With the growth of the online business, investment in SEO is constantly increasing. Regular updates to Google’s algorithms force marketing companies to “keep their finger on the pulse” and improve. Competition in the field of SEO services is still gaining momentum. Marketers, developers, optimizers need to constantly look for new ways to improve the quality of your site. It means keeping up with the latest SEO trends by identifying and improving your site’s weaknesses to increase user engagement and rise above your competitors. And this is where SEO audit comes in handy.
Here are some tips on how to effectively conduct an SEO audit and the hottest trends in marketing that rethink this process in 2019 and beyond.
Make sure your site has only one version to view
There may be several addresses in your browser, including:
- http://example.com
- https://example.com
- https://www.example.com
- http://www.example.com
Currently, this is due to the mass transition to HTTPS. Therefore, when enabling SSL / HTTPS, make sure that you have moved all static URL resources. Otherwise, it will still display some of your files via HTTP, and Google will mark them as “dangerous”. In addition, it affects the site’s ranking.
Make sure the site pages are indexed
When your site is indexed, Google reads each page separately. And your goal is to check for pages that the search engine has blocked by mistake. There are a few simple ways to do this:
- Use the site: (for example, site: example.com) operator to view Google pages indexed for your domain.
- Check your robots.txt files to see a list of restrictions on your site. Enter your domain name in a browser and add a robots.txt file to it (for example, https://www.example.com/robots.txt).
- Check your index status. The status of the index in your Google search console will help you check the number of pages indexed by Google.
- Use the Google Search Console to find site and URL errors.
Check the speed of your site
Sites that load slowly usually have high bounce rates, which tell the search engine that your site is not optimized for its users. Google has decided to make this an important ranking factor for mobile searches. Now the speed of loading the page is already a signal of ranking and search. Thanks to this, the speed of the website will remain a critical aspect of SEO. There are numerous tools to help you check your page load, including Pingdom, GTmetrix, and Google PageSpeed statistics.
Some methods to improve the speed of websites:
- minimization of HTTP requests
- reducing server response time
- enable browser caching
- CSS and Javascript compression.
Evaluate your list of backlinks
It is 2018, and now it is more important than ever to adopt the right link-building strategy. Attracting low-quality links to suspicious sites can only damage your rankings. That’s why you need to analyze your backlink profile regularly. Numerous tools help you carefully examine your backlinks, such as Ahrefs, Cognitive SEO, and Majestic SEO.
How optimized is your site for voice search?
The voice recognition industry is growing remarkably fast and expects to exceed $ 601 million by 2019. Although only one-fifth of all Google search queries are voice transmissions, this number expected to increase to 50% by the end of 2020. Voice search will significantly affect keyword targeting, as voice searches base on spoken, human phrases. It is something you should keep in mind when conducting keyword research or auditing existing keywords.
Check your structured data
Google has changed dramatically over time. In the past, our search queries were ten blue records, right? However, today’s issue is very informative and attractive, providing us with relevant information about the site without even clicking on it. This applies to structured data.
Although this has never been a ranking signal, setting them up correctly is extremely important for SEO. For example, rich snippets can increase your clickthrough rate by 30%. When you enter Shema.org or similar structured data formats, perform regular checks to see if these snippets appear on your site.
Find out if you optimize a site for mobile devices
We live in the first mobile era, where mobile users expect to exceed 5 billion by 2019. And to ensure that mobile users are completely satisfied, Google has started indexing mobile versions of websites. If your site does not adapt to the needs of mobile users, your rankings will suffer.
Make sure your site is adaptable and looks excellent. When browsing on a mobile device, it focuses on page load speeds, simplified navigation, UX design, and logical information order. Google’s mobile test can be a great starting point when testing your site’s mobility sensitivity.
By conducting regular SEO audits, you will be able to identify the main problems of your site and fix them before they start causing problems. Most importantly, you will significantly improve the user experience by making the necessary changes and get a high rating on the issue.
Do you need an SEO website audit?