What is and SEO Audit?
A comprehensive SEO Audit - What is an SEO Audit? SEO for Tradies?
Involves a detailed evaluation of your website. The main aim is to pinpoint aspects of your site that can be enhanced to boost its ranking in Google search results. The ultimate goal is to optimise your website for SEO and enhance organic search traffic. There are a few factors stated below to take into consideration.
1. What factors are impacting this website's ability to rank on the first page of Google?
2. Has the website made sufficient efforts to secure a first-page ranking within its specific niche?
3. Is the website aligned with Google's standards and deemed search engine friendly?
You'll find the most important and common SEO factors that affect a website's ability to rank on Google. Below you will find critical and prevalent SEO factors that will influence your potential to rank on Google.
To stay organised and ahead of the social and digital game this blog is sectioned off into 3 sections by topic:
On-Page SEO
Traffic Diagnosis (blog to follow)
Technical SEO (blog to follow)
ON-PAGE SEO
On-Page SEO factors are the first things to audit because they have a massive impact on rankings. On-Page SEO looks into keyword targeting, content quality and optimising the HTML elements on the page. This is what we audit to find quick wins that can push up rankings and traffic, improve CTR with a couple of changes. Low effort, high impact. You will need to install SEO Ability and crawl your website or use a site auditing tool.
Title Tag
The title tag holds significant ranking weight in on-page SEO and is the most keyword-sensitive. It plays a crucial role in helping Google comprehend the page's topic and is displayed prominently on Google search results, influencing the click-through rate (CTR).
Title Tag Checkpoints:
- Does the title accurately summarize the page content?
- Avoid default titles like "Untitled" or "New title 1".
- Ensure each page on the site has a unique page title.
- Keep the title tag within 70 characters in length to avoid truncation in search results.
- Include a core keyword with search volume in the title, preferably near the beginning.
- Avoid keyword stuffing, as it is not helpful for users or search engines and can make your result look spammy.
Meta Description
The description meta tag informs Google about the content of your page. When your page appears in Google Search Results (SERPs), the meta description is displayed along with the title and URL of the ranking pages.
Checkpoints for Meta Description:
- Is there a meta description for each page?
Are there pages with an empty meta description tag?
- Does the meta description summarise the page content?
Is it descriptive? (Example of an under-optimised meta description: "Beautiful nails begin today.")
- Does the meta description include relevant information that would be helpful for people searching?
- Does the meta description contain the core keyword and search queries your audience may use to find this page? (Words that match the query will be bolded) - - Does the meta description contain a powerful call-to-action to entice click-throughs?
- Does the meta description tag keep within 155 characters?
Heading Tags
Using heading tags such as H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 in your page or blog post content helps break up text and improves readability. Google indexes on-page anchors, content, and markup, and search engines analyse the HTML structural elements when ranking pages.
Additionally, headings present an opportunity to create anchor links for Google to index and display in search results. Personally, I have utilised headings as anchor links in my long-form pillar blog posts, which has contributed to my articles showing up for in-snippet links, enhancing their search appearance and ultimately boosting click-through rate and driving more traffic to the posts!
Checkpoints for Heading Tags:
- Are headings h1, h2 - h6 used on the page?
- Is there only one h1 tag for each page?
Google may be confused if it detects multiple <h1> tags on the page.
- Is there an opportunity to add subheadings (h2, h3, etc.) for long sections of text on each page?
- Are the h2 - h6 headings optimised with keywords (long-tail, related keywords)?
Content
The main content comprises any part of the page directly contributing to achieving its purpose, as per Google's search quality raters guidelines. While we know that Google prioritises high-quality content, understanding what that entails is crucial.
Here are several queries to adopt Google's perspective in evaluating content quality:
Checkpoints:
- Does the content offer a comprehensive and adequate description of the page's topic?
- Does the content provide valuable and insightful information?
- Does the content encompass original research or information?
- Is the content authored by individuals with expertise in the subject matter?
- How does the content compare to the top 10 ranking results in terms of providing value?
- Does the content contain any spelling and grammar errors?
- Is the content easy to read and scan through?
- Does the content include an excessive number of distracting advertisements?
- Is the content responsive on various devices?
-Does it display well on mobile, tablet, and desktop?
- Is the content inherently link-worthy, to the extent that one would recommend and link to it?
- Is the content easily shareable on social media, with integrated social media sharing links?
Images
Consider the following points about images:
- Images enhance the quality of your content and can improve the usefulness of your page, potentially leading to better rankings and higher quality traffic.
- It's crucial to provide context for your images so that they can be easily discovered in Google Images search results, resulting in increased traffic to your site.
Checkpoints to consider:
- Do the images add value to the page and are they relevant to the content?
- Are the images strategically placed near relevant text?
- Is the most important image positioned near the top of the page?
- Do all images have descriptive alt text?
- Is the alt text meaningful and does it convey the content of the image?
- Are the images appropriately optimised for web use, avoiding large file sizes?
-Aim to keep file sizes within 150KB for better performance.
Internal Linking
Internal linking involves creating hyperlinks from one webpage of your site to another page on the same site. These links play a crucial role in helping both users and search engines navigate your website more effectively.
Search engine crawlers follow these internal links to scan pages, analyse content, and establish connections between different pages on your site.
Checkpoints to consider:
- Ensure that important pages on the site are easily accessible from the header and footer sections.
- Implement breadcrumbs to provide users with navigation paths and improve the site's structure.
- Verify that all pages can be reached through links without relying on internal site search functionality.
- Aim to include at least 2 incoming internal links for every page to improve interconnectivity.
- Regularly check for and address any broken internal pages (404 errors).
Outbound links
Google has specified guidelines to qualify outbound links for SEO. This is to safeguard against link schemes designed to manipulate search engine rankings. Using rel attribute values in outbound links (you linking out to external websites) helps Google understand your site's relationship with the linked page.
Google associates your page with the outbound links you link out to. Google's webmaster guidelines recommend using the rel=sponsored attribute for sponsored links. So for affiliate links, this is the attribute you want to use. Note that you don't need to go back to redo all your links, just make sure to do this moving forward for all your sponsored and affiliate links.
Checkpoints
For normal external links to useful resources, link out normally without any rel attributes.
Keep following www.rocksolidmarketer.com.au to learn about Traffic Diagnosis and Technical SEO. (Blogs to come)
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