Usually people tend to overestimate the importance of design and build websites without the advice of an SEO or better said without thinking about SEO. Only after the website is built and after 6 months there is still no traffic on their website they think about hiring an SEO to perform an audit on their website.
Here are 5 stages or 5 points an audit on your website should address, in order to improve the presence on search engines of your website. A word of caution is that an audit can’t solve all your problems but should offer sufficient information for you to start improving the metrics of your website.
1 Auditing technical issues
The first thing to check is the indexing level of the website, poor 404 pages (or inexistent), checking that the website is registered with Google Webmaster Tools for proper setting the preferred way of indexing (with or without www.) and the correct setting of the location based audience.
Other issues spotted here are: duplicate content, not found pages, broken links and the presence (or absence) of a sitemap.
2 Auditing keyword targeting and internal architecture
Another aspect is to see how well the website targets the keywords they want to rank for. This is usually the moment when many times you realize that the owner of the website doesn’t have a clear keyword strategy and is just assuming what keywords he should target.
Keyword targeting is in close relation to how the internal linking architecture of the website is created. Usually high competitive keywords should be targeted in pages closer to the root of the website, while less competitive keywords (such as long tail) should be used in lower levels of the website.
The main issues that should come out refer to pages that target the same keywords (resulting in confusion towards the search engine), misuse of keywords in content (the targeted keyword should be present in title, text content, file names embedded on the page, ALT property of images, anchor texts from within the text) and poor linking between articles.
The internal architecture should place the pages that target the most competitive keywords closer to the root of the website. Following this line of judgment, the main page should target the most important and the highest competitive keywords.
3 Auditing client engagement through analytics software
The analytic software installed on the website should provide important metrics that can offer some answers to the lack of clients. Here are some metrics to check:
- How much time a user spends on your website: if the majority of visitors spend less than 10 seconds on your website then you’re in trouble
- Check the bounce rates and don’t despair if the numbers are high. Correlate high bounce rates with time on page. If the time on page is fairly decent it could mean the page was interested enough but you can’t know for sure if the user found your page interesting or just forgot to close the window in browser
- How many pages visitors see on your website: if the majority of your visitors see only one page usually there is no conversion, since visitors enter the website through landing pages that, in theory, should guide the visitor toward the conversion page(s).
- You need to work on your engagement methods in order to hope for conversion:
- Keep your links in blue and underlined when hovered (if you already have success with links of other colors don’t change that)
- Keep in mind to work first on your top landing pages (provide clear visual links toward the conversion pages or to other related topics on your website) and then move on to the next level
- Since at first visitors just scroll through the page, place visual elements that break the content’s ideas and highlight the most important ideas from that page
4 Auditing the competition for the selected keywords
Onsite auditing for SEO is not enough, since the most important aspects of rankings are located outside your own reach. You should know how your competition is targeting the same keywords and from where they receive their links.
Since links are the juice, the backbone, the Holy Grail of SEO here are some aspects to check when analyzing the competition:
- How many links do they have
- How many different root domains link to their page and root page (so having 1000 links from blogs hosted on WordPress or Blogspot isn’t going to help that much since they all come from the same roots)
- What is the anchor text distribution of the links pointing to your competitor’s page? As a tip, after you gather all the anchor texts, place them in a tag cloud generator and see what are the most used words.
- What is the quality of their links: this means to check and see if the link is coming from a directory, from the footer of a website or from inside the text of a page; also it has a great importance how much authority the website that provides the link has.
- Analyze how related is the page that links to your competitor’s website in relation to their website
5 Establishing an onsite SEO strategy
An SEO audit on your website should always offer you some ideas on how to improve the website. Suggestions should include:
- How to better use your keywords
- How to better use internal links
- How to have a better internal linking architecture
- How to improve engagement of visitors on your website
- How to improve conversions
6 BONUS: Determining essential offsite ranking factors
Offsite factors refer to:
- Building links to your website
- Building authority profiles on social networks that can spread your content and also help you with rankings
I don’t consider this to be part from an SEO audit for the reason that it would raise to much the cost of the audit. Identifying websites that can provide useful links, contacting them, seeing what it takes for you to get a link from those websites involves another kind of work.
However, an SEO audit on your website should also offer some general hints on where to start building links and how you should go and create a strong profile on social networks.
If you have any questions fell free to ask them in comments bellow or send me an e-mail. If you feel that your website needs an SEO audit let’s talk …
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