How to complete a basic SEO audit for your business website

Having your website is great but it isn’t easy to maintain from an SEO perspective. In the ever-changing world today, the way we search for knowledge is changing. It is, thus essential to keep your website up-to-date. But, how can we do this? Well, a simple solution is to conduct a basic SEO audit at least twice a year.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. To understand it better, let us first find out what exactly is an SEO audit? It is a process to evaluate the effectiveness of your on-site search engine optimisation implementation. It is necessary to do an SEO audit as it helps you to understand how to improve the visibility of your website. the goal is to get more qualified traffic to your website and convert visitors into potential customers.

An SEO audit can either be done by oneself using a guide or can be done by hiring a professional. There is a checklist of things that needs to be completed when performing a basic SEO audit. This checklist is spread across six different factors which we will discuss in the text below.

1. Page Titles, descriptions and URL’S: This can also be termed as on-site SEO. Most of the audits cover this part only.
   1. Titles: It is important to note that a page title should be less than 70 characters. Moreover, we also need to check if the page title tells a potential visitor about what content can be found. Thirdly, we should also check if the title uses the right keywords or not. Your page title should clearly describe the content of a web page and incorporate a few keywords for better search engine rankings. A good example of a bad page title is "Home Page", now imagine if you did a Google search and all the results returned "Home Page" as the page title. It would be very difficult for you to understand what this page is about.

  Now if the page title is something like "How to do bookkeeping for a small business" then you will fully understand what to expect when you visit this page.

1. 1. Description: A meta description is displayed directly under the page URL in search engine results. The description should be approximately 145-155 characters. Again you should incorporate new keywords into the description and ensure the user can understand the page content based on this description.
   2. URL: A page URL Secondly should use hyphens to separate words in the URL. Each URL on your website should be unique and contain 255 characters including the domain name. It should also be informative. Google will give better rankings for websites that use HTTPS URLs. These URLs are considered safer and the website is using an SSL certificate to encrypt data transfer.
2. Consistency, relevancy and content quality: It is important to have the content presented correctly for all types of browsing devices. It is necessary to have quality content that is relevant and well organised. Make sure the content displays correctly on desktop computers, mobile phones and tablet devices. The use of keywords must be carefully incorporate across page content if you overuse keywords then this can look like SPAM content and makes the user experience poor. Additionally, content should be unique for your website and should be free of any grammatical and spelling errors. Never cut and paste content from another website, always write fresh new content in your own words or pay a professional SEO content writer.
3. Structure of the site and the indexability: A good website is one that is very well organised and is inter-linked. Inter-linking ensures users and search engines can navigate your website effectively. It is advisable to have a clear site map for your website which can be submitted to Google for indexing. If there are any broken links on the website, they should be fixed immediately.
4. Page speed: This is one of the most important but difficult things to maintain on the website especially for non-technical users. It has been proven that page speed can affect your conversion rates and rankings. You can ensure a fast page speed by doing the following:
   1. You can either use a CDN or compress images.
   2. You should remove unnecessary JavaScript from the pages.   
   3. Reduce the size of CSS and HTML.
5. User experience: It is our responsibility to provide the best service to our customers and ensure experience when viewing your website is the best possible. To ensure that this happens, it is important to have a clear, well-structured site. Try structure content so users can find what they are looking in less than 3 clicks.
6. Content quantity and diversity: Content is one of the most important elements of a website. Spend the time and effort to creating compelling content which is easy. Ensure you incorporate logical keyword phrases into your content as mentioned above. Use tools like SEO Quake to balance your keyword density. To give you a helping hand take a look at our Quake SEO Plugin Extension Tutorial.

After reading the above information, I am sure it is evident that we don’t always need professionals to handle our work. If we become a little more vigilant and pay attention to the content we create, we can achieve better search engine results.

Take a look at the infographic below created by Captaim for some more useful tips.

(Click to enlarge infographic)

Article created by: DCP Web Designs London