Less than 50% of small businesses invest any money in SEO. That means they’re happy to lose leads, clients, and customers by not increasing their web presence.
Thank goodness you know better! Because if you’re reading this, you’ve likely dedicated your time and money to SEO. You can see the positive differences it’s made to your website’s rankings and traffic.
But how do you know if your SEO strategy is working? Well, you can follow an SEO audit checklist. This will ensure you perform a comprehensive SEO audit and you don’t miss a single opportunity for improvement.
Lucky for you, this is a comprehensive SEO audit checklist and it includes both an on-page and a technical SEO audit. Follow this guide to check your website’s progress and figure out how to improve.
Check Keyword Rankings
As you might know, the foundation of any decent search engine optimization strategy is keywords. You should be doing keyword research using a keyword research tool for every piece of content you create.
But that does not 100% guarantee that you’ve chosen the right keyword. Around four to five months after you publish content, you can use an SEO audit tool that checks how well this keyword is working. Click to learn more about these types of tools.
Or, you can type your own keyword into a search engine like Google and see for yourself! Open your browser in incognito mode to see a more realistic view of where your content ranks. You can also check the “performance” tab in Google Search Console to find out the most popular keywords that visitors use to find your content.
Increase Site Speed
Checking your site speed is one of the most important tasks on an SEO audit checklist, but it’s often overlooked. Fixing your site speed could demand some quite techy solutions, but you don’t know until you check.
You can (and should) check your site speed through one of these speed testing tools:
- GTMetrix
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- WebPageTest
Most sites use a traffic light system to determine whether your site speed is reasonable or not. If it’s green, you likely don’t need to touch anything. But if it’s yellow or red, look at the tool’s improvement suggestions and make those changes.
These tips will help you improve your site speed if you’re not sure where to start:
- Switch to a hosting company with a server near most of your visitors
- Upload smaller images and other graphics to your website
- Enable lazy loading on your images
- Enable browser caching
- Remove render-blocking JavaScript
Consult a website speed expert to perform this SEO audit service if you are unsure what to change. This should go without saying, but don’t touch your website’s code if you don’t know what it means!
Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
Depending on your website’s niche and target audience, chances are that most users are visiting your site from a mobile device. Google indexes the mobile versions of websites now as well, not any other versions. So, you must focus on mobile optimization above anything else.
Navigate to the “Mobile Usability” tab in Google Search Console. Here, it will tell you how many URLs have an error and how many are okay. If any are not okay for mobile, it will list the reasons below so you need to make those changes.
You can also type a URL into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check if it’s optimized for mobile. But you can only test one URL at a time with this tool.
Perform a Competitor Analysis
It doesn’t matter how much time you spend on improving your website’s SEO if your competitors are doing it better. You will know who your main competitors are if you see the same websites pop up in the results pages when you search your own keywords.
If they appear higher in your search results, ask yourself why. Is their title more attention-grabbing? Is their meta description more enticing?
Then, click on their content. Are their comparative posts more informative than yours? Do they use more headings, and are their pictures better? Use this information to keep improving your own content so it ranks higher than theirs in search engines.
Refresh Old Content
Speaking of improving your content, you should always be updating and reposting your content so that it stays relevant. Google might like old URLs, but it loves new and up-to-date content. Plus, you’ve likely learned more about SEO in the time since you wrote the content and will be able to optimize it better.
Type your sitemap (often https://YOURSITE.com/sitemap_index.xml) into your URL bar and you should see a full list of your web pages. This list is in order of when you last updated them. So, start with the oldest one and work your way forwards.
Update these components of every webpage to improve your on-page SEO:
- Keyword (and secondary keywords)
- Titles (H2, H3, and H4 tags)
- Photographs and alt tags
- Meta descriptions
- Body of text
- Internal and external links
Check all the information is correct and still relevant, and if there is no way you can update the content, delete the page. You can redirect the URL back to your homepage or another relevant page using a redirect plugin. Check Google Search Console’s coverage tab to make sure you don’t have any 404 or other indexing errors.
Since you’ve likely created more content since the last time you updated the post, you will be able to add more internal links. And you should only link to authoritative external websites that are not broken.
Use This SEO Audit Checklist to Boost Your Traffic
Going through this SEO audit checklist shouldn’t take you a day or a week to complete. Nope, doing an SEO site audit should be a consistent task that you are always working on. Only then will you keep learning how you can make your site even more optimized and see returns on your investment in SEO.
Running a successful website demands many skills, a lot of hard work, and the right tech. Browse our lifestyle and technology articles for advice and guidance that will help you level up your knowledge of websites!
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