps for a beginner to do their own website audit:
Here we have covered the basic elements of SEO Audit in simple steps.
For In-depth Complete SEO Audit kindly read more.
CRAWLING & INDEXING
Crawling is nothing but the data acquired or read by Googlebot (Spider) which reads the page title, keywords, images and other pages linked to it.
Indexing is the immediate step after crawling which is adding the web pages that have been crawled to the Search engine in relevant categories. This is more in the style of a filing system in a library.
Whenever the user types any queries, the search engine displays the results in a relevancy order. This is what is called SERP ranking or Search Engine Position Ranks
How to Check whether your website is Indexed?
A simple step to check whether your website is indexed or not is just by typing Site:yourdomain.com
Example of Code Honchos indexed pages:
Troubleshooting: Crawling Errors
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
The above tag will not allow the GoogleBot to crawl the webpage and also remove it from the Google search index if present..This will eventually affect the organic traffic to that particular page 0.
The other 2 common errors are URL Errors & Site Errors, the best way to check them is through Google Search Console.
Reachability
Make sure your website is available for the users and search engines. If your site can’t be reached, then probably it might not exist.
One main reason is due to “ Robots.txt ”
A Robots.txt file is used to restrict the crawlers from finding the webpages of your site.
User-agent: * Disallow:/The above entry might restrict from accessing the entire website.
To know more about Robots Meta tag click here
PAGE SPEED & LOADING TIME
Checking Page Speed is yet another important SEO audit that should be in your Checklist. With the help of the Free Tools, you can check the speed of your website.
There are many free tools available to check the page speed:
SEO Free tools:Here we used GTmetrix to test our site
A complete report about our website performance along with Page speed and loading time.
Best ways to improve Page Speed is to:
- Clean unnecessary Codes and files.
- Image Compression & Optimization.
- Browser Caching.
- Fix HTTP requests.
- Code Optimization.
UX & MOBILE RESPONSIVE
For a website to be Mobile-Friendly they should be highly responsive and provide the best User Experience.
A well-maintained website with good UX is easily accessible by all the users. Gaining new visitors and engaging the existing users results in more website traffic and visibility.
A Simple Mobile-Friendly test helps you to fix any technical issues and also an overview of how your website looks on desktop and mobile.
We did a quick check through Search console:
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
NAP ( Name, Address, Phone Number)
Specifying NAP is best for local Business Ranking and also Google search Engine validates your website through the given information.
Incase of local citations, NAP would be more useful when you specify them in the local directory as well as international directory.
Adding your website information in the high authority sites helps you improve your Domain authority.
Google My Business
Even Though Google My Business is a part of Local SEO, use the GMB listings effectively to promote your Business.
Define your Business objectives in a simple way so that people can reach you easily. Use all the fields of GMB to stay ahead of the competition.
Google My Business helps you to increase the traffic and Branding becomes easier.
XML SITEMAP CHECK
Sitemap is an essential file which helps the search engine to crawl and understand your website easily.
Type your website/sitemap.xml in the search engine and find your sitemap. Also check whether you have included all the webpages that needs to get indexed in the sitemap.
REDIRECTS
Error pages may affect the ranking of your website and high bounce rate. People will leave your website the next moment the error pages shows up.
So, it is important to fix your 2xx,3xx, 4xx, 5xx errors in order to make your website look error free.Be it permanent or temporary redirect, proper usage of redirects will reduce the bounce rate and increase the user engagement rate.
Always check for your Page speed and make sure they don’t exceed more than 2 seconds to load.
IMAGE OPTIMIZATION
Be it a blog or website, a lot of images would have been included along with the content. In SEO, image optimization is nothing but compressing the file size without losing it’s quality.
The ultimate purpose for doing an Image Optimization is to rank on Google Image search engine.
Take a look at how to Optimize Images:
1. CHOOSE THE RIGHT NAME FOR THE IMAGES
Search engines crawls the text in your webpage and most important thing is they crawl the image file name too. Filename embedded with keyword will be helpful for the search engine to crawl.
One of the best ways for including the keyword is to add them in the Image Filename. Search Engine can crawl the images along with the alt attributes.
2. PROVIDE THE CORRECT ALT ATTRIBUTE
When you describe what your Image is all about, it would be helpful for both the search engine and visually imapired people. Optimizing your alt attribute helps you in improving your ranking.
SITE ARCHITECTURE
Keep your website navigation simple with good site architecture. Any website which provides the essential information within 2 clicks gains more conversion.
Create your site architecture in such a way that both your users and search engine can access it easily.
Menus should be placed at the right place so that it would be quickly accessible by the users.
Advantages of SEO Audit:- Overall Performance is measured.
- Issues are sorted.
- Understanding the site’s Strength & Weakness.
- Analyze competitor’s SEO Strategies.
- Improve sales and conversion.
CONCLUSION:
The prime purpose of doing an SEO audit check is to bring in more customers and have a bird’s eye view of how well your website is performing. Regular SEO Audit will help you in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your sites and you can fix the issues then and there. Need a quick SEO Audit consultation for your website? Reach us here.
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