In this digital age, eCommerce marketing is booming, and more and more products and services are sold and promoted through digital channels. One of the most effective eCommerce marketing strategies is search engine optimization(SEO).
So, don’t neglect systemic checks. In our case, that check is a technical search engine optimization audit. How does this examination boost your site’s performance? We have an all-elucidating answer for that.
Why Are SEO Audits Vital?
An SEO spider tool assesses all website pages against multiple SEO best practices. Once the scan is 100% complete, you get an in-depth report on the website’s strengths and weaknesses. And marketers can fine-tune their SEO strategy, focus on high-impact areas, and improve ROI. That, in turn, makes the system note that your website is an excellent info hub that people will enjoy reading.
Enhance Your Site with an Audit: 10 Steps to Take
1. Analyze Google Reports about Your Site’s Success
See the search index and remember that number! It might alter very soon if your audit brings fruits fast. So, take Google’s statistics to clarify the place your website takes. Do not fear seeing some errors, as they are not problems — those are tasks you can solve.
2. Crawl, Crawl, Crawl
The first step (even if it is under #2) in conducting an audit is to check the accessibility of your website pages. The most practical way to attain that is with an SEO spider tool. Crawling means checking if all your pages are working fine and can be visible to search engine bots. Such tools:
- Analyze all resources on each page. That includes CSS, Java scripts, visual materials (for instance, a video), etc.Â
- May extract content;Â
- Crawl different browsers (Google, Bing, etc.)
- Systematize all information. So, the analyst gets ready-made clear reports about the crawling results.Â
- By utilizing Java development services, you can ensure that your site’s crawl ability is optimized, allowing search engines to index your pages effectively.
3. Check If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
Nowadays, people use their phones to search the web more often than laptops. So, if you want your website to be visible in SERP rankings and make the most of your brand marketing strategy, make sure it is mobile-friendly. There are many ways to assess that. The most budget one is opening your site from a couple of mobile devices. If you see that the content can use adaptation to a smaller screen or loads very slowly, it means you need to improve things. Then assess the website with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. It will show if there are any technical problems like wrong font size, unplayable content, etc.
4. Check the Sitemap
A sitemap helps search engine bots find all website pages and assess them better. So, if you don’t have one, it would be best to create one. If you already do, check if the sitemap is up-to-date. The most common format for a sitemap is an XML file that contains links to all website pages.
5. Check How Fast Your Website Loads
You might have the most useful and high-quality content on your website. But if it loads for ages, users will not even get to see that! So, check the loading speed of each page with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. It evaluates the loading speed and provides practical advice on improving the performance. Besides that, it also assesses the mobile version of each page.
Also, remember that your website might become slower when an ad campaign is running. The site’s power must be sufficient to allow thousands of guests to scroll simultaneously!
6. Check If There Is Any Duplicate Content
Duplicate content confuses search engine bots and decreases a website’s ranking in SERP. Moreover, the system stops considering other pages when they resemble. So, you need to check if there are any pages with the same or similar content. The wisest way to do this is by using Copyscape — it will show all instances of duplicate content on the web. But other programs might help you with that. So, you have a wide choice.
7. Analyze Internal Links and Replace/Erase all Broken Ones
Internal links help search engine bots understand the website’s structure and assess its pages better. So, make sure you have enough of those. Also, you need to check if all links are working fine, as broken ones decrease the website’s ranking and negatively influence the UX.
8. Check Meta Tags
Meta tags don’t affect the content users see on a webpage. But they help search engine bots comprehend what each page is about. So, if you have incorrect or missing meta tags, it would be best to change that. Besides the standard tags like title and description, you might also want to add Open Graph tags. They help social media platforms show attractive previews when users share links to your website’s pages.
9. Evaluate the Quality of Your Website’s Content
Even if your website has no duplicate content, technical errors, or other issues, it might still have low rankings. The reason for that is poor-quality content. So, you need to check if the texts are informative, error-free, and easy to read. Besides that, they should be keyword-optimized but not stuffed with those words!
Suppose you have condensed, logical, and readable texts without keywords. You can fix that issue instantly by writing small SEO-optimized recaps of each content piece. Of course, such a solution is temporary. But it gives a sustainable boost until you comprehensively fix the problem.
10. Check the Quality of Your Website’s Backlinks
The number of backlinks is not as crucial as it used to be. But their quality still matters a lot! Check if any links are from low-quality websites, such as link farms. If you find some, eliminate them as they might decrease your website’s ranking. Besides that, you must check if all links are from reliable sources and have the appropriate anchor text.
In Conclusion
So, these are the ten most essential technical SEO audit steps that you need to take to improve your website’s ranking. By following these recommendations, you will make sure that your website has no technical errors. And that is the first step to improving its ranking!
