How to Do an SEO Audit to Boost Your Website Ranking by 10x? SEO isn’t a one-night game and requires patience and technique. Before starting an SEO campaign we need to performant an SEO audit to know where our website is lacking from an SEO perspective.
What is an SEO audit?
SEO audit helps you identify the errors and omissions that demote your website on a search engine. By rectifying such errors, you can give a massive boost to your website on google. It significantly improves your website’s health, making it attractive to the search engine and users.
You can conduct an SEO audit by using any online SEO audit tool. You need to put a URL there to get a list of errors on the respective website.
Hiring a professional to conduct an SEO audit on your website can cost you some money. The price of an audit depends on the size of your website. The audit cost for a large enterprise with a substantial website can be thousands of dollars.
While conducting an SEO audit, focus on the following factors:
Speed of website
The loading speed of a website plays a crucial role in its ranking. If a website takes too long to load, it puts off the user. It increases the bounce rate, resulting in a negative Google rating. You must ensure good load speeding of your website’s homepage and other key pages.
A few simple steps can improve the speed of a website. When you upload images of a large size, they slow down the website. You should upload pictures after compressing them with any online tool.
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
Additionally, hosting can also prove a critical factor. If you buy some cheap hosting, it reduces the speed of your website. So, you should acquire the services of an excellent host to maintain optimal website speed.
Mobile-friendliness
Your website needs to be mobile-friendly. It is more important than ever because most users access websites through mobile phones. If a website is not mobile responsive, it will lose significant traffic.
Optimizing your website’s format and content for mobile phone users ensures easy accessibility. It helps your website rank high on the search engine.
- A delay of just one second can result in a reduction of a 7% conversion rate for some websites.
Indexing problems
You need to identify the web pages that Google has not indexed. Otherwise, these pages will never appear in google search results. When you resolve indexing problems on your website, Google can see all of your web pages. It greatly helps in the ranking of your website.
On-page SEO
In on-page SEO, you optimize web pages to attract more organic traffic. It helps you rank high in google search results.
The quality of content plays a critical part. When you conduct on-page SEO, you optimize the content of web pages for specific keywords. You also optimize title tags, internal links, and URLs.
Backlinks are essential for the ranking of your website. More backlinks from websites of high domain authority rank your web pages on top of google search results. These backlinks also need to be relevant.
Irrelevant backlinking, even from a website of high domain authority, will not benefit your website.
Broken links
Broken links on your website dampen its ranking. It affects the user experience and damages your credibility. A broken link means that when a user clicks on that, it directs the user to a page where it finds nothing but an error message.
When a user lands on an irrelevant page, it also means a lost business opportunity. So, while conducting an SEO audit, you must spot these broken links on your website. Once you fix them, it gives a massive boost to website ranking on google.
Content Quality
Content is everything. Without impeccable content, you can never rank your website on google. If you fail to deliver value to the user, Google will not recognize you. All SEO strategies will go down the drain.
To improve the content, write short intros. Nobody has the patience to read a lengthy introduction. Also, write content in simple words and small paragraphs. Make things easier for your target audience.
Use graphics to make the content scannable. Attention-grabbing images can also hook your audience.
Duplicate and thin content
If you duplicate content on your website or steal content from other websites, it proves catastrophic for your website. Google only rank those websites that provide value to its users. Duplication of content makes no value addition.
Google also rank those websites higher that provide comprehensive information. Google likes rich content that covers a topic from all aspects.
So, when you conduct an SEO audit on your website, you must replace duplicate content with the original one. Also, add more value to existing content.
URL structure
The structure of URLs also plays a crucial role in the ranking of a website. You need to optimize the URLs for the users. Ideally, URLs need to be short and rich in keywords.
An optimized URL does not contain special characters or numbers. It should not have any useless information. Also, ensure that you use hyphens in place of spaces.
You can improve the user-friendliness of a URL by writing it in a more readable form.
