Introduction
If you're like me, you have a blog that was once a little baby website, but now it's growing into an adult-aged website and needs some serious attention. That's why I'm here to help! My name is Matt and I'm here to share everything I've learned about SEO during the last decade of running a business online. If you want to get your website in tip-top shape for search engines, then read on—you're in good hands.
Perform an SEO audit on your website to get a bird's eye view of what's working and what needs improvement.
An SEO audit is a deep dive into your website's traffic and performance. It can help you identify areas where additional improvements can be made, as well as determine how effective current efforts are.
An SEO audit is important because it gives you an unbiased view of how well your website's content performs in search results, both now and over time. This allows you to make informed decisions about what features need improvement or removal, and will help build a roadmap for future optimization efforts.
You should perform an SEO audit on your website every quarter at a minimum; however, if there are major changes happening within your business or industry that would significantly impact rankings (for example: merging with another company), then conducting one more frequently may be necessary.
Use tools like Moz, SEMrush, or Sitebulb to perform a technical SEO audit.
A technical SEO audit is an important part of any SEO strategy. It involves analyzing your website for a variety of issues that could be preventing it from ranking well in search engines. This post will outline how to perform a technical SEO audit, what to look for during this process, and why you should perform one regularly.
Before You Start: How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit
The following steps can help you prepare for the technical SEO audit process:
Gather information about your website’s current status in Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) and Bing Webmaster Tools. These tools will give you insight into problems with crawling or indexing that may affect rankings on those sites.
Determine which pages are most important by looking at traffic data from Google Analytics or other analytics tools like Chartbeat or Parsely (if they exist). You’ll want to focus on pages with high-quality backlinks because these links help strengthen your overall link profile and can improve rankings over time.
Look at the keywords that you rank for and make sure they align with your goals.
A keyword audit is still a good idea, even if you have an excellent understanding of what keywords you rank for. If you do a search for "SEO audit" in Google, the first result is a blog post about how to do an SEO audit. That post has over 1 million backlinks and ranks on the first page of Google for many related terms like "SEO audit checklist" and "SEO checklist." But if we dig deeper into its content, we can see that the blog post doesn't actually provide any information about how to conduct an SEO audit.
Instead of just looking at your current rankings in Google Search Console or Moz's Open Site Explorer (which gives only limited insights), consider using Keyword Planner or SEMrush as well as other tools that help identify potential new keywords that align with your business goals. You can also use tools like Ahrefs' Content Gap Analysis tool (formerly known as Link Research Tools) to find gaps between internal links and outgoing links on your site—a sign of poor user experience (UX).
Make sure all the pages on your website are linked together and no pages have been orphaned.
You don’t want to be that orphaned page on your own website. You need to be linked up with the rest of the gang, or else you could find yourself left out in the cold. This is because Google and other search engines rely on links as one of their primary signals for ranking content. If your site has a lot of orphaned pages, then it will have fewer links overall (and thus be less likely to rank well).
To avoid this problem in future, make sure each page has links back to at least two other pages on your site. It’s also a good idea to create an internal linking strategy so that all related information is connected together in meaningful ways within your content hub (such as blog posts).
Check your backlink profile and make sure you're getting authoritative links and not spammy ones.
You may be familiar with the idea of backlinks, or inbound links. If not, it's a simple concept. A backlink is simply any link to your website from another site. These links are helpful because they show that other people have found your content valuable and trustworthy enough to link their site to yours—but only if those links are coming from reputable sites with good reputations.
To check whether your backlink profile looks good, look at the chart below.
Fix any 404 errors immediately.
Now, let's say you're looking for the page titled "How to Fix a Broken Leg" and all of your links are working properly. You click on the link in your internal site search bar and...
BAM* you get a 404 error message.
What does this mean? It means that when someone searched for "how to fix my broken leg," we weren't able to find it! This is not good news if you care about search engine optimization (SEO). A 404 error means that either the URL was wrong and should be changed, or there's some kind of server issue going on with your website that prevents users from accessing certain pages. Either way, there's work to do before we can call our website "search-friendly."
Make sure your site is mobile friendly.
If you have ever visited a website on your phone and had to scroll up and down, left and right, in order to see an entire page of content, then you know what it’s like when a website is not mobile-friendly. Make sure your site is mobile friendly by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. If you get an unsatisfactory result, then make changes to your site so that it does meet mobile-friendly standards.
Mobile-friendly = better user experience = more traffic.
Address duplicate content issues on your site.
Duplicate content is a big no-no in SEO. It's not only punishable by Google, but it can also confuse users and cause them to bounce from your site because they think they're on a duplicate page.
If you have multiple pages that are using the same image, make sure you edit those images so they have different file names or use an alt tag (alt=“this is an image of _____). If you've got a blog entry that’s essentially just copied from another page, take the opportunity to revamp it with fresh content and maybe even add some new keywords. Some of the best sites out there focus on creating unique content for every page that makes sense for their audience, rather than just repeating things verbatim across multiple articles.
It's important to constantly keep an eye on your website's SEO health and make sure it's up to snuff!
It's important to continuously keep an eye on your website's SEO health. You don't want to just do one audit and then forget about it; you need to make sure that you're constantly checking in with your website and making changes as needed. An SEO audit is a good way of not only making sure that your site is up to snuff, but also a great way of keeping tabs on the general health of your site.
It's easy for things like broken links, slow loading times, and outdated information to slip through the cracks when we have so many other things going on in our lives. You don't want any of these issues popping up when someone visits or searches for content on your site!
This post is all about how you can keep an eye out for these kinds of issues and perform small tweaks so that visitors are getting exactly what they want from their experience with yours - whether it's finding an answer quickly or viewing something entertaining while they're waiting at home before heading out again later today."
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed this post! If you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the comments below.