Your SEO strategy is vital to the survival of your business. If you are playing fast and loose with your SEO activities, chances are you are losing out on a lot of traffic and, ultimately, sales and income.
Regardless of whether you have a solid SEO strategy in place or not, it still is crucial that you regularly perform an SEO audit.
SEO Audit Checklist for 2018
This will help you determine if there are any changes necessary to your strategy and force you to stay up to date with the latest search engine developments. Today we are going to discuss 7 checks that you must perform an audit to ensure that your site is fully optimized.
1] Website Crawl
Performing a website crawl is the first step of your SEO audit. This test helps you to find any technical issues, including broken links, redirects, errors and duplicated content.
A website crawl will also analyze your website’s meta information for potential optimization issues that can have a negative influence on your search ranking.
There are many high-end tools available online that you can use for a crawl, but if you are working on a budget, you can make use of free tools that may be just as effective.
2] URL Direct
When there are multiple accessible versions of your website, it can have a negative impact on your optimization. You need an accessible version to enable people to find your website even if they didn’t type in your full URL.
You can do a URL direct during your audit to ensure that there is only one accessible version. When people type in the wrong URL, they will then be directed to your one accessible version and gain access to your site.
How Proper Web Design Affects SEO3] Audit SEO Tags
Make sure that all your headings in your website content are tagged with H1, H2, and H3 tags. Your headings should also be unique and keyword-rich without losing their ability to draw attention. This will help search bots to optimally crawl your headings.
Just like your headings, your meta tags should also be unique and keyword-rich. Make sure that they are relevant to the content and that their text is not cut off.
4] Eliminate Duplications
The search bots that crawl and index your pages won’t be able to do so with duplicated content on your website. This is because they can’t determine which is the right content for indexing.
An important step in SEO audits is to eliminate text that is duplicated elsewhere on your website. If you can’t remove content for some reason, make use of canonical tags to direct the search bots to the correct content.
5] Audit Your Backlinks
Building links is an important part of your SEO strategy, and you may have spent a lot of time and effort to build backlinks on high-ranking websites.
During your common-sense SEO audit, you should take an in-depth look at your backlink profile to ensure that there are no low-quality or broken links that can harm your ranking. Also, make sure that all your anchor texts appear naturally in content and that they consist of keywords.
6] Audit Your Internal Links
Internal linking is a great way to incentivize visitors to explore the rest of your website. You can also use internal linking to drive a little traffic to some of your older content.
Internal links also improve search bot crawling and indexing. During your SEO audit, make sure that none of your internal links are broken and that visitors are able to follow them easily.
7] 404 Errors
When there is a 404 error on a highly optimized blog article or other content, you lose out on the increase in rank that the page contributed top your website.
404 Errors do not necessarily have a negative influence on your search rank, but it is important to get rid of them and restore your page.
