How to DIY Audit Your Website to Improve Your SEO
Your business website isn’t something you can create and leave running. It requires constant monitoring and frequent maintenance and updates to ensure it contains to function properly and helps meet your online marketing goals.
An SEO audit can diagnose any technical and performance issues with your site, as well as review your content for ways you can better include your keywords and improve your rankings. While some of the issues discovered by an audit are relatively quick fixes, others will take a little more time and effort to correct.
A professional SEO audit can provide you with a comprehensive list of issues and help you develop a strategy for prioritizing and fixing them. But if you’d rather audit your website yourself, we’ve put together a list of questions you need to ask to pinpoint some of the more common issues you may find with your site.
Is your site secured by an SSL certificate?
An SSL certificate provides authentication for your website and enables encrypted communication between a browser and server. Installing an SSL certificate on your site is a relatively easy way to boost your SEO and ensure that your visitors feel secure when using your site.
If you don’t have an SSL certificate, your users will a “Not Secure” label in their browser when they visit your site, which will likely make them think twice about continuing to browse.
To see if you have an SSL certificate installed, type https://[yourwebsite].ext into your browser. If your site loads properly, you have an SSL certificate installed. However, if you see a note that reads, “Your connection is not private,” you don’t have an SSL certificate installed or it isn’t installed properly.
Fortunately, this is an easy fix. Talk to your hosting company about how you can get an SSL certificate through them.
Do each of your pages have an SEO title and meta description?
When you perform a search on Google, each page is listed with a title and a description. Each of your pages should have both a title and a meta description that include keywords and describe exactly what visitors can expect to find on the page.
If you built your site with WordPress, you can easily add SEO titles and meta descriptions using the free Yoast SEO plugin. Your page title should be between 40 and 70 characters, while the description should be between 120 and 155 characters.
Is your site mobile-friendly?
As more and more people use their phones and tablets to browse the web, search engines have put more emphasis on mobile-friendly websites as an optimization factor. Having a functional mobile version of your website also provides a better experience for your users.
If your page isn’t mobile-friendly, you may want to consider switching to a responsive theme that will ensure your site displays and functions properly on all mobile devices.
Does your website load quickly?
If your site takes more than a few seconds to load, users are more likely to become frustrated and leave. You don’t want to drive traffic away, so it’s critical to make sure your site loads quickly.
Your website’s speed is also an important factor in optimization. A slower site or hindered performance can have a negative impact on your rankings.
Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that analyzes your site, scores your speed and provides recommendations to make your page load faster.
Do your pages have descriptive URLs?
You’ve probably seen URLs that include strings of numbers and letters that don’t have anything to do with the page. These URLs aren’t helpful for optimization or for human visitors to your site.
A descriptive URL includes keywords and lets both search engines and users know what they can expect to find on that webpage. Your URL should describe the content of the page with hyphens between words.
Does your content include relevant keywords?
While technical issues can get in the way of your website performing well, content issues can keep visitors from staying on your site and taking action. Using relevant keywords and phrases helps your site show up in organic search results, improving your chances of ranking higher and being found by your target audience.
Your content is more than just the words on the page. It also includes the titles of your images and the alt text of each image, which describes what the image includes for search engines, as well as users who may not be able to see images.
Do you use any duplicate content?
If you use the same content on more than one page of your website, Google considers this duplicate content and decides which page to display in search results. This can be frustrating if you’ve worked hard to optimize one page for SEO and that page doesn’t show up for your chosen keywords.
Be sure to check your site to ensure that you aren’t repeating content anywhere and that all your content is original and informative.
Simplify your optimization process with our free SEO audit! You can quickly get a comprehensive SEO audit that will diagnose any technical errors with your website, allowing you to jump straight to fixing them and ensuring your site functions smoothly.
Click here to get your FREE SEO Audit now!
