What is SEO And Areas To Focus on SEO Audit
Businesses do an audit of their account to know where they stand. As an online business person, it’s paramount that you undertake an SEO audit so that you can know how healthy your website is in the eyes of search engines. When you do an audit you will also be able to know the necessary steps that you need to take to make your site more search engine friendly. To have an easy time auditing your site you need to focus on specific areas of your site. These areas include:
Indexed pages
Not all pages on your site are indexed by search engines. When pages aren’t indexed it means that they can’t appear in the search results thus no one can see them. This is disastrous to your business. To know the indexed pages you should head to the Google search bar and enter your domain then click on search. When you do this you will see all the pages that the search engine has already indexed.
If you want more details about your pages you can use tools such as Screaming frog and Scrutiny5. These tools will let you know the page factors that are preventing your site to rank high, the presence of duplicate information on the pages, and any other nitty-gritty things that you might be required to know.
On-page factors
If you have been around SEO for long enough you know that there are many on-page factors that determine the ranking of a site. To know the status of your site you should take your time to go through each of the factors:
Content: As you know content is king online. You should check the quality and uniqueness of the content on your site. The cool thing is that there are many tools such as SEO browser and Browser that you can use to easily find out the condition of your content. If there is any duplicate content you should remove or de-index the pages carrying the content.
When it comes to the length of the content, there is no hard and fast rule on how long it should be but search engines and people have been shown to have the affinity for long content. Professionals recommend that you ensure that your content is no less than 300 words.
You should also check whether your content has targeted keyword. For maximum SEO benefits, the keywords should appear in the first few paragraphs of your work. Also, confirm if the keywords are stuffed. If there are more keywords than they should be there, remove them to prevent your work being cited as spammy.
While you will be creating content in order to rank high, you shouldn’t write for search engines—you should write for people. You should find out whether the content is easy to read to all the people.
Links: Links are important for search engines and users. There are two types of links that you should have on your site: in and out links. In links are those that link to other pages on your site while out links are those that link to other sites. You should analyze them and ensure that they are linking to relevant sites and pages. For in links, ensure that the pages that you want to rank better have many links. For out links, ensure that they are linking to reputable high-quality sites. One of the major problems with links is getting broken. If any of your links have broken you should fix it immediately.
Images: Images make it easy for people to go through your content. They have also been found to have great influence on the speed of pages. You should check the images and ensure that they are properly optimized. This means that the filenames should be as descriptive as much as possible. They also should have the ALT tag. To increase the site speed, compress them as much as possible.
The structure of the site: Google and other search engines put a lot of weight on user experience. To give your users the best experience, have a properly designed website. One of the things that you should do is to ensure that your site is mobile friendly. Mobile friendliness is a ranking factor thus when you make your site mobile friendly you not only give your mobile users a great experience, you also have a higher ranking. All you need to do is give your site a responsive design.
In addition to this, you also need to ensure that your site has a clear content structure. Here you need to have content that is organized into categories and pages. Also remember to include contact, privacy policy, and about page that lets your users know more about you.
Off-site factors
Off-site factors are the factors that you don’t have control over but they have a great effect on your site. They include:
Backlinks: Backlinks are like recommendations. When you have a link from a reputable site, it means that you are trustworthy and this makes search engines give you a higher ranking. While the links are great, they can hurt you especially if you are having plenty of them from low-quality sites. You should analyze your backlink profile and find out the number of links that you have with high-quality and low-quality sites. You should also determine the percentage of do-followed and no-followed links.
The anchor text is also an important factor to consider. To prevent search engines from flagging the links from these anchor texts as unnatural ensure that the backlinks don’t use the same exact match anchor text.
Conclusion
A good SEO audit should not only help you identify the areas that need improvement, it also should include information on how to make the improvements thus making your site better. To make your work easy you should use audit tools. As rule of thumb, use reputable tools from reputable companies. After auditing your site, make the necessary adjustments. There is no point of doing an SEO audit for the sake of it.