It contributes to your site’s ranking and sends a signal to the user that they can trust your site. If you don’t have a lot of experience diving into the backend of your website, you might consider consulting a web expert to secure your site. Now you have to use it in your content if you aren’t already. (Well, almost there.) Most SEO audits take place on desktop, but doing a few quick mobile checks can make the difference between ranking or not. Download the free Google Quality Rater Tool and get the kinds of insights on your content that actually improve your rankings. For competitive keywords, the small details often make the difference.
For custom sites, work with a developer to implement responsive design principles. I’ve seen this issue most often on newly launched websites that haven’t standardized their URL structure. But if you find a page that should be indexed but isn’t, fix the issue by following Google’s guidelines. Open the tool and head to the “Pages” report from the sidebar.
Issues with title tags
But if there are lots of redirected links for specific URLs, you could use a plugin SEO Anomaly like “Better Search Replace” to find and replace them all at once. For users, it’s going to stand out more when they are scanning the page. But if you have blank header tags — or header tags with images in between (which are basically also blank) — then you might lose the snippet. So I’d recommend filtering the sheet to only show images that are missing alt text and included in at least one post. Clicking on “Search” and then checking “Enable advanced filters” allows us to filter the sheet to show only images which are currently used as the featured image. This is why the first thing I did was fill in alt text for all featured images.
Putting Your SEO Audit Into Action
Pay close attention to whether responsive web design works correctly, meaning your site adapts to various screen sizes. Review CTAs and forms to confirm they are accessible and functional on mobile devices, especially ensuring buttons are easy to tap and forms are simple to fill out. Document any issues you find so they can be addressed during your site updates. SEO audit tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush can audit your backlink profile. The results show a list of spammy backlinks and links from irrelevant websites with low authority. If spammy websites link to you, there’s an option in Google Search Console to disavow these links.
Factors That Determine Rankings
- Thus, it’s important to eliminate long redirects on your site.
- SEM allows you to capture traffic from the high-visibility paid spots while also working to rank for more specific, less competitive variations of the keyword.
- The robots meta tag lets you use a granular, page-specific approach to controlling how an individual page should be indexed and served to users in search results.
Still—whenever possible, you should make sure all your pages are as optimized as possible for keywords that will help them show up in organic search. Unless you’re auditing your own site, IA-based recommendations should hinge on the goals of project stakeholders. To which pages/parts of the site are they trying to push users? Your target audience and business goals will inform the way you define and organize content. This type of SEO audit will involve on-page efforts like image optimization but largely refers to performance metrics like site speed and security. A technical SEO audit will identify opportunities to fix, eliminate, or reorganize code, prevent spam, switch from HTTP to HTTPS, and more.
