On the subject of search engine ranking, one abbreviation manages to get digital marketers excited in a jiffy: SEO.
What does this have to do with a website audit, you might wonder?
When a Website Audit Becomes Necessary
Certain elements on your website may be preventing it from ranking high on SERPs (search engine results pages). An audit is, therefore, needed to first discover those problematic elements and devise strategies to address them. Keep in mind though, that a site audit must be done prior to any website optimization.
It also pays to understand the importance of devising strategies to rectify problems, rather than focusing too much on what’s wrong once you have generated a proper website audit report. For example, if you’re specifically auditing your website for mobile responsiveness, rather than pinpointing key issues, get to work by asking yourself certain questions in order to find solutions fast:
Am I using a mobile-friendly font size?
Is my site displaying properly across all screen sizes and mobile devices?
Are links displaying properly? I.e. is the spacing between links adequate?
Are my top performing pages mobile user-friendly? (one of the hottest ranking factors on Google, just so you know)
Doing a Quick Website Audit: Where to Start
As long as you know where to start, there’s no need to look for the proverbial needle in a haystack. What you need is a quick and easy website analysis, again, not to pinpoint issues but find opportunities, which can truly help your website in terms of better SEO.
Set expectations – problem areas are key opportunities to help rank your site higher, so it’s important you chalk out realistic expectations right from the start.
Here are some elements you need to know in order to kick off your website audit:
Selecting Keywords
You need to know what your top keywords are; i.e. those that help the campaign move forward. These keywords must gain a sizable percentage when it comes to ranking. In fact, 60-80% of your top-ranking keywords should land your site on the first page of Google.
Selecting the right keywords at first isn’t always the easiest of tasks; even if your selected keywords are ranking well, you need to see to it that those are the ones your customers are using. A quick note: keyword selection is not to be confused with keyword research, something an SEO specialist is better equipped to handle. And, keyword selection as such, requires you to collaborate with an SEO expert in order to get things done right from the get go. If you have an in-house SEO specialist, well and good. If not, carefully look at what keywords your website is ranking for. Use AdWords Keywords Planner and Google Webmaster Tools to help yourself with this.
Mobile Responsiveness
One of the most overlooked aspects during website audits is checking to make sure your website is displaying properly on a variety of mobile devices. As a general rule of thumb, you need to build your website for mobile before anything else. It’s no secret that online visitors generally prefer using mobile devices as opposed to a desktop PC. And, as we mentioned not too long ago, mobile friendliness is something Google loves and considers a crucial factor for ranking websites high.
Overlook this aspect, and you’re missing out on a great deal of potential traffic. An experienced website auditor would know the importance of web pages being properly optimized for mobile.
Do a quick site search; type your site’s URL on Google, add a space and mention your main keyword in quotations. You’ll instantly know if the keyword is associated with your website. Next, determine if any of your pages are returning a 404 error. You should also use Google Webmaster Tools to find “crawl” errors.
Inspecting On-page and Off-page Elements
The on-page elements of your website include content such as images, text, audio, video etc. plus the meta content. On one hand, keyword selection plays a critical role in site audits, on the other, content is the number one ranking factor of any site. For information-rich pages, for instance, between 1600-2500 word content is ideal for ranking purposes. For commerce-heavy pages (pages that are targeting commercial keywords), 300-500 words suffice.
Search engines have now gotten smarter though; on-page content isn’t just limited to keywords anymore. Everything on your site needs to make sense and sit perfectly well together because the general idea is to provide useful content to target audiences, and not just look all glittery to search engines. Google knows this all too well.
Once you’ve checked your content and see that it is relevant and has the right word count, you need to examine your meta content. This includes all the title tags, meta description, meta keywords and alt tags. Make sure headers are included. Remember, words that show up on the top-left corner of your website are considered not only powerful but influential as well.
The interesting thing is, websites leave footprints, just like people do. They leave an impression and this is what a site’s off-page elements are for. A more technical term for this is “backlinks” or external linking. And as far as auditing is concerned, you need to see what kind of pages are linking back to your site. For example, are they truly adding value and authority to your site? Or are they doing more damage than good?
You see, when it comes to backlinks, you must go with the “quality reigns superior over quantity” mantra. If one of your page links to thousands of others, it does not mean those are authoritative ones. In fact, on the contrary, you’re losing out on website authority when you start linking to too many sources, particularly those that have little relevance to your business or audience. Another key thing to remember is linking to your own pages within the website, otherwise known as internal linking.
Think about this for a moment: if you’re externally linking to pages that have little relevance or internally linking to content that isn’t relevant to the reader, why should Google rank you as a high authority?
Start making the most of contextual relationships, which are easy for search engines to understand. Make use of latent semantic indexing (LSI) and if you’re unable to access a Search Console, use Ahrefs or any other third party source to get the job done.
Dealing with Penalties
Should you ever find yourself on the receiving end as a result of underhand SEO techniques such as spamming or content duplication, Google will be quick to penalize you. From that point on, no SEO tactic will get your website to rank higher. You can use the Google Search Console to look for penalties that have been imposed on your site.
Your next course of action is to find out how to undo the penalty. Google will usually include this information in the warning. Try submitting a request for reconsideration. On occasions, Google might investigate one of your pages, if there was an uncalled for spike in traffic. Just remember not to do anything unless Google tells you otherwise.
Real-world Example of Good Auditing
Gentlevelten saw a domain and site migration back in 2012 due to a serious penalty from Google which resulted in most of the content being migrated to a new domain name. The penalties did not carry over, however, all previous content was not always up to date, especially when the company decided to engage in microblogging.
Naturally, duplicate content was a hard-pressing issue and blogs dating back to 2013 were suffering from expired outbound links, too many internal links and generally outdated content. The site’s editors had also forgotten to add tags to uploaded images which presented an issue with image tags. Another issue, though not major, was Google Business Authorship which caused some confusion due to the outdated content. At the time, there were too many organic keywords the company was trying to rank for, while no designated top ten keywords were being focused on.
Even though the website was originally built to be mobile and SEO–friendly, these minor and often tedious issues were keeping the business from getting better conversions and website traffic.
The company hired an SEO expert to give them keen insights into what was working, and what wasn’t. After a thorough audit, the following changes were introduced:
The website was crawled for a complete examination of images, links and main SEO elements.
Spreadsheets were segmented for the following:
Blog content plus links, images and formatting that should be updated or removed completely from the site which brought no value to the brand.
Landing pages that may need deletion or updates.
Pages that need updated inbound and broken outbound links.
Image links that require alt tag descriptions.
Pages and other content that might be repurposed for eBooks or whitepapers.
Pages that had no meta descriptions.
Old and outdated content was deleted in limited increments. Between the months of July and November that year, Google Analytics showed a 44.72% web traffic increase, thanks to the site SEO audit. In addition, the audit also lead to a 20.15% increase in session traffic.
The Next Steps
The above elements are some of the first ones you need to consider in order to perform a quick and effective site audit. It may seem overwhelming at first, but then again, getting your site to rank high takes a lot of hard work and dedication, and good SEO happens to be smack in the middle of it.
Reviewing your site is a never-ending process. What you need is a highly sought after digital marketing firm to take the burden off your shoulders so you can focus on other day-to-day business aspects.
AOK Marketing has been helping businesses navigate successfully through highly competitive waters for nearly two decades now. Our team of SEO specialists have hands-on experience with site audits and fully understand what it takes to rank on the first page of Google.
Don’t hesitate to contact us today for a FREE consultation at 1.888.566.2577 and get site auditing right the first time around.
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