SEO Auditing Your Website

When it comes to effectively marketing your website, it is important to keep up with the latest trends and changes in the industry so that your website doesn’t get left behind in the search results. Unfortunately, Google updates its algorithm a few times a year, with many sites falling foul of the latest updates to link building and quality control.

A site ‘health check’ is as important to your online business as a medical or dental check-up is to your health and should be reviewed at a minimum of every six months.

A good website audit should flag up areas of improvement or concern, as well as make it clear what marketing features are working well as that you can carry on and maybe invest more time and money into what is working for you.

SEO Auditing Your Website – Here I will list a few SEO features you should check against to ensure you are targeting the correct areas and are not wasting time or money on areas that bring in very little.

Check your URLs

The structure of the URLs can be significant but often go unnoticed.

A URL that contains something like /index.php/page-5 doesn’t mean anything and almost certainly doesn’t contain any of the keywords that you would like the page to be competitive for. Plus, Google gives more credit to sites with a short and clear URL structure

There are ways to change this to be more friendly, but how to do this depends on how your site is built. It is different for a WordPress website than it would be for a basic HTML website. Please get in touch via the contact form if you want us to take a look and see if your URLs can be improved.

Page Titles And Meta Descriptions

A page title is a very important area of SEO that often gets overlooked or abused by keyword stuffing. I wish I had a pound for every time I have seen a page title as ‘Home’ from business owners wondering why their website isn’t as competitive as they would like!

To check your page titles and meta descriptions, visit your webpage, right-click, and select view page source. Near the top of the page will be some code that starts with the text in between the title tags that look like “. This is what your page title is.

Now think to yourself, does this reflect your services or what you want to be found for in Google?

The text inside the content area is the meta description. Google doesn’t use a meta description for SEO purposes in determining where your site will appear in the search results. Still, it will be the description that your potential customers see and decide if they should visit your website or one of your competitors.

The process of changing this again depends on your website platform. If you would like us to take a look and help with any SEO Auditing on Your Website, please get in touch by giving us a call at 01257 429217.

Evaluate Content Consistency And Quality

After checking the top-level issues with the website, it’s time to dig a little deeper and ensure that the existing content is consistent and high-quality. Website content should be relevant to the industry and its products or services. More importantly, it should be easy to read, so that site visitors are compelled to share it.

Quality content is achievable with the inclusion of organic keywords, a clear message and a call to action. The website should also have a good balance between HTML code (images, video, maps etc.) to text ratio of around 25 – 70%, which search engines and spiders use to determine the relevancy of a page.

Text is readable information by Google to determine the page’s relevancy against the search performed. However, the code is data that is invisible to Google. It knows that an image is there but has no real idea what is contained in the image. Things like ORCs (optical character reading) and ratios of colours on an image help Google guess what is on an image, and they can block things in this way (graphic porn images, for example, based on the ratio of skin colour pigment in the image!), but it isn’t perfect!

Although a ranking factor, it could point out issues with your website — like speed. Too many images can cause a delay in the loading of your website.

Website Speed!

There is not much more off-putting than visiting a website and waiting for an age for it to load!

A good website will deliver a webpage within 2 seconds with anything more than that increasing drop-off rate to the page and losing customers.

There are many website speed tests available for free on the internet, and Google Analytics has a speed test that also offers recommendations on increasing the website’s speed.

Image optimisation is usually the first issue highlighted, but others include the reduction of unnecessary plugins and extensions, minifying CSS and javascript files and caching.

Increasing the speed of a website can become quite technical, so if you are uncomfortable doing it yourself or would like any help or advice, please feel free to contact us.

Check your keywords

When starting SEO, many times, the keywords that are being targeted are ones that the business owner has come up with and are what they think they need to be competitive WRONG.

More often than not, the terms you use to describe your business or service will not be the same as a person performing a Google search. As a result, there tends to be a leaning towards more technical terms that may be correct but are unknown or not relatable to the average Google user who may be looking for your services.

Tools such as Google’s free webmaster tools (search console) provide valuable information on what keywords people use to find your website, along with the average position your website appears for when people type these terms in. Keyword planner in the Google Adwords system is also good to start planning a keyword list.

Again, please contact us using the contact form if you need help or have questions.