You might be able to get away with ignoring SEO on your website if you have a one-page site. However, things change once your site starts to grow.
Studies show that 57% of marketers believe that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing method. It pays to get things right.
If you’re trying to tidy up the SEO on your website, there are a few things you can do to get started. Follow the SEO audit steps below to optimize your site.
1. Improve Your Page Speed
Nobody is going to stay on your website if it takes forever to load. Even a load time of several seconds can send someone back to the search results and straight to one of your competitors.
Google knows when this is a problem.
If you don’t have a speedy website, you’re going to be penalized in the search engine. Use a page speed test to see how long it takes for your site to load.
If your load time is too long, start with optimizing your images. There are compression tools that will reduce your file sizes while retaining the original quality of your pictures.
Once you finish, minimize your website code to reduce the total amount your visitors have to download to view your site.
2. Create a Mobile Design
Mobile users used to make up a small percentage of all web traffic. It didn’t make sense for many webmasters to consider them when designing their sites. Things have changed now that there are 6.95 billion mobile users in the world.
Google now considers mobile design essential for websites. If you can’t provide a great experience to people on smaller screens, it’s going to impact your search rankings.
Inspect your website from your smartphone to make sure it still looks good. If not, work with your SEO agency UK to modify your design to work with mobile devices.
3. Find Old Content
Do you have content on your website that is old and outdated? Believe it or not, it might be hurting your rankings.
Google loves to rank fresh content for searchers. Look through your website for information that could use a refresh. Once you get your content updated, use the Google Webmaster Tools to have search spiders crawl your site.
Once Google knows you have updated your content, it will give it more reason to rank it higher on search pages.
4. Look at Your Meta Information
Are you in control of what Google shows searchers when they see your website in the search results? If not, you might be missing out on clicks.
Your meta information is what tells Google what to show on their pages. Start with your meta-title and meta-description.
Your goal should be to create a title and description that entices searchers to click on your result. The higher your click-through rate is, the more Google will believe that your website has the answer their searchers are looking for.
Spend time to test different meta-tags to see which ones result in the most clicks.
5. Discover Dead Links
Have you ever come across the dreaded 404 error page? If so, you’ve come across a page on a website that was deleted.
It isn’t wrong to delete pages that don’t add any value to your website. The problem comes from having links to those pages on your site that you don’t get rid of.
Either remove dead links or change them to other relevant pages. Another option is to redirect your deleted pages to similar pages or your homepage.
6. Find Duplicate Content
Even if you write unique content for every page on your website, that doesn’t mean you won’t have duplicate content on your site.
If you run a blog, you’re going to have the category, archive, and author pages. Depending on your design, you might show snippets of your blog posts on these pages.
Unfortunately, this can throw duplicate content flags for Google. You need to flag the original content on your website, so these pages don’t cause issues with ranking in search engines.
You can do this by adding the canonical tag to your posts. This tag will let Google know what content is original so it can ignore any other places it appears.
7. Look at Your Backlink Profile
Not everyone plays nice in the SEO field. Many people launch negative SEO attacks aimed at crashing their competitor’s rankings.
They do this by creating spam backlinks in bad neighborhoods. Google doesn’t value these links, and will sometimes make the mistake of penalizing websites as a result.
Sign up for a backlink analyzer to see what sites are linking to you. Your goal should be to find links from bad parts of the internet. Once you have your list, submit it to the Google Disavow Tool to make sure they aren’t considered part of your link profile.
8. Optimize Your Website URLs
People don’t like long and complicated website URLs. They want something easy to type in the address bar when they go to your site.
Examine the pages on your site that have complicated URLs and work to simplify them. Don’t add things like post date, author, and post ID in the URL. Only include a category and the main keyword for your post.
These URLs are more memorable and more digestible for search engines. You can also format your URLs to create a site structure that helps Google figure out what your website is about.
9. Set Up Structured Data
Have you noticed the rich text snippets that Google shows on searches now? It uses structured data to get that information.
If you have any information you want to show up in these areas, you need to improve the structured data on your website. You can do this by adding a schema markup to your pages.
These pages help Google read your page. It will use what it finds to put you directly on the search page if your content is good enough.
Follow the SEO Audit Steps Above to Improve Your Website
If you’ve ignored SEO for a long time, you have a lot of work ahead of you. Luckily, the audit steps above can help you get your website back on track. Get started today, so you can improve your chances of ranking higher on Google.
Once your on-site SEO is on point, you can start focusing on building links. Head back to our blog to learn our latest strategies for getting links to your website.
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