You may have heard about why good SEO is essential, but do you even know if your current SEO strategy for your site is working? Finding the right place to start can be hard to do when it comes to SEO and businesses.
SEO audits are used as a guide for business owners to improve their SEO strategies. Audits also will tell you if your website is search engine friendly. SEO audits will look at different factors about your sites like site architecture, links, and content. When you understand how each of these factors works when optimizing your site for organic searches, you will learn just how important SEO is.
What is On-Page SEO?
When you optimize your website page by page to develop organic searches for keywords related to the page topic, it is called on-page SEO.
An audit of your on-page SEO can help you:
- Keep up to date with recent developments for search engine marketing
- Find out if your website can be crawled and indexed
- Understand the issues that are keeping your business from being found online
- Know the SEO health of your website
The SEO audit on the page will provide real and actionable insights into your business. Perform SEO audits at least twice a year. Things in the SEO world change quickly (such as Google algorithm updates). When you take the time to regularly auditing our site, it can help it to keep it up to date.
On-page Audit
You can review it yourself or hire an expert to review the page for you. SEO audits can be very detailed. If you want to do your own SEO audit, then use an Excel worksheet with a list of your web pages and their categories in rows. Make sure to include each element of the review in the title column.
The following are the eight main factors that we review web pages for SEO effectiveness.
Does each page have a title and description?
Title tag
Title tags and meta descriptions are essential for good SEO. Every page on the website should be unique, which means that every page needs a different title tag. The title tag tells search engines the subject of each page of your website. Title tags are displayed as hyperlink words in Google search.
Title tags play a pivotal role in Google rankings, so please spend some time writing great tags. The title tag should contain keywords related to the page’s content, but it sounds natural and has no keyword filling.
Meta description
The meta description should describe your page’s content, convey the value of the page to readers, and call for action.
Meta descriptions will not directly affect your Google ranking, but a well-written description can help you attract more clicks. Like the title tag, a meta description needs to be between 250 to 300 characters and only contain relevant keywords for your site.
Is your content original, attractive and relevant?
To make the most of the best SEO, your content should be unique and original. Use Copyscape to ensure that there is no duplicate content. Delete or unindex any duplicate content you find. Check out this useful guide to write website content and this list of duplicate content checkers.
Your content should be useful, informative, and attractive to your ideal customers. Stick to a stable release schedule, but remember that quality is better than quantity.
Check to see if you have relevant internal links.
When you link your pages together, it can improve user experience, plus it can impact your ranking for Google search. If you have internal links, ensure that they are using anchor text that is an exact match. You also want to make sure that all of the pages that are being linked will be related to each other. You should have between two to ten internal links for each page.
Ensure that you have short and clean URLs for your web pages.
It is best if your URLs are properly formatted and unique for each of your webpages.
Bad example: https://www.somewebsite.com/post=33049586830
Good example: https://www.somewebsite.com/page-title-you-made
A good URL is going to have a keyword and will be descriptive and brief. Remember that even though descriptive URLs are great, it will be hard for you to change if you do not have any of those. When you suddenly change your URLs, it could cause the opposite effect for your rankings on search engines. Ensure that you speak with an expert in SEO before you do anything like big URL updates.
Check to make sure each link of your site works.
A broken link can cause your customers to have a bad user experience, which will impact your rankings on Google based on how bad it is. Check to make sure that all of your links are working. You can use tools like Link Checker to make sure that your site only has functioning links.
Ensure that your content has been logically organized.
When you have an intuitive and clean structure on your site, it helps promote good SEO and a good user experience. Your content will need to be grouped into relevant pages and categories. Also, ensure that your site has an about page, disclaimer, and privacy policy.
Check to make sure that all your images have ALT tags and are sized correctly.
If you want to optimize your images for SEO, then check to make sure that your images have an ALT tag. Search engines will use ALT tags as a part of the image search algorithm.
Every image will need to be compressed to reduce the size. If you have many images, you may want to use a CDN or content delivery network. When you have many large image files on your site, it may slow it down, which causes bad user experiences.
Check the load time of your website.
Just how fast your website loads up can determine if a person will click off of your site or stay on it. Not to mention that Google tends to like websites that have quick loading times when it comes to organic rankings. You can use a free tool from Google to check the speed of your website. Any page that takes more than three seconds to load will need to be improved.
Now it’s time to audit your site.
When you check for each of the above on each page of your website, you may find some changes that need to be made to improve your on-page SEO. That will be an excellent way for you to start a new SEO campaign and see how your site has been set up at that moment.
On-page SEO factors can be easy to fix most of the time. Based on your SEO needs and where your website states, an on-page SEO audit can be extensive. These audits can be hard to deal with, especially if you have no technical expertise.
You can claim a free SEO audit or talk to one of our experts at Sages Marketing to get your site optimized for organic searches.
