The First Steps of Your SEO Audit
An SEO audit helps us to evaluate the current state of any website and create a roadmap for improvements that need to be done. When you are working for your clients, you can check where a client is succeeding and where it is failing to manage its website.
The SEO audit helps you determine the problems with a client’s website and what you need to do to fix them. Moreover, a good SEO audit keeps your website updated with the latest updates in search marketing.
Unlike the offline marketing, SEO audit is a part of digital marketing. In offline marketing we contact the offline marketing agencies like Signwriters Brisbane for advertising. However, you need to contact a professional SEO agency to conduct an SEO audit for your website.
What is an SEO Audit?
SEO audit is the process of determining the search engine friendliness of a website in a variety of areas. An SEO auditor checks your website and comes up with a number of issues that needs to be fixed. The auditor also makes recommendations on what needs to be done to improve the performance of the website on search engines.
Here are the first steps that you need to take while creating an SEO audit report.
Only one version of your site should be accessible
You should check that only one version of your website is accessible. For example, one can type a website URL in many ways.
- http://yourdomain.com
- http://www.yourdomain.com
- https://yourdomain.com
- https://www.yourdomain.com
Only one of these versions should be accessible to open in a web browser. All the other versions should be 301 redirected to a canonical version.
Website crawler
An SEO crawler scans your website in the same way as Google and provides us with some useful information on the website’s current structure and SEO setup. There are many SEO audit tools that can crawl your website. For example, Beam Us Up is a free SEO audit tool which is quite helpful in auditing a website.
Are your web pages indexed?
If your website is not being indexed in the Google, it will not get any rankings on the search engines. You need to check whether your site is being indexed or not. A simple and easy way to check the indexing of your website is to type site: URL into the Google search bar and hit enter. You can also enter the URL of a page to check whether it is being indexed or not.
If you don’t see any results in this search, it means there are issues and you are not receiving any organic traffic. You need to fix the problem to get your site indexed and rank it on search engines.
Using Robots.txt
The robots.txt file sends instructions to the search engine indexing robots about how to treat the content on your website and individual pages. You can specify the pages or directories and how they should be treated by search engines robots while indexing. You need to enter your domain name in a web browser followed by /robots.txt. For example, https://www.spiderseocompany.com/robots.txt and press enter to see the list of disallows for a spiderseocompany.
Using Robots Meta tag
The robots meta tags are placed in the header of a web page. You don’t need to use both the meta tags and tobot.txt to stop the indexing of a page. For example, if you have used the robots.txt file to disallow Google from indexing the pages, you don’t need to use the robots meta tag.
Using robots meta tags, you can tell the search engines, which links on a page they should not follow for the search engine optimization. You can use the robots meta tag like this
<meta name=”robots” content= “noindex, follow”/>
The robots meta tag allows you to use a page-specific approach to control, how a particular page should be indexed and shown to users in the search results.
XML sitemaps
When you create a new page on your website, you want it to be quickly found and indexed by the search engines. Here you need the extensible markup language (XML) sitemap to register the new web page on the search engines.
The XML tells the search engines about all the pages listed on your website and also the content on those pages. XML also determines how often you update the content on your website. This makes it easy for Google to find the content on your website when a visitor tries to search it on the search engines.
To rank your website high on search engines, you should get an XML sitemap and register with the tools like Google search console and Bing webmaster. This makes Google and Bing search engines to locate the sitemap and index the new web pages easily.
Code to Text Ratio
The search engines and spiders use the code to text ratio to determine the relevancy of a web page. A webpage with high code to text ratio has more chances of getting a high page rank on the search engine result pages (SERPs). An aspect ratio should be minimum 10% for text and 90% or less for HTML. Ideally, the more text you have on a web page, the better it will rank on the search engine result pages.
Google analytics
The analytics of your website (Google analytics) comprise vital points that show the traffic on individual pages, time spent on the website, bounce rate, and much more. Moreover, it is also important to track your keywords to determine which keywords are bringing most of the traffic on your website. It is important to know which keywords are important for your web pages to rank your site higher on the search engines. The relevant keywords need to be used in the titles, meta tags, meta descriptions and also in subheadings to improve your SEO and increase the ranking of your website.
Final words
Indexing of your website is vital for it to rank well on the search engines. Indexing makes it possible for the search engines to find your web pages and content. All your search engine optimization techniques work only when your content is visible to search engines. Offline marketing also help to improve online reputation through site signage banners design, printed cloth. So, checking the indexing should be on the top of the priority list while conducting an SEO audit for your website.
