So, in our last blog, we set out to demystify this scary, little understood area in the Digital marketing-Search Engine Marketing (SEO). Now its time to put some of the learning from the last blog to use. Its time for the (dreadful) SEO audit! Don?t worry, we will make it as simple for you. After all we know that most SEO audit are
- Either too technical
- Or takes days to complete
Lets understand why a SEO audit is important. One simple reason! Things change too fast in the digital space. What works today, may not work a few months from now. This makes it necessary to perform a SEO on your site at least 2 times in a year.
Convincing enough? Well then, lets get started.
1.Getting ready to SEO.
First up, make sure there is only one site version that is browseable.
Next, start a website SEO crawl. You can do this by using tools such as Beams Us Up? its free). You will have a detailed report ready once the manual process is complete.
2.Checking Indexing Status
Google is the biggest search engine. And if Google can?t find your website, well then no one can. You can use the Index status report in the Google Search Console to check the number of pages Google has crawled from your domain
Google Search Console?> Google Index > Index Status.
Alternatively, you can simply search the site in google by typing in ?Site:<your domain name>. While this will show how many of your pages have been indexed by Google, it is not going to be as accurate as the Google Search Console report.
3.Securing your site
And HTTPS site is better than the HTTP site. What?s the difference? An HTTPS site is a secured site and Google ranks secured sites better. So go and get that SSL certificate and secure you site. HTTPS provides encrypted communication with a web server. If you are an ecommerce site, then a secured website is a must.
4.Ranking for your brand name
Ideally when you type in your site name in the google search bar, your site should be the first organic one. Until unless you site is a very recent one, or if you have used a generic word as your brand name.
5.On-Site SEO Checklist
Here are a few more factors that you need to take into account in order to ensure your site is optimized.
- Page titles, Descriptions and URL Structure
- The Title and description for each page should be unique and well within the characters limits (70 for the title and approx. 160 for the description. Titles and meta descriptions should be optimized to entice potential customers to click. You also need to make sure that the URL is unique and properly formatted. A good URL includes the keywords, use hyphens(-) to separate the keywords.
- Content- Consistent, Relevant and Quality
- The content on each page has to be unique. It should contain the keyword 3-4 in the nature way. Keyword stuffing is not really encouraged. The content should drive value for the reader and it needs to be relevant to your product, industry and service. Remove any duplicate content from the site.
- Mobile First
- Given that more than 50% of the people now use their mobile devices to search online, a mobile optimized website is a must. Ensure that your web design is a responsive design that adapts to different displays/ devices- mobile, tablet etc.
- Speed matters
- A slow loading page can really bring down your SEO rank as search engines favour faster sites. Use Google PageSpeed insights to check site speed on your mobile and desktop version of the site.
- Links
- Internal and external links are important. Make sure you have the relevant internal linking structure that are valid and easy to follow. External links can help with your website ranking but ensure that you focus on quality backlinks and not low quality spammy links. The links should not be ?broken? as this affects the ?link quality?
- Images
- Search engine bots can?t read or understand an image (yet) so it?s our job to describe images to them using alt text. Therefore, when it comes to an alt text, we check to make sure each image is labeled clearly and concisely.
- XML Sitemaps
- XML sitemaps help with listing of pages with the search engines. This is especially helpful when you have new content that may not have many inbound links pointing to it yet, making it tougher for search engine to find that content.
There you have the basic steps for conducting your site SEO. Not so scary now, is it? If you are still stuck or need the experts to step in then drop us an email on sales@inboundheart.com