It may come as a surprise, but your website can deteriorate over time. Ongoing maintenance is a must if you want it to perform well in search engines and provide your clients with a good user experience.
Performing regular site audits is the best way to discover issues and resolve them. This is a critical function in the overall search engine optimization (SEO) strategy of your site.
The good news is, you can learn how to do a website audit yourself. To help you get started, we’re going over some of the essential steps.
Acquire the Right Tools
When auditing your site, you’ll need to run it through a program designed to find errors. There are plenty of high-quality tools available.
Investing in premium technology results in reliable results. They also come with added features that make tracking and reporting a breeze.
However, there are also other affordable options, such as finding a Fiverr SEO gig that includes auditing. Look for something that allows you to audit your site and also research keywords.
Pinpoint Technical Problems
There’s a good chance your site has many technical issues that negatively affect SEO performance. Once you plug your site into your auditing tool, you’ll get a list of problems.
Some things that should cause concern are slow load times, broken images, and bad links. All these things can hurt your site’s ranking potential.
You may see crawl errors, which refer to pages on your site that search engines can’t index. An audit tool will also determine whether your site is mobile-friendly.
Spot On-Page SEO Weaknesses
In addition to backend problems, a site audit will highlight issues with on-page elements. These are things that need your attention in order to strengthen the SEO value of your site.
You may see things like duplicate or missing title tags and alt text. Meta descriptions that are too long or short will also show up.
The great thing about these issues is you can fix most of them yourself. You’ll need to educate yourself on SEO best practices to ensure you make the appropriate changes.
Focus on Content
The content on your site has a huge impact on your search engine rankings. An audit will expose problem areas such as pages that aren’t ranking well and duplicate content.
Pages that aren’t ranking well most likely need to get a rewrite along with new keyword phrases. This is your opportunity to target new keywords you’d like to rank for.
Duplicate content can result in Google penalizing your site. If the audit turns up duplicate content, those pages need to get rewritten or removed immediately.
A Final Report
Once your site audit is complete, the program you use should generate a final report. Use this to ensure you make all the necessary changes.
Getting a digital copy of the report allows you to share it with your web team. They can then use the report as a checklist and complete the most severe issues first.
Learn How to Do a Website Audit Today
The faster you fix the hidden problems on your website, the faster it will start ranking higher. Take the first step and learn how to do a website audit right away. Use this article as a jumping-off point and get started now.
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