While a professional digital marketing consulting team can help you conduct a full SEO audit of your website, there are some steps you can take yourself if you are looking to do an audit of your own.
1. Perform a Site Crawl
A site crawl is a process where a “site crawler” gathers information from across your website by following its links and traveling more profound into your website. This information helps tell search engines what your site is about and whether searchers will benefit from it it.
Performing a site crawl on your website helps you identify any potential issues you may have missed when publishing your pages, such as setting them to “no index” which blocks search engines from crawling and indexing your page. This process can also point out broken links and page errors that could be causing issues.
2. Check to See if Your Site is Indexed
Once you’ve taken the time to crawl your site, you’ll also want to take a moment to check and see if your site is indexed. This can be as simple as going to Google and entering “site:your website” into the search bar and hitting enter. The number of search results shared will tell you how many of your pages have been indexed by Google.
If you want a more detailed look, however, then you’ll want to go ahead and check out Google Search Console. You’ll want to make sure you cross-check your number of indexed pages with the pages found during your site crawl, as this will help you find missing pages that could be causing you some troubles.
3. Manually Perform On-Page SEO Check
When creating your content, you want to make sure you use digital marketing best practices, such as keyword optimization. This is the process of using the best keywords strategically throughout your content to help it rank in search engines. Once you’ve done your keyword research, you’ll want to make sure you are optimizing your content/page with the best keywords possible by including them in your:
- Blog/Page title
- Meta description
- In your H2 HTML tags
- Throughout the body of your text
4. Check Your Page’s Meta Information
When you’re confident that your on-page SEO is on track, you want to go through each of your pages and check each piece of your meta information. Meta information or “Metadata” helps define your content and tell search engines what your content is about.
The most frequently used metadata includes your:
- Meta Title: When it comes to SEO best practices, you want to pay careful attention to how you name your page. You want to make sure you use the right keywords to rank accordingly. For example: “Apple Pie Recipes • Recipes for the Fall • Your Brand Name” Your keyword is included at the beginning, telling site crawlers precisely what the page is about, allowing it to rank accordingly.
- Meta Descriptions: Tells search engines/viewers what your page is about. If your page is about the best apple pie recipes, then your description may read: “Looking for the ultimate list of apple pie recipes for the fall? Then look no further! Here are five recipes that we know you’ll love!”
- Meta Keywords: this describes what your page is about. For example, “Apple Pie, Recipes” for a page about apple pie recipes.
5. Check for Thin/Duplicate Content
Google does not favor “thin” or duplicate content because it’s considered rehashed and generally not valid for those searching the web.
So, if you find content that can be upgraded or done away with, mark it as such and remove these pages as necessary. For thin content, take the time to update it with relevant content that is up to date with current data that readers could benefit from.
