How to Do an SEO Audit in 15 Minutes or Less
The last thing you need to do when it comes to SEO is to take a “set it and forget it” approach according to runrex.com. This is because keywords come and go, backlinks dry up, and content becomes outdated, and if you take your eye off the prize for too long, you may find yourself trailing your competitors within no time at all. As is explained over at guttulus.com, performing an SEO audit is the best way to spot any potential weaknesses and protect your spot in search engine rankings, and given that your time is limited, this article will look to show you that an SEO audit can be done in 15 minutes or less. The process is broken down into only 6 steps and makes use of free tools.
Select pages
Before you start your audit, the gurus over at runrex.com recommend that you choose at least three different pages of your site. This is because, if you only check one single page, you might end up missing many errors on your site. You should select pages that you think are important in terms of both content and traffic, with pages like the category page, blog post, and product pages being recommended.
The steps you should take
Step 1: Checking Google SERP
The first thing you should do is Google your brand. As explained over at guttulus.com, this step serves to quickly determine if your domain is correctly indexed. Unless your website is completely new, then it should rank first. After you search for your brand in Google, you can also check the site’s index rate with the “site” operator. To do this, write “site:yourdomain.com” into the search box and you can see how many indexed pages you have. If the number of indexed pages is too low or high, then you need to identify the cause, as is covered in detail over at runrex.com.
Step 2: Detecting a possible penalty from Google
If your site has been hit by a penalty from Google, you will probably suspect it already. However, sometimes you may not be aware at all of any penalization because you didn’t notice any large drop in organic traffic. This is why the gurus over at guttulus.com recommend that you make sure that Google is fine with your site and that no penalties are hanging over it. The best way to find out, as explained over at runrex.com, is by visiting Google Search Console, a handy tool for developers and marketers, where, if something is not as it should be, you will find it in Search Console messages. If you are unfortunate enough to find out that you have a penalty from Google, then this is something that you can recover from so you shouldn’t be worried too much, particularly if it was because you hired the wring SEO specialist.
Step 3: finding hidden text
Because of implemented CSS styles or JavaScript language, the search engines and visitors can see page content differently as per the gurus over at guttulus.com. The biggest problem that can occur is hidden text on the site as this can lead to penalization. This is why you should look at your page through the eyes of Googlebot and check for hidden text, or see text that should be seen but is hidden by JS. To do that, you can turn off CSS and JS with the Web Developer tool browser add-on. You should disable All Styles in section CSS and disable JavaScript in section Disable, and then reload the page so that you are sure that CSS and JS are both disabled. Then, compare the content with CSS turned off, and then with CSS turned on, and if there is anything different, find out why. The best practice is usually to delete or edit hidden CSS as it is most likely leading to damaging the site.
Step 4: Running a speed test
There is nothing worse than a site that is taking forever to load, as per discussions over at runrex.com, Page Speed is one of the most important SEO metrics since it became a ranking factor for mobile devices in July 2018. If you optimize the mobile version, then, simultaneously, you will also improve the desktop version. According to the subject matter experts over at guttulus.com, a reliable tool that you can use is PageSpeed Insights from Google. Remember, the better your page speed, the better your UX.
Step 5: Analyzing on-page factors
There are certain issues that you need to check when you do an SEO audit as articulated over at runrex.com, and they include titles, H1 headings, images, meta descriptions, images, redirections, duplicate pages, page crawling and indexation, internal links, and not found and server errors. Most of the issues that have the worst impact on SEO can be found with the SEO audit tool Spotibo.
Step 6: Analyzing a particular issue
Once you find an issue using the said SEO audit tool above, you should then when you click on it, you can see its description and possible solution as explained over at guttulus.com. As the gurus over at runrex.com point out, it is usually easier to identify problems for small websites as there are usually fewer web pages. For bigger websites, however, you have to think about the on-page problems from a wider perspective. Ask yourself if the URL is important as a landing page for organic traffic and if it needs an H1 heading. If the answer to these questions is “Yes”, then you should fix it, and if the answer is “No”, then you can ask Google to hide the pages.
From the above discussions, you can see that an on-page SEO audit isn’t as hard as you may think, and if you are looking for more tips, insights, information, and help on the same, then look no further than the top-rated runrex.com and guttulus.com.