In this lesson, Gerals takes you through how to do an SEO audit.
SEO audits are the bread and butter for SEOs as they offer a birds-eye view of site-wide issues that affect your website's SEO health and organic performance.
What are SEO audits?
SEO audits are reviews of your website's performance. For example, in an ecommerce website, this would mean looking at your product pages, blog, and homepage, either individually or collectively, depending on the size of your website.
What ranking factors are involved in SEO audits?
- Duplicated content - make sure you don't have the same content on multiple pages because it will prevent you from ranking higher on those terms.
- Technical ranking factors - often referred to as HTML markup. The most important thing to ensure is that your website is aligned with W3C standards. Also, does it use schema markup that ensures Google's bots can accurately crawl your site?
- Redirect chains - the fewer you have, the better. This means old links redirect readers to newer links with more relevant content. To ensure you have fewer redirect chains, you should use general URLs that can be updated instead of specific or timely ones with particular indicators that can't be easily updated. If you don't tell search engines that you've moved the link, they will penalize you for that. This is known as a redirect loop, and it's something you'll want to try to avoid altogether.
- User experience ranking factors - such as site speed (i.e., how long it takes to load). Pages that take a long time to load will generally experience high bounce rates, as viewers won't have the patience to wait. Another critical factor is broken links, or 404 errors.
- Indication ranking factors - this refers to your sitemap and if it complies with robots.xls industry standards.
How do you get started with your SEO site audit?
The best way to get started is to fix broken links and identify ways to increase speed (e.g., smaller images and videos) to improve your performance positively. It will help if you start by looking at your top-performing pages first and then moving on to other pages on your site.
