An SEO audit can be undertaken at any stage of your website’s lifecycle. Its objective is to identify areas for improvement, to uncover any hidden problems having an impact on traffic and to optimize natural referencing. During an SEO audit, several elements must be checked: URLs, links, redirects, keywords, content, sitemaps, title tags, etc. We have drawn up a checklist of some points to check during your SEO audit for you.
Accessibility
Your website must be accessible not only to Internet users but also to search engine crawlers. Pages that are inaccessible will not be indexed, and therefore will not be referenced. Concretely, your site’s content must be accessible in HTML format and must not contain JavaScript elements that are too complicated to analyze. In particular, Adobe Flash files should be avoided, which Google reads very poorly.
A key element of accessibility lies in the website’s architecture, in the organization of content and files. A clear architecture makes it easier for search engines to link different content and more easily find what Internet users are looking for.
A site with well-ordered and hierarchical content helps search engines understand the semantic relationships between the website’s different sections. Always with a view to making your site more accessible, consider creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google.
For Professional SEO services, please contact SEO services in Pakistan.
Diagnostics on Google Search Console
It is important to regularly check the technical health of your website. And not just during the SEO audit. Here are the two technical inspection steps to follow to carry out the diagnostics on your site:
- Check your Google Search Console account (and possibly your Bing Webmaster Tools account if you have one) that your domain has been validated. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools allow you to analyze how search engines see and read your website. Check regularly that you haven’t received a message from Google or Bing. Indeed, each time you receive a penalty (for duplicate content, for example), the search engine warns you by message.
- Also on Google Search Console, check the index of your website, that is to say the number of web pages indexed in the search engine. If you notice a sudden change in the number of indexed pages, there is probably a problem somewhere. Compare the indexed number of pages to the total number of pages your website contains: this will allow you to know if Google overall well indexes your site… or not. If the difference is around 20%, there is not too much to worry about. On the other hand, whether the disparity is between single and double, or between single and triple, you need to try to understand why.
Keywords
The quality of your natural referencing depends on your ability to position yourself well on your website’s target keywords. Several SEO tools make it possible to analyze SEO performance from the “keywords” angle. To identify the keywords that bring the most traffic to your site, you can also use Search Console by going to Search Traffic .Search Analysis. If you find that keywords that used to bring you traffic don’t work anymore, it is probably a sign that there is an issue. In order to optimize your natural referencing, focus your efforts on keywords whose position is between 5 and 20. These are keywords on which you can hope to position yourself in the first results by dint of effort.
The contents
Regarding the content of your site, you must control three elements as a priority:
- The depth of the content, its quality, and optimization. Your content must be informative (always put yourself in the place of your readers) and sufficiently long. You need to have more long texts than short ones. If your content is too light, take the time to enrich it.
- The duplicate content. A lot of sites have duplicate content, without even realizing it. You should in particular be careful that your site is only available in one version. For example, you must not have a “www” version and another version without the “www.” If your site is accessible by typing http://www.mysite.com or simply “monsite.com,” one of the addresses must be a redirection. Same remark regarding Http and https. If there are two versions, do the necessary 301 redirects.
- The density of advertisements. Google doesn’t like sites that are stuffed with ad blocks.
Writing URLs
It is important to optimize the writing of URLs. A URL should be clear, short, describe the main idea of the page, and indicate the page’s position in the tree. If it meets these criteria, it will help both Internet users and the search engines themselves.
Redirects
When a page no longer has a reason to exist on the site, it is customary to redirect it to a more relevant page by making a 301 redirect. This is the most used technique, even if it is not the only one. Before generating your redirects, you should consider the various techniques that exist.
Google recommends going for 301 redirects, as this indicates that the redirects are persistent. By using 302 redirects, you are signaling that a page has temporarily changed address. If you don’t use the right kind of redirects, Google may get it wrong.
Pro Digi 