A website audit is a detailed analysis of how your page is doing with respect to SEO rankings. It also gives you an overview of the performance of your website. There are many free SEO audit tools available in the market which you can use for the purpose.
Your website is not frozen in time. It is constantly changing. So, you need to keep tweaking your SEO strategy and optimize your approach according to the SEO Audit checklist. A page audit is like a routine health checkup that you conduct on your Website time to time to make sure that your SEO strategy is in line with Google guidelines.
Why should you audit your Website?
It is discouraging when the website you put your hard work into is not receiving the desired results and reaching your target audience. This is where a SEO on-page factor checklist comes in handy. The odds of your website featuring in top search results depend on a multitude of factors. A website audit helps you to:
- Analyze your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
- Devise an actionable plan to utilize your competitor’s weaknesses to your advantage.
- Identify your weaknesses and fix those to get better results.
- Examine your current SEO strategy and optimize it based on the audit findings.
- Get an overview of your website’s performance.
Your go-to page audit checklist
A page audit identifies issues in content, website architecture, SEO strategy. It especially helps businesses in improving their online presence.
SEO audit checklist is handy as it helps you to make sure that you have covered all the key areas. So, here is a list of activities that must be ticked off when you conduct your next website audit.
- Make your content exciting and engaging: Content is supremely important in the overall performance of your website. An attractive page title and engaging subheadings work wonders in pulling in the crowd. Check whether your content has too much complicated jargon. Excessive brochure speak is boring. They don’t engage well with the audience. Hence, it is a good idea to have a look at the type of content you are rolling out as they make a big difference.
- Content comprehension: The language of your content should be lucid and easily understandable. Most viewers find self-explanatory content reliable. There are multiple tools available over the internet that scores you on the readability of your content. One can use those to determine how comprehensive their website is. Research has also shown that the length of your content plays a role in your SEO rankings. So, any content with a minimum of 1,000 words has a better chance of featuring in top search results.
- Get rid of grammatical errors and incorrect facts: Grammatical errors are a pet peeve for most internet users. They make your website look shady and untrustworthy. Proofread your website to identify such errors. Fact checking is essential too. Incorrect facts may be the reason why your website is not doing as well as it should. Online fact checkers can be utilized for this or you can also choose to do this manual, though it is hard work.
- Quality Keywords: Keywords play a significant role in getting your site featured in the top search results. Hence you need to regularly check how your keywords are performing in terms of online search rankings. Your content should be focused around your keywords, which you can easily find out by doing keyword research. However, you need to choose wisely which keywords to use. Instead of working with multiple keywords, it is better to choose the best keyword possible and use them in titles, subheadings etc. Ideally keywords should be well spread across the content.
- Interactive web pages: Check if your webpage is interactive. Check how responsive your website is. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. A huge number of internet searches nowadays originate from mobile users. Hence it is absolutely crucial that your website is optimized to work seamlessly with mobile screens.
- Quality of backlinks: Backlinks are important. Studies have shown that backlinks co-relate with rankings more than any other factor. Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. They are also popularly known as ‘inbound links. Find out whether good quality websites are referencing to your site. At the same time, check whether you are linking your content with other internal links as well as outbound links. Make sure the pages you are referencing to also have reliable and quality content.
- Take care of broken URLs: Majority of internet surfers get frustrated with broken URLs. One needs to check them on a regular basis and fix the broken ones. Broken URLs paint an incomplete and feeble picture of your website which is not at all encouraging if you want to reach the wider audience.
- Analyze your competitors: In any business, you cannot perform optimally if you do not know your competitors. Analyze your competitors and get to know their strengths and weak points. Devise a plan on how you can utilize that to better your online reach.
- Well indexed website: Website architecture does play a part in SEO rankings. SEO optimization is essential to maximize your ranking potential and drive traffic to your website from search engines. A sitemap is very helpful here as it helps your site get indexed properly.
- Website speed: Google is obsessed about the loading speed of webpages. They have even confirmed that site loading speed is a ranking factor. Hence you need to keep a close eye on your site loading speed and take on every kind of measure that fastens the loading speed. Run a speed test and record the results. Keep in mind that the size of images in your website works against your site loading speed.
Final Thoughts
A website audit analyzes key aspects, like user engagement, user experience, traffic, functionality, site health, website performance. Ideally a free SEO audit can be done once a year. But you can increase the frequency of audits if your website content is constantly changing. With changing content consumption patterns, audits are a necessity these days. Your desired online presence may just be a page audit away.