Several people marketing their products or services online do so through their websites.
In this case, the website they leverage should be discoverable to their target audience. One of the most viable means to ensure that this is the case is by ranking high on the search results of Google. Statistics show that people who are searching for a particular product or service tend to click the first link displayed by this popular search engine. For this reason, you will tend to get more visitors if your website appears on the top spot.
While you may already have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place, you should exert the extra effort to ensure that it is effective. After all, the ranking algorithm of Google gets updated time and again, such that your SEO strategy may no longer be effective as soon as the updates take place. To ensure that your SEO technique is up to par with Google’s ranking algorithm, make sure to audit it. This article tackles the SEO audit process that you need to familiarize yourself with to boost your Google rankings.
Crawl your Website
By default, Google’s ranking algorithm crawls through various websites to analyze its structure and content in search of specific elements that are used to determine the rankings. Thus, in a SEO audit process, the first thing that you need to do is to crawl through your website.
While there are several tools that you can use for this purpose, you may not be able to analyze all the metrics that you need to inspect. In this case, you can also consider a SEO audit service performed by experts in the field to ensure that you don’t miss any of the things that you need to carefully scrutinize. This is more beneficial if you are still in the process of familiarizing yourself with SEO and Google’s ranking algorithm.
Remove Low-Quality Content
A SEO audit process also involves the removal of low-quality content. This step is commonly referred to as content pruning and it often leads to a significant traffic boost. In this case, all you need to do is to remove pages that serve little purpose, as well as the unnecessarily indexed pages. Keep in mind that a tidy site with a good structure will rank higher than a site with enormous content that proves to be irrelevant.
Resolve Technical Issues
You should also take the time to resolve the technical issues of your website. You may want to start by finding indexing errors, alt tag problems, and duplicate content, as well as broken images and links. In this case, you can use various tools where you only need to enter your URL. From there, all the issues that need to be resolved will be displayed.
Identify Speed and Mobile Page Problems
Make sure that you take the time to identify and resolve any speed or mobile page issues because this is another crucial step in a SEO audit process to boost your Google ranking. In this case, you need to ensure that your pages load within a couple of seconds or even lower to ensure that your bounce rate remains minimal. Aside from the page loading speed, you should also test your overall website speed through the use of available tools that only require you to enter the URL of your website.
Alongside this, you also need to evaluate the mobile-responsiveness of your site because this is another factor that can significantly affect your SEO efforts. In this case, you can leverage Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. After keying your URL and running the test through this tool, you will be presented with a result that states whether your website is mobile-friendly or otherwise. From there, you can do the necessary steps to improve your website accordingly.
Test Meta Descriptions
In a SEO audit process, you also need to test your meta descriptions and rewrite them if needed. Meta descriptions are simply information about what your website displays. Make sure to rewrite duplicate meta tags for similar pages in your domain. When you do rewrite, keep them short and straight to the point, while ensuring that they are unique as well. You also need to ensure that all title tags are accounted for, immediately letting your viewers know what your page is about.
Analyze Organic Traffic
The analysis of organic traffic is another essential part of a SEO audit process. In doing so, you may find that most of your traffic may come from long-tail keywords. This means that you need to perform an in-depth analysis of the keywords that drive the most traffic to your site. In this case, you can connect to Google Analytics and use the Search Console to analyze your organic traffic.
Improve On-Page SEO
Make sure to take the time to improve on your content, as well as on your on-page SEO because this is one of the most viable ways to deliver significant results with minimal investment. In this case, you may want to break up your content and add relevant headers. You should also prioritize writing content that your target audience will most likely read. When it comes to your on-page SEO, there are already various tools that can help you check each of the pages of your websites. There is also the option for you to optimize your internal links to enhance your SEO efforts.
To boost your Google rankings, you need to implement an effective SEO strategy. You will be able to do this by performing an audit process to ensure that you will get the results that you hope for. Apart from crawling through your site and removing low-quality content, you also need to ensure that you resolve technical issues, as well as speed and page problems. You also need to test your meta descriptions and analyze your organic traffic. From there, you will be able to improve your on-page SEO and enhance your backlink techniques better. All these are geared towards ensuring that you are implementing the right SEO technique to land on the top spot of Google’s search results.