We can audit your website and know the SEO factors and strategies of the pages ranking ahead of you. We also can recommend you immediate and long-term recommendations on how to optimize your website so that it ranks better and brings more traffic and sales.
Want to learn about the SEO audit checklists? Or about SEO audit online? You’re not alone. I’m pulling out my hair just thinking about it. We all want to rank better, but unfortunately, there are no “real” gurus that tell the truth about SEO.
There are many ways to do a search engine optimization audit, but there is a right and wrong way to do it. To be successful with an on-page SEO audit, you have to find the right balance of being thorough while at the same time being efficient. Today I’m going to take you through my general SEO checklist which you can use as part of your own audit.
Learn how to do an on-page SEO audit. Not only will it help you fix your website’s most important issues, but it will also give you actionable information about gaining more traffic and improving the overall user experience. We will start with a checklist of items that can influence your ranking. Sources for this article:
Remove Low-Quality Pages
Speaking of SEO audit:
Your job is not only to find the errors but also to fix them.
And you can start by removing the low-quality pages that provide no value to the readers.
So you may ask:
How to identify low-quality pages on my website?
It’s simple, just log in to your Google Analytics, and then jump to ‘Behavior >Site Content > All Pages
And go through the list…
You’ll see that there are pages with a high bounce rate and low user retention time:
These pages are low-quality because no one wants to read them, and people are not coming back.
To fix this, you can do two things:
- Either remove the pages
- Or Rewrite the content so that it provides value to users
It depends on what you want to do, just make it better in any way you can!
Crawl Your Website
As part of the process used to determine search engine rankings, search engines like Google will use a crawler (or “spider”) to essentially analyze the structure and current SEO setup of your site, looking for various elements that determine where you’ll rank for certain terms.
Tips – Google indexes and ranks javascript pages in two different waves days apart.
Therefore, if you really want to conduct an SEO audit, you’ll want to crawl your site yourself.
There is a wide range of tools that you can use to do this, some of which are paid and some of which are free. I recommend using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider to kick off your SEO audit (it’s free for the first 500 URLs and then £149/year after that).
Once you’ve signed up for an account, it’s time to select your crawl configuration. This is important, you need to configure your crawler to behave like the search engine you’re focused on (Googlebot, Bingbot, etc). You can select your user-agent by clicking on configuration > user agent in Screaming Frog (I’ve included a short gif below).
Next, you want to decide how the spider should behave. You can do this by selecting “spider” from the configuration menu in Screaming Frog. Do you want the spider to check images, CSS, JacaScript, Canonicals, etc? – I suggest allowing the spider to access all of the above (I will share my setup below!).
If you have a site that relies a lot on JavaScript (like SpyFu) you’d want to make sure the spider can render your pages correctly. To do that, click on the Rendering tab, and select JavaScript from the drop-down. You can also enable rendered page screenshots to ensure that your pages are rendering correctly.
When everything is finalized, enter your URL and click “Start” to get started. Depending on the size of your domain, this could take quite a while – so remember, patience is a virtue.
Website Speed
Not without a reason, I start my SEO audit checklist by improving page loading speed. This is one of the main Google ranking factors (confirmed by Google in 2010) that many people still tend to forget about. Remember that website speed affects not only SEO but UX as well, as users simply hate sites that load too slow.
There are many elements that have a significant impact on page loading speed – so once you discover what is slowing down your page load time, try to optimize it or ask your web developer for help, as this often requires more advanced knowledge.
The main elements that affect website speed:
- unoptimized images,
- uncompressed HTML, CSS and JavaScript,
- slow Server Response Time (SRT),
- long redirects chain.
How to check page loading speed?
If you want to improve page loading speed, then Google has prepared a custom tool called PageSpeed Insights that will indicate to you exactly which elements of your site need to be optimized to make pages faster.
Check if more than one version of your site is indexed
Your site has many versions like:
https://yoursite.com
http://www.yoursite.com
https://www.yoursite.com
For you and me these are pretty much the same websites.
Unfortunately,
Google will treat them as separate websites, and that’s not good at all.
So, how to fix this?
First, check if the other versions are being redirected to your homepage or not.
If not then, set up a 301 redirect from all those pages to your main page. That’s it.
Remove Excess / Low-Quality Content
While it seems counterintuitive, Google has said they don’t value the frequency of posting or volume of content as a ranking factor.
And it’s not just smoke and mirrors. Over the last few years, sites have managed to improve their search rankings by actually removing thousands of pages from search results. This strategy, sometimes called Content Pruning, can lead to significant traffic increases as big as 44%.
Just as with regular pruning, Content Pruning is a process where you go about removing the unnecessary, to maximize results.
Remove pages that serve little purpose and that don’t adequately answer the search queries of Google searches.
While you should consider removing problematic pages discovered with the SEO tool in the last step, tools often don’t pick up on the majority of problem pages. So you have to do some manual searches.
What better place to start than Google itself?
Check how many pages Google has indexed, and if the number is outrageous, start pruning.
If you are using a CMS, you should make a note of the types of pages that are unnecessarily indexed as well.
There might be a setting in the backend that you can change to fix the issues, rather than manually deleting or no-indexing hundreds or thousands of pages.
A tidy site with a good structure that highlights quality, cornerstone content is an important piece of the SEO puzzle in 2021.#
Mobile-Friendliness
Mobile SEO is no longer a distant future, it is the present. Google has officially confirmed that from March 2021 mobile versions will be indexed first, so you need to make sure your site is mobile-friendly. Millions of users around the world use mobiles to access web pages so if you don’t optimize your website for mobile devices, you will lose many opportunities for mobile traffic.
These elements have the best impact on whether a site is optimized for mobile devices:
- website speed,
- responsive design,
- voice search,
- metadata,
- dynamic serving.
How to check mobile-friendliness?
Google has introduced the Mobile-Friendly Test tool, where you will be able to quickly test if your site is mobile-friendly, and if not, it will indicate which elements should be improved.
What’s more, in Google Search Console, you will find the Coverage report – it will show you if your website has any mobile crawl issues (make sure you set the primary crawler as a smartphone).
Conclusion:
The on-page SEO audit has become one of the most valuable tools for website optimization. It is part of SEM, PPC, and SEO marketing campaigns that help a company grow in a virtual environment. The main reason why a site owner decides to run an on-page audit is to see where the problems in their site are and take action against them.
On Page SEO Audit is a very important part of SEO process. On-site optimization not only helps you to make your site search engine friendly but also improves the user experience.
Search Engine Optimization is a process through which search engine friendly web pages are developed. If your goal is to rank well for relevant search terms, you must spend time thinking about what shows up in search results. Your main focus should be creating pages that will “hook” visitors into reading your content.