Your business is trustworthy if it has run a great website. According to the web creditability research proposed by the Stanford University, approximately 75% of users judge a business based on the quality of its websites.
Today, we find a rise in the competition of the online presence of the companies. Hence, it is most essential to find if your website functions optimally across all the above-mentioned criteria. Performing an SEO audit is the best solution for assessing a website in a holistic way. It answers:
- Condition of your blogs
- Existing problem in your website
- Advantages of your website
- Using SEO basics
- Increasing the traffic
You might think, what we, at Shrushti, are saying is complicated, but it is the simplest task. All you need to do is to follow the 15-step website audit we propose in this article.
How SEO and Marketing Strategy Go Hand-in-Hand
Although basic advice, you must look for this primary step towards successfully processing SEO page audit. Recently, we found that several new marketing platforms are holding better positions, and SEO and SEM stopped being the longer end of digital marketing. According to sources, companies spend approximately 60% of their Google Search budget on Amazon, while the spending over social media increased to about 13.8% of their marketing budget in 2018. Looking at the figures, we, at Shrushti, advice our users not to completely depend on SEO to perform 100% for your website while you spend only 30% of your money and energy on it. Hence, decide on your action before you implement your SEO strategy.
Have you ever wondered when you try to reach your customers? It is:
- Before they know your products and services interests them
- When they engage themselves in comparing and researching for alternatives
- While they search for dealers and suppliers
However, if you know what you need to focus on reaching your customers when they seek alternatives, the work gets easier. With more than 8.49 million visits a month from more than 25,000 unique landing pages, Zapier is a great example of dedication towards undertaking a specific step in the buyer’s cycle for their SEO strategy.
Tracking Google Analytics Code
Google Analytics helps you in tracking the performance of your website. All you need to do is add a bit of coding to the web pages you want to track. However, if the pages you want to track fail to have a tracking code, you cannot see the page’s statistics, which includes the timing on the page, number of visitors, and other such metrics that indicate its performance.
If you run tracking code for all the webpages, Google Analytics doubles as a full catalog on all the pages. Running the analytics will help you analyze the number of pages, the content of the pages, and location. If you have a tracking code directly embedded on your website by a third-party plug in, consider moving the code into Google Tag Manager. With the help of this free tag manager by Google, you can easily manage the dashboard, which contains all the tags and pixels (including GA) used for tracking.
Checking the Traffic Trends
In the opinion of the expert, Paul Koks, never forget to ask business questions while analyzing your client’s Google Analytics account for the first time. If you can set up the goals, do not forget to identify the traffic sources with high values or lead to the most conversations. Try segregating these users and learn in detail about their behavior on their site. Analyze whether the visitors belonging from the best converting traffic increases or reduces over time, the traffic sources that are worst for conversion, and the trends, both short-term and long-term, you can identify.
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Check for Mobile Compatibility
While checking for mobile compatibility of your website, consider using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. How would you do? It is simple, as you only need to enter a URL to check your website’s mobile friendliness. If the tool finds your website is not mobile-friendly, you will need to suggest your client update and make your website mobile-friendly on an urgent basis. The Google bot, which helps crawl the web indexes sites on a mobile browser, calls it “mobile-first indexing.”
Google found websites facing common SEO issues. A study conducted proved that 50% of webpages analyzed contain duplicate content and wrong indexing. 45% of them face broken images and alternative tag issues, and 35% of them face broken links. You can easily find the probable issues about indexing, such as occurrences of unnecessary pages and duplicate content, broken links, and other technical issues with spider tools like Screaming Frog.
Finding and Removing Low-Quality Content and Unnecessary Pages
Although it seems counter-intuitive, Google states that they neither value how frequently you post nor consider the content’s volume for ranking. Over the last few years, several company websites improved their search ranking by removing several unnecessary pages from the search results. The strategy famously known as Content Pruning led to the noteworthy increase in traffic by 44%.
Several company’s websites have more than 50% to 75% indexed pages than they require. However, if you delete these unnecessary or Zombie pages, you can get larger organic traffic. Remember, deleting the Zombie Pages, you give a better ranking and problem-free website.
Robots.txt and Robots Mega Tag
To have a clear picture of conducting the best technical SEO Audit, you need to know the working of the Robots.txt file. Google and other web spiders get information from Robots.txt for indexing the pages on your website so that your users can easily find them. With the file, you can also inform Google regarding your website’s sections that you will not like to crawl, which Google automatically indexes if something links to those pages.
Check the Speed of Your Website
Often people ask us the ways to check the loading speed of their website. You can easily go for a tool to analyze your loading speed. All you need to do is to type the URL, choose a location and run the test. The tool you choose will provide you the actual loading time, which needs to be below a couple of seconds.
However, your mileage might vary, and you need to fix the issues. Many of us have inquired if it is difficult to fix the issues. It would help if you kept in mind that fixing issues can be easy and budget-friendly and expensive and complicated, which completely depends on the issues.
Getting Rid of Data Errors
Opt for Structured Data Testing Tool by Google. All you need to do is enter the URL of your website or any site to check and click on Run Test. With the help of a tool, Google will evaluate the structured data and provide any errors. However, if the tool found any errors, make sure to fix them immediately.
Assessing User Experience
The step helps emphasize with the users and understand how successful your website is in fulfilling the needs of your users and analyzing whether they are informational, functional, and transactional. You can start by understanding the connection between your websites’ objectives and user’s objectives. While assessing the user experience, you also need to look at the following factors:
- Information architecture or website navigation
- Layout and design of the website
Analyze Keyword Ranking
Building great content is one of the most effective ways to increase your webpage rankings. Besides looking for keyword density, ascertain that you choose to use the correct keywords that your client needs to rank. The client might have formulated a set of target keywords, and you must know the keywords you used throughout your website with the help of the Keyword Density and Consistency Tool.
Performing a Competitor Analysis
You will receive the free SEO audit outcome in several metrics, and to put context around these metrics, you will need to benchmark them against the competitors. The audit reports include the capability to benchmark the websites against the competitors. All you need to do is insert the competitor URLs beforehand, and you can see the website checks run across your site and competitor sites. For automatic tracking, use tracking tools that would automatically monitor competitor websites and alert the competitors’ changes.
Improving Content and On-Page SEO
While the backlinks are the most important in SEO, you will get better results with the on-page alterations with less investment. A recent case study conducted on on-page improvements led to an increase in organic traffic by 32%. However, breaking the content and adding relevant headlines lead to an improvement by 12%. Google either directly chooses Readability as its ranking factor or is a usability thing, which indirectly influences the rankings because of the dwelling time and RankBrain.
Google remains consistent in providing messages to SEOs in 2021. Hence, you need to create clear and authoritative content, which people would love to read. Whether you choose language optimization or phrasing, your website content is sure to benefit from modern updates and SEO. Market Muse is the most beneficial tool that would help you create a balance between SEO concerns and the actual content present in your website. The tool analyzes all the pages, pinpointing those pages where the content requires some tweaks. The tool would suggest you the topics you might need to include in the pages and the post and achieve a better position in the SERPs.
Make sure that your On-Page SEO was on point, else it would become a tedious process. You need to have a 30 plus point checklist. You can check your On-Page SEO rankings on SEO Checker developed by Seobility, a free and best tool for On-page SEOs. Type your page’s URL and start checking.
Optimizing Internal Links and Its Structure
Most website developers forget about the internal links, which is crucial for the local SEO audit process. The internal links exist, and we seldom mention them. Instead, most of the time, the professionals stop working on them and keep worrying about the backlinks. It is a shame because optimizing internal links would improve the traffic up to 40%, even with less work.
Once you understand what your internal links look like, get to work on it. Brian Dean recommends a site architecture. When you structure your site like a flat pyramid, it becomes an easy hierarchy for understanding. A search engine spider or crawler does not require a person’s creative mind in understanding the important aspects.
Improving the Backlink Strategy
Backlinks form the backbone of any large-scale SEO effort, even in the present decade, and there lies no secret. Some researchers and professionals claim that up to 75% of SEO is off-page, while backlinks form one of the top-ranking factors. Google does not care about straight volume; rather, it cares if the link contains good content or fails to do so.
Analyzing the Results
However, do not implement the changes blindly and hope for better results. Try installing analytics and track your results, which is the most powerful and leads to a 13% improvement in conversion rate. SEO is no different to it, and if you fail to track what happened to the website after implementing the required changes, the operation will be blindfold.
Last but not least, do not forget to run your audits at regular intervals, preferably once a year.
Shrushti – A Professional SEO Audit Service Provider
Want to conduct a successful technical SEO audit and confused to choose a company? Worry not as we are here. At Shrushti, you get the best SEO audit service that follows these 15-step checklists trending for 2021 and beyond. With 12 years of expert and professional experience in improving rankings and advanced rank building, along with the best SEO consultation, we will help your team to grow your business at an optimum level.
