SEO audit: a complete guide to the basics
We provide a set of SEO tools to help you understand your website from a search engine’s perspective. The Google Search Quality Rater Tool takes all of Google’s complex guidelines and puts them into customised, actionable steps you can follow to improve your content and rankings. The improvement checklist is your road map to fix your piece of content step by step. Demonstrating strong E-E-A-T is essential for ranking any piece of content in Google’s organic search results. Contrary to popular belief, duplicate content doesn’t result in a Google penalty, though it does force search crawlers to make a decision about which page should be indexed and ranked. Technical SEO is the collective term for all the factors and best practices that affect the ability of search crawlers and users to access your website content.
Shows you whether the site has any manual actions preventing it from ranking. If you’re not then grab a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt and follow our guide. And Core Web Vitals is actually part of a wider ranking signal called “Page Experience”. In 2021, Google’s Core Web Vitals became an official ranking factor.
An SEO audit is the process of analyzing a website to identify issues that affect its organic visibility in search engines like Google. All of these factors are compiled and organized into an audit document for consumption by the business owner or marketing manager. SEO audits can just be a list of issues but often includes a proposal from the SEO auditor to complete the work.
SEO Auditing
- While backlinks are only rarely included in a technical SEO audit, a lack of relevant backlinks is often the number one reason good, relevant content struggles to rank.
- Thousands of tiny variables like word count per page, number of sentences, keywords in sentences, and number of YouTube embeds can affect how your pages rank in search.
- It also detects problems behind the scenes, like inefficient caching that negatively affects page load times or missing canonical tags that impact your SEO.
- These include highly dynamic websites that may have thousands of web pages across many subdomains.
- SE Ranking is a comprehensive SEO platform that offers a range of tools to help businesses optimize their online presence.
- You’re unlikely to have a manual action unless you’ve done something drastically wrong.
If your site is slow, people are going to go to one of those faster sites, increasing your bounce rate and hurting your rankings in search results. For example, backlinks — or links to your site from other sites — are a key component of off-page SEO. When a site SEO Anomaly with a good reputation online includes a link to your site on one of their pages, they pass on some of the value of their site to yours. Your pages gain more value, and you have the potential for people to click the link on the other page and land on your website.
Check Your Organic Traffic
Google and other search engines work by using math & artificial intelligence. Our method for building links ensures we are solving the math equation while avoiding black hat strategies so you can rank for national and local terms. You can improve your SEO score by fixing the errors and issues that the PagesMeter SEO checker found on your website.
While quick wins get you started, long-term strategies are what solidify your site’s authority and visibility over time. These foundational efforts build trust with both users and search engines. Site audit tools have the ability to identify all the 404s within your site.
You would need to create an account, answer some questions about yourself, and choose to skip a trial in order to create the free audit report. There are a number of choices available, and HubSpot’s Website Grader is one of the most user-friendly. It quickly and automatically generates a report after entering the web address you want to have crawled along with an email address. An audit also helps me evaluate website content such as blogs, landing pages, product/service pages, among others. Now that I’ve covered a few different audits you can conduct to improve your website, let’s discuss the perks of an audit.
Google Search Console is a tool provided for free by Google to allow site owners to monitor traffic from Google to their website. It also allows you to check for some basics like; website speed, crawling and indexing errors, top linking sites, and even notifies you if your site has been hacked. In the second step of your SEO audit, you will be able to see what are the top performing pages of your website and the top search queries for each page. With this information, you can check the page to ensure that you are sufficiently targeting that query and topic on the page and satisfying the search’s intent in the best possible way. An SEO audit checks how well optimized your website is for search engines.