Anna Kaleta21 September 2020|~12 min read

SEO

GUIDE

SEO Audit in 9 Steps - How To Improve A Website

If you are wondering which parts you should focus on when it comes to the SEO Audit, then why don’t you read my 9 step guide for beginners

Finding the ultimate way to optimize a website might be tricky. In the previous 2 years I bounced between a few digital agencies which presented various types of SEO audit methodology and what they thought was the best way of SEO website optimisation. Surprisingly, even though many of the ideas were similar or sometimes the same, there were a few key points that always differed.

In this blog I’ve decided to present you my points on what I believe is vital to achieve better SEO results in the future.

Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?

You could say "okay my current website does not look outdated and is still running well. At the same time people can see my brand on the internet". But have you ever wondered if your website is mobile friendly? It is important to have a website that can be used on mobile devices. Why? Because we know that in the Q1 of 2023 over 58% of Searches were done with use of mobile devices. This means that technically if your website isn’t ready to welcome mobile users then you might not be ready to welcome every second visitor on your website.

It is also important to remember that in late March 2018 Google Introduced Mobile First Indexing which basically gave us information that from now going forward the main version of the website is the one you see on mobile. This announcement was very important to the SEO world because it was changed the way that we were assess websites.

If your website is already mobile friendly, you should not worry too much although it is still worth running your website through a mobile-friendly tool made by Google which will allow you to pinpoint any issues such as clickable elements placed too close, content wider than a screen and much more.

Check & resolve the speed issues

Speed Issues are a very common problem for digital marketers. I saw in the past many websites that speed especially for mobile was ranked as poor. Let’s be honest, your site should load fast. Why? Because users are not willing to wait a few seconds until the page is interactive. You could say that I am exaggerating the problem but hey did you know that 53% of users will leave the website if it won’t load within 3 seconds?

To do a full speed audit of your website you can use the PageSpeed Insights Tool created by Google. I’ve heard in the past that this tool is pretty harsh and never gives good speed results. In my personal opinion, yes it is harsh but Google does it for a purpose and if anyone is looking for other tools that bring "better" results it is just an excuse to not improve the web.

Whilst running the tests I would suggest to focus on two things. Firstly on the current speed result (and the colour assigned to it) and opportunities section. There is more useful information you can find during this test, but those two will be enough to start with. If you don’t have much technical knowledge, it might be worth discussing the recommendations with website developers.

Detect pages with thin content

During your SEO Audit you should search across your website for pages that contain poor quality content, have low word count or even worse... contains only duplicated content. If you wonder, okay I have 300 pages I don’t have time to go on every page individually and count the words then Screaming Frog Crawling Software is the one you need and is free as long as you don’t have more than 500 pages to crawl.

Once you run the crawl on the website, you will find the following options in the right hand side navigation. Click on the HTML section.

Screaming Frog Navigation Window Displaying Internal SEO Elements

Once this is ready, scroll through the columns in the main window until you will see the "Word Count" section.

Screaming Frog Results focusing on Word Count Column

If you have any that show below 250-300 characters - revisit the page, check if this is necessary to keep it, if yes then try to improve the content by adding unique paragraphs of keyword rich content.

Ensure all Meta Information is in place

Let’s take a moment and discuss the importance of having well optimised meta information. Meta Titles & Descriptions are still playing a big role when it comes to deciding whether or not visit the website. You should think about those two meta tags as a business card with a small description which will determine whether your business is what this particular visitor is looking for or not.

It is important to not stuff all the keywords you have into your title as this will most likely not work. You should consider whether or not keywords you are planning to use will match the content of the page. As a rule I usually create the meta titles in the following structure:

Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

Ensure that keywords you are providing within your meta title are also utilised within your H1 Header and across your content on the page. Also don’t forget that your Meta title should be kept within max 65 characters (You can try to extend it slightly by up to 5 characters, but before you will update it make sure it won’t be cut off by Google with Moz Title tool!)

Once you finally created all meta titles, which contain good keywords, you should look at the meta descriptions. Information included in the description will not help you to rank better as meta descriptions do not have ranking signals but it will definitely help you to convince users to come to your website. Your descriptions should be no longer than 155 characters and I suggest adding the primary keyword previously used within the title, somewhere at the start of the description.

Note: bear in mind that these days Google treats the meta title and description tag as a suggestion and there is a chance that search engine will pull some content from your website as a title/description instead.

Invest Your Time (and money) in Link Building

Let’s face it. Backlinks always were and will be a hot topic for digital marketers. The external links that are linking to your website are vital to improve your Domain Authority. DA Score is in fact a ranking score which presents how likely you have a chance to rank better and how trustworthy is your domain. If during your SEO audit you will find out that you are missing out in this sector of SEO you should start working on backlinks as soon as possible.

Link building isn’t as easy as it used to be a few years ago. Since the Penguin Algorithm Update the way of how we are building links has changed massively.

Link building requires time and sometimes money to achieve the results. In general you should always aim to link to websites with similar topics and high domain authority scores. It is important to remember that you don’t need a large number of spammy links coming from various places, focus on systematic gathering 1-3 links a month instead.

Identify Duplicate Content

As mentioned in one of the previous points you should avoid thin content, but this is not the only content related issue we see every day.

Pages with duplicated content are as bad as the ones which have a word count under 300. If your website has many pages with content that is similar on every page Google might be in trouble with determining which of the pages is the main page and is a duplicate.

Every page should contain unique and descriptive content that helps visitors understand your business, services and products you offer. If you really cannot avoid duplications and you in fact don’t need this page you should 301 redirect this page to another with the same content.

If you feel that this page needs to stay and redirecting is not an option I would recommend canonicalising this page to another one with the same/extremely similar content. Thanks to the canonical tag Google algorithm will understand that the other page is the main version of this content.

Identify Keyword Cannibalisation

Keyword Cannibalisation unfortunately happens all the time. You could say, but hey my pages are great, they are both ranking so well for the same keyword. But the truth is keyword cannibalisation can damage your authority. It can also mean that Google potentially could de-value the page which should be ranked for this particular keyword keeping other, less useful pages still in the ranking.

To ensure your website is not affected by keyword cannibalisation, you should undergo a full keyword research for all your main pages which will include primary & secondary keywords for each page and also prepare keyword research for your future blog to ensure you are not writing twice about the same topic and that what you are writing about has actually a search volume.

Ensure Your Website Is Secure

Now, website security is important okay? You should ensure that your website has SSL certificate and all insecure http versions of your website are redirected to secure https://.

There are two main reasons why you would like to have an SSL certificate and https website.

1. Your code is protected. If your website will be attacked by malicious malware, even though you clear the code later on and get the website back and running there will be major complications which can affect not only a website but also your online marketing.

   If you run a Wordpress powered website, most likely there will be no full recovery from the attack, this means that even though you were able to clear the code and the website seems to work fine, Google will not allow you to run the Google Ads. Google will also not put at risk the users who are searching through the web and you might drop completely from the rankings.

2. By having a secure website, you are showing your customers that you care about their safety in the web. This means that when they add any of their personal details such as name, surname, address and especially payment information there won’t be any breach of data or cyber attack. This is very important especially if you are running the website which has been created for eCommerce purposes or maybe you have a contact form on your website.

Check If Your Website Has Site Errors

Your website should be crawled every now and then to ensure that there aren't any errors. If you find any pages which no longer exist and display a 404 error, you should immediately redirect them whether it is through one of the plugins in Wordpress or via htaccess.

This is an important task, 404 error pages might not hurt your website straight away however, it is better to keep the website well maintained. Imagine if you would look for some sort of information on one of the websites and wherever you click the link that leads you to the 404 error page again and again. Potentially, you would give the website a chance once or twice but if this issue would happen all the time you would find another website with similar information which you can actually access!

The list of points above is not exhausting the possibilities, but this is what you should look at during your SEO Audit. Never forget that your website is created not only for your business but also for users of the web on the other side. Consider how you would feel entering a website full of issues, errors and poor content.