For digital marketing specialists, the first step before creating a SEO strategy is conducting an in-depth SEO audit for your business website. This audit gives us the chance to assess the strong and weak points of the site, helping us tailor the best strategy for optimal results.
A website SEO audit is a complex and technical set of activities, involving:
1. Crawling Your Website
Using specialized software, our SEO specialists will crawl your website in the same manner as Google does. At the end of this test, we will have a report including the findings of the software such as:
- The crawlability of the site, expressed as a percentage
- How many pages have HTTPS
- Internal linking insights
- Site performance
- Core Web Vitals values
The data in the report will determine our next actions, such as:
- Correcting crawling errors
- Improving page load speed
- Enabling HTTPS across the entire site
- Re-submitting the sitemap to Google
2. Checking for Indexing Issues
After crawling a website, Google indexes it – this means that it stores and organizes the information found on your site to use it for suggesting results to searches. In some cases, you do not want Google to index some pages and specify it in the robots.txt file,
However, there are situations when Google cannot index pages correctly and this means that they are excluded from search results. Using the Google Search Console tool, you can see which pages are not indexed and the reason for it.
SEO experts can fix the errors signaled by Google and re-submit the site for indexing.
3. Finding Obsolete and Thin Content Pages
Websites that have been online for several years may still have pages containing old and irrelevant content. Typically, these pages are:
- Landing pages for expired promotional offers
- Pages for discontinued products
- Old news articles
- Articles containing information that has since been disproven or refuted
There are also pages from the early stage of your website, when you were still learning how to build the online presence of your business. These pages contain thin content (under 300 words).
Both thin and obsolete content affects your website ranking potential. Thus, the SEO audit of your website focuses on finding and deleting these pages.
4. Finding Google Penalties against Your Website
Many clients request a SEO audit when they notice a significant drop in organic traffic. One of the reasons for this issue is that Google imposed a penalty through a manual action.
There are 14 types of violations that trigger manual actions, including:
- User-generate spam
- Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing
- Cloaking and/or sneaky mobile redirects
- Unnatural links to and from your website
- Structured data issue
Some of these issues are caused by a security breach (website hacking) which gave a third-party access to your site. Our team of specialists can help regain control over the site, removing all malicious links/ content.
If you notice a sudden and unexplained drop in daily traffic to your site, you should contact our digital marketing specialists for assistance.
5. Checking for Structured Data Errors
Structured data help Google understand the different elements of a web page and even helps your site qualify for rich results – carousels, images, videos and other non-textual content displayed on a Google search result page. Studies show that rich results can increase the click-through rate by up to 10%.
This is why a SEO audit of your website will also include the analysis of the structured data, to identify and fix any errors.
Let Our SEO Specialists Audit and Update Your Website!
The SEO experts EverConvert leave nothing to chance when it comes to analyzing and updating your site to meet all the Google criteria for ranking. After conducting the SEO audit, we will present our findings and recommended actions.
Once we set to work, you will start seeing measurable results – more clicks and more clients. Call us today to schedule your initial appointment with our SEO specialists!
