Review your files for unused CSS or JavaScript that could inflate load times and unnecessarily increase file sizes. Investigate whether file compression, such as Gzip or Brotli, is enabled to compress assets served to users. Tools like Google Lighthouse can detect if compression is missing and identify files contributing to slow load times. Assess your site for missing canonical tags, non-indexable canonicals, or conflicting tags.
Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website
Don’t forget to monitor what people search for to inform your content strategy. Look for anchor text with generic phrases like “click here” and add these to a list of issues to fix after the audit. Anchor text should include relevant keywords or describe the linked page.
Use our SEO audit checklist to fix issues and improve your SEO. Sometimes “penalties” come in the form of unknowns, without manual actions, and teams are left to try and figure out what issues may be causing a loss in rankings. As a last resort, one strategy I personally have had success with is rebranding, changing the website domain, and relaunching the website.
Identify organic traffic drops and work out what caused them
- To prevent this from happening, you’ll want to use canonical link tags.
- For more in-depth insights, a technical SEO audit is the next step.
- Purchase a paid Site plan to publish, host, and unlock additional features.
- Intuitive experiences also signal to search engines that your site is valuable to users.
- There are advantages and disadvantages to handling image and content delivery regardless of which methods you choose.
Performing SEO audits at regularly intervals, like monthly or quarterly, will provide the most benefits because you’ll spot issues faster. Some SEO audit software, like Screaming Frog, allow you to schedule website audits. Auditing your website on an ongoing basis is key, regardless of how long you have been doing SEO on your website. Since websites are ever-changing, it’s easy to miss best practice elements that can help to move your results forward. Auditing can be a great way to catch these items, as well as find outdated practices that could be holding your website back. To get more backlinks, you should focus on publishing quality content that speaks to industry topics.
Here are the steps I follow when performing a thorough SEO audit. SEOptimer is easy to use and great for people starting out in SEO. SEO Anomaly Its a lot cheaper than other platforms like Moz and essentially fills all our needs.
Subheader tags, also known as H2-H6 tags, are used to provide proper structure in the content for the subtopics to make it more readable for users and search engine crawlers. Your website’s robots.txt file tells search crawlers which sections of the site should be crawled and which ones should be ignored. A misconfigured robots.txt file is a common issue for on-site search engine optimization which is a highly important SEO audit template item to analyze during the auditing process. Connect with him on LinkedIn or through the BruceClay.com website. This type of SEO refers to making sure the backend elements of a page are optimized for search crawlers.
When looking at the results of your website crawl, find any 404 pages that are linked from your content. Regardless of your business, industry or niche, a great process to have in your arsenal is mastering an SEO audit. Even if it’s a minimal, quick process or full-scale audit, the results are sure to pay off. Read on to learn more about how to perform an SEO audit in 9 steps. As a part of your SEO audit, verify search engines can crawl your website.
By understanding your requirements and comparing the strengths of these tools, you can ensure that you’re making the most informed decision for your website’s SEO strategy. Are the pages of your website loading quickly to create a good user experience? Most websites today load within a few seconds, and searchers are used to that. Around half of searchers won’t even wait for your site to load if it takes longer than three seconds. Your on-page SEO audit consists of site elements you can control and optimize, and a large portion of that is the content.