How to perform a comprehensive SEO website audit on my own?
Performing an SEO site audit is essential for many reasons. First of all, it gives you a clear picture of site current positions. Secondly, it identifies weak points and problematic areas of your site which you need to improve to get a higher ranking position. Moreover, a quality SEO website audit will keep your web source up-to-date with the latest digital marketing innovations and Google updates.
Definition of website SEO audit
An SEO audit is a complex of procedures which give you a better insight into your website performance and overall traffic. It helps webmasters to evaluate a site SEO-friendliness and input corresponding amendments. Moreover, it is a perfect way to improve website performance by tracking a success of a promotional campaign. By performing timely audits, you can understand a root of your ranking drops and different traffiс spikes. It is advisable to conduct audits at the beginning of the new quarter, and each time you do a website redesign.
- Components of a complex SEO website audit
To make sure that all your website optimization techniques are working in practice, you need to provide complex SEO audits on a regular basis. Let us discuss what the components of a comprehensive SEO audit to structure our website analysis in such a manner as to avoid any pitfalls and omissions are.
- Site structure
The first thing you should check is an XML sitemap existence. It is essential for your website ranking as it helps search crawlers to determine which URLs are placed on your site and parse your web source more quickly. Moreover, XML sitemap gives you a guarantee that you won’t be penalized by Google.
While improving website structure, it is advisable to edit a robots.txt file as it shows Google bots what pages of your site they can parse. Moreover, by editing this file, you can prevent crawling a duplicate content on your site and page you want to hide from Google. You can create robots.txt.file using Google free tool.
One more thing you need to do while making an audit of your website structure is to remove your old URLs from an index and check whether you have error 404 pages or not.
- Usability
The basic concept of your website usability is mobile-friendliness. That is why you need to make sure your website has a responsive design which is easily adaptable for any devices. Website mobile-friendliness is important Google ranking factor that has a direct influence on your conversion rate and website position on SERP. Use Google Mobile-Friendly Test to check whether you have a well-optimized web source or need some design improvements.
Another important ranking factor is web pages load speed. Users, as well as web crawlers, do not have a bit of patience for slow sites. It means that if your site loads slowly, you reduce your chances to rank high on Google and have regular customer flow. You can check a page loading time using Google Webmaster Tool.
- Errors and omissions
While providing an SEO website audit, make sure you eliminate all site errors and omissions that keep you from high Google positions. These failures may include broken links and duplicate content.
Broken links can negatively affect your website rankings and devastate your SEO efforts. That is why you need to check both internal and external broken links and remove them from your site.
Duplicate content is one more gross violation that can cause Google penalties. Make sure your content is unique, updated and free from plagiarism.
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