Are you looking for ways to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs)? If so, you’re in luck! SEO is an important aspect of website design and can help to increase traffic and conversion rates. In this article, we’ll explain what a website SEO audit is and give you a free checklist to help you get started.
What is a Website SEO Audit?
A website SEO audit is a process of assessing the quality of your website’s content, on-page optimization (including Title tags, meta descriptions, and keyword density), and site architecture. By reviewing your site’s data and making any necessary changes, you can improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Why Do I Need a Website SEO Audit?
There are several reasons why you might want to undertake a website SEO audit: to improve your ranking in Google, Yahoo!, and other major search engines; to attract more visitors from SERP listings; to increase conversion rates; and to improve brand awareness.
How Does Website SEO Affect My Rankings?
Good website optimization can help turbocharge your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). Higher rankings typically mean more visibility and Traffic. In addition, improved rankings can help to boost brand awareness and increase traffic from complementary websites.
How Do I Effectively Optimize My Site?
Begin by understanding what Google considers important when ranking a website. According to Google, key factors include site content, backlinks, and on-page optimization. Identify which areas of your website need improvement in order to improve your ranking. This could include content that is not relevant to your industry, duplicate or low quality content, or insufficient backlinks.
Make changes to your website content and backlink strategy based on the findings of your audit. For example, if you find that your site lacks relevant content, you may want to add more information about your products or services. If you find that your backlinks are not effective enough, you may want to invest in more high quality links.
Repeat the process of auditing your website every six months in order to keep up with changes in Google’s ranking algorithm.
Here are three reasons why a website SEO audit is essential
1. To make sure your website is easy to find and browse.
2. To identify any issues with your content or design that could be causing problems with SEO.
3. To make sure your website is displaying the most relevant keywords in the most effective way possible.
SEO Audit Check List
Website crawling and indexing are two essential tasks that need to be done in order to maintain a search engine friendly website. Website crawling is the process of systematically reading through a website and recording all the information that is found on it, including text, images, and links. Indexing is the process of making this information searchable so that it can be easily found by users.
XML Sitemap
A XML Sitemap is a document that helps search engines understand the structure of your website. It tells the engine where to find each article, video, and image on your site. By creating and maintaining a XML Sitemap, you can ensure that your site is easy to navigate for search engines.
There are several plugins (if you use WordPress) and several websites such as XML-Sitemaps or My Sitemap Generator that help create a sitemap for you.
If you have a XML sitemap created and properly configured, your site will appear higher in Google searches and other search engines. You need to ensure the sitemap is uploaded in your website directory.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text file that can be placed on a website to control the behavior of search engine robots. By default, most search engine robots ignore this file. However, there are some exceptions, including Googlebot and Bingbot.
If you wish to have your website indexed by Google or Bing, it is important to include a robots.txt file on your website. The file should contain the following directives:
Noindex: This directive tells the search engine not to index the page. This can be useful if you want to keep certain information off of the public web search index.
Index: This directive tells the search engine to index the page.
If you want to prevent certain types of search engines from crawling your website, you can use the following directives:
Disallow: This directive tells the search engine not to crawl the page.
Allow: This directive tells the search engine to crawl the page.
You can also use the nofollow attribute to tell the search engine not to include links on your page that point to pages that have a nofollow attribute.
XML Sitemap in Robots.txt
If you want your website to be included in Google’s search results, it’s important to include an XML sitemap in your robots.txt file. A properly formatted XML sitemap will tell Google which pages on your website should be indexed and ranked for search engine results.
Check out any websites XML Sitemap or Robots.txt by simply adding “/xmpsitemap or /robots.txt” to the domain address. For example, my domain is dhirenmulani.com, to check my sitemaps or robots.txt you simply type https://dhirenmulani.com/sitemap.xml and https://dhirenmulani.com/robots.txt
Mobile Friendly
One of the biggest advantages of having a website is that it can be accessed from any device – whether that’s a phone, a tablet, or a computer. This means that your website can be accessed by people who may not have access to a desktop or laptop. Unfortunately, not all websites are designed for mobile use.
When designing your website, make sure that it is mobile friendly. This means that your website will look and function the same on phones and tablets as it does on computers. There are many different ways to make your website mobile friendly, but the most important thing is to test it out on different devices.
To check if your website is mobile friendly, simply go to google search console and click on “Mobile Usability” on the left panel. Here you will be able to identify issues that impact the mobile friendliness.
On page SEO is the process of optimizing a website so that it appears higher up on search engine results pages (SERPs). This can be accomplished by ensuring that the website’s title, meta data, images, and content are all of high quality. By ranking higher on SERPs, a website can attract more visitors and generate more revenue.
Heading Tags – Hierarchy
When creating a website, it is important to include heading tags on all of the appropriate pages. Headings help organize your content and make it easy for readers to find the information they are looking for. There are a few different types of headings you can use on your website.
H1 Headings: These are the most important type of heading and should be used on the home page and any page that is the main focus of your website. H1 headings should be at the top of your page and should have a larger font size than other headings.
H2 Headings: This type of heading should be used for sub-headings under H1 headings. They should also have a smaller font size than H1 headings.
H3 Headings: These are used for additional sub-headings under H2 headings. They should also have a smaller font size than H2 headings.
This goes all the way to H6 and I’m sure you know how to use them by reading the examples above. When auditing the website you need to ensure that your content on a page or a post is properly structured to help the search engines as well as visitors better understand your content.
There can be several H2-H6 tags on your website but there should be just one H1 tag. Multiple H1 tags will just end up confusing both and results is poor rankings which in turn results in poor visibility.
Page Title & Meta Descriptions
Your page title is the H1 tag of that particular page. The H1 tag (Page Title) is automatically picked up by Google and displayed in the search results. This is the first bit of information that is visible along with the meta description to the potential visitors.
Ensure that Page Titles are under 60 characters and has the main keyword visible in itself. A page title more than 60 characters is often truncated on SERP.
A Meta Description is what appears just below the Page Title (H1). This is the 2nd most information that is visible to a prospect visitor on search engines.
Meta descriptions are a great way to get your website visitors to click through to your website from search engine results pages. They are also a great way to show your authority in the web marketing world. Meta descriptions are brief, 1-2 sentence descriptions of your website that appear above the search engine results when people type in key words related to your topic. Ensure meta descriptions are under 250 characters
ALT Text or ALT Tags – Images
An alt text is an alternative text accompanying a graphic image, intended to provide a description or explanation of the image when it is not displayed.
ALT text can be important for accessibility reasons. If your website includes images with alt texts, you should make sure that all images have corresponding alt texts. This way, people with vision impairments can still understand what’s going on in your photos.
Additionally, alt text can be helpful for SEO purposes. When people click on an image on your website, search engines may display information about the image in the search results (such as the filename and the URL of the source file). Including alt text in images will help Google index and display this information properly.
Status Codes
Status codes are a way of telling a web browser how to handle a request. The most common status code is 200, which means the request was successful. However, there are other status codes that indicate different things. For example, 404 means that the page couldn’t be found and 500 means that the server is experiencing an error.
There are many different status codes, but most of them fall into one of two categories: server-side and client-side. Server-side status codes are determined by the server on which the website is hosted. Client-side status codes are determined by the web browser on your computer.
There are six different status codes that a web server can return:
1xx – Informational
2xx – Successful
3xx – Redirection
4xx – Client Error
5xx – Server Error
6xx – Indeterminate
Website Accessibility – with and without “www”
Website accessibility is a big issue for many people. For some, the thought of having to use www instead of their default http:// address is enough to put them off. However, website accessibility is not just about using www; it’s about making sure that the site can be accessed by everyone, regardless of their computer or internet connection.
Google and several other search engines automatically canonicalize the URLs unless particularly specified. A canonicalized URL is the URL that is used by search engines to index and display your blog content. The canonical URL is the one that is “preferred” by search engines.
Broken Links
Broken links can significantly lower your site’s traffic and critically damage your online reputation. One of the most effective ways to identify broken links is to use Google Webmaster Tools. This free tool allows you to view all the pages on your website that are linking back to your home page (or any other page on your site). If you notice any broken links, you can troubleshoot and fix them using the provided tools.
There are several ways to fix a broken link.
1. You can use a 301 redirect to permanently change the URL of the page that contains the link so that it points to the new location.
2. You can also use a rel=canonical tag to make sure that all search engines index the old URL as well as the new URL.
3. You can add a canonical tag to the new page so that it is included in search engine results for related terms.
Conclusion
The checklist above is one of the most basic checklists on the internet to get you started with a website SEO audit. There are several other advances checklists available in case you’d like to dig deep (mostly if you are a developer). A SEO audit is the starting point of Search Engine Optimization and if done incorrectly, will result is minor or no improvements on SERP. I hope this helps!
Read More – All You Need To Know about SEO To Get Started in 2022
