SEO audit checklist
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The first step before running SEO audit check list is to determine the short and long term priorities of your website. Whatever strategies or processes implemented may require a minimum of 3 months for search engine rankings to take place. That is why it is necessary to prepare a long term plan.
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Listing Near Me SEO Team provides few SEO audit checklist for our audiences:
Does your site load within few seconds?
There are many tools like images, videos that can have an impact on a website’s speed quality. So speed check is important to know what is slowing down a website. Check Website Speed & Quality Test, loading time or page speed. If your website is taking more than a few seconds to load then most visitors will quit your site. Google considers a website’s page loading speed an important factor for determining search engine ranking. There are few free tools that can measure a website’s speed test.
Do you have a Mobile-Friendly website?
Did you know that until March of 2023, 60.67% of all traffic comes from people using mobile devices? According to Exploding Topics, there are approx. 4.32 billion internet users who are active in mobile. That is why it is very important to make sure your website speed is fast and pages load properly on mobile devices. To check if your website is mobile friendly Test here.
Are you using Title Tag and Heading Tags effectively?
When we search key words in Google, many results appear on the meta description bar. Page visitors can see a title on each website and this title is the Title Tag.
To fully display these Title tags in SERP it should be within 60 characters in length. The Title Tag is the line just below the website URL. For search engine optimization, it is important to have enticing and creative Title tags. Title Tags should include one keyword or search phrase and avoid key word stuffing which is against Google’s ranking policies.
To optimize your website the heading tags (H1 to H6) should be under 70 characters. The page should have proper inclusion of heading tags. It is important to have the contents look rich with multiple heading tags so audiences find the site pages readable.
As you can see title tag is one of the most important factor of On-Page SEO. It is important how the search engine crawler views the heading tags using HTML source code. This method requires an SEO expert to determine if heading tags can be fully optimize the site. For example, each web page should have only one H1 tag and many websites lose their effectiveness by adding more than one H1 tag.
Do you have broken links like the 404 or redirect like 310, 302 pages?
Broken-link is a web-page that not available and the user are unable to access the page for various reasons and must be in the SEO audit checklist.
Broken links are pages that the website owner deletes it for a reason of their own. It causes the URL to change and the website owner did not remove it from Google Search Console.
404, 301 and 302 Redirect issues mostly occurs by trivial errors, such as incorrectly inputting the link while setting it up. These type of broken links has negative impact on Google’s search engine rankings.
Are you familiar about the Robots.Txt File?
Robots.txt is a file that tells search engine crawlers to not crawl certain pages or sections of a website. There are certain pages in a website that has personal or sensitive data which the website owner doesn’t want the Google search engine crawlers not to visit. These pages doesn’t require any indexing or ranking.
Checking your website pages for Duplicate Content or plagiarism is critical SEO audit checklist
In many cases a website owner lacks the skill to write contents or is reluctant to hire Content writers to write contents. Plagiarism should be important in SEO audit checklist. Rather they will just copy/paste contents from other sites not realizing that plagiarism or duplicate contents can hurt a website’s Google search engine rankings.
That is why it is a good idea to check for a site’s contents by doing an SEO audit. There are few sites that provide free duplicate checking features (up to certain number of searches which are free). If you are unsure if your site has duplicate contents or not, check out Plagiarism Detector to check your contents.
Duplicate contents not only harm the search engine ranking but also can face penalty by Google. It is a good idea to remove pages that have duplicate contents or fix them with new and unique contents.
Are you following the word count requirements on your pages?
Do you know the word count requirements per page or post of your website? According to Ahrefs, If you have up to 1000 words in your page then there is a great response from audience as viewers tend to quit the page after reading approximately 1000 words.
On the contrary anything less than 300 words says a lot about content sharing skills. Also longer word contents with backlinks shows better authority over the website quality and deserves better optimization and search engine rankings.
Did you include XML Sitemap on your website?
Traffic in a website comes in 2 ways. One is by Crawlers and other by online visitors or audiences. A Sitemap is a list of your website’s URLs. It acts as a roadmap to tell search engines what and where the contents are available based on the pages.
Do You Examine The Structure Of The Website on a frequent basis?
You must evaluate the site structure of your website which is an important SEO audit checklist. Site structure includes elements such as your site links, background colors, navigation menu and graphics. Make sure that the pages are loading correctly, double check if links are working and not getting error pages and make sure that the text in the contents are readable keeping in mind the color of the background.
Do you update your key words on a regular basis?
As technology changes every day so do trends in different niches and this is an important SEO audit checklist. It’s a smart decision to check and double-check your key word list to keep up with changing technology and trends.
Key words are the most important area for better search engine rankings and key words in contents play a significant role to impress the visitors or audiences. It is important to research key words and select those to represent your business and website contents.
It is not what you write but what contents your audiences are looking for. Google frowns on over-stuffing key words and may cause Google to levy penalties to punish a sites optimization and ranking factors.
Do you know the difference between Dwell and Bounce rate?
Dwell time is the actual length of a time that a visitor spends on a page before returning to the SERP.
Bounce rate on the other hand is when a visitor surfs an individual page on your website and quits without spending any time to review the contents. So it is important to have audiences with higher Dwell time as compared to audiences who leave the site early known as Bounce rate.
The more exciting and unique a content in a website page the higher the Dwell time and better chances of higher ranking in SERP.
Do you have a good Backlink strategy to grow organic traffic?
Backlinking which is an off-page SEO method is an important strategy to improve a site’s search engine ranking. It is more important to have backlinks that are of high quality and have high Domain Authority (DA) points.
It is therefore important to have your backlink from reliable sources. An SEO expert can do an in-depth analysis of backlink resources and help you optimize your website ranking in SERP.
An SEO audit can analyze the links and see whether it is coming from good quality backlinks. While high quality backlinks with high DA ratings can improve search engine rankings, backlinks from low quality or spammy sites can harm your SEO.
How effective is your Social Media strategy?
An off-page SEO includes social media strategy which is an important component for conducting an SEO audit. Google Social Engine considers social media presence to be an important factor in determining the visibility of sites on search results pages.
If you have links in social media like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc. and visitors from those platform clicks your link and it redirects to your website, that will give Google the impression that your site is popular and that will have a positive impact in Google’s algorithm and take improve optimization for search engine rankings.
Do you compare and analyze your site data with your competitors?
It is an important strategy to compare and asses your competitors by checking their DA rating. Check which key words your competitors are using who have first page ranking in Google’s search engine pages (SERP). This analysis will give you a competitive advantage with your SEO strategy for optimization.
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