While high-quality, search-engine-optimized content is a great way to boost your traffic numbers, it’s what happens once those visitors are on your website that really counts. It’s also crucial to audit the content you‘re publishing to ensure it’s actually solving your visitors’ problems. Ultimately, fast-loading and optimized pages will lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions. To quickly check a web page’s load time, download MozBar, a toolbar by Moz that you can attach to your browser for simple page analysis every time you visit a website. Are there excessive page sizes or long page load and server response times?
Types of website audits
- After you hit “Compare,” the tool will compare the sets of keywords the analyzed domains are ranking for.
- That means we’ll work to keep this audit checklist up-to-date as SEO changes, so be sure to check back for new updates.
- Making quick gains such as speeding up your site, fixing broken links or optimizing images may result in quick wins that improve user experience while remaining cost-efficient.
- If you’re an Ahrefs user, begin by launching a new project in Site Audit.
They guide users in gauging a page’s relevance to their query. Meta descriptions are HTML summaries of web pages, shown below title tags in search results. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that regardless of the issue, its importance depends on the website or page you’re working on. For example, the main pages you want to rank will always take priority over pages you don’t want to index.
The public sitemap is one that users can access to review the pages of your site, like the index of a book. Within the robots.txt file, you can include sections for specific (or all) crawlers with instructions (“directives”) that let them know which parts should or should not be crawled. These elements also present problems from a usability perspective. Visitors are often looking for a very specific piece of information when visiting your site. If they have to sit through a 10-second visual introduction before they can find your hours of operation, you’re going to have a pretty frustrated visitor on your hands.
A fitness blog should have links from health and wellness sites, not gambling or loan websites. Google’s algorithms have evolved to better understand whether content actually provides what users are looking for. To get started, create a project in the tool and configure the audit.
• Ensure that vital pages (home, main products/services, top content) are indexed. If not, find out why – perhaps they have a noindex tag or weren’t linked well (or are new and need to be fetched). By following the process I’ve outlined in this guide, you’ll uncover numerous opportunities to improve your website’s performance in search results.
Discover pages with an excessive number of outgoing links
We also like the audit checklist by Benjamin Estes over at BrainLabs, in particular, the pass/fail selector for each item. While our BHS Links own audit is substantially different, we stole incorporated this feature into our own. As an SEO consultant, I was always on the lookout for a good SEO audit checklist.
Issues with any of the things mentioned above are vital to include in an audit. Since audits are something you do regularly, keeping track of your most important metrics will help you understand the results of the changes you make over time. Next, consider what type of content could be valuable for others to link to.
That’s why proper internal linking can help boost your topical authority. Inform us about your SEO goals and provide access to your analytics data. Your business might also decide to invest in SEO audit services because of a few common warning signs that your site isn’t performing as well as it should.