Make the Most of Your Next SEO Audit
Search engine optimization is more important that ever before. With pending updates from Google as part of their Page Experience Update and search results becoming more personalized, conducting a proper SEO audit for your website can help you stay ahead of the curve.
An SEO audit can help you:
Update and optimize your titles, headings, and meta descriptions on all pages of your site. These are the elements that are most important to search engines. They will help search engines determine what your page is about when they read your content. You need to make sure that the title, heading tags, and meta descriptions include relevant keywords related to what the page is about.
Make sure that you have good page content on all pages of your site. This includes using the right amount of keywords in a natural manner so that search engine spiders can read this text and determine if it’s relevant to a user’s query.
Make sure that you have the right sitemap.xml file as well as an XML Sitemaps for Google to use. Upload your XML Sitemap to Google Console.
Update your site metadata and crawl all the pages of your site. The two most important elements here are your meta description and canonical tag. The meta description is the text below a link, such as in this example:
SEO Software
The “title” element in this example is the meta description text that appears under that link when you click on it:
And the “content” element in this example is the actual page content:
If this were a real SEO audit, you would also check for pages that don’t have any description or no description at all. You can then add your own snippet meta description and title where appropriate. This will help your site be more search engine friendly.
The canonical tag is another critical piece of information you need to include in your webmaster tools account. Your sitemap should point to an index page, and your index page should contain the canonical tag.
A canonical tag tells search engines which URL they should use for search results when someone queries your site. If all of the pages on your site point to a single URL (the index page in this case), then search engines will use that one URL for results instead of the URLs at any other pages on your site. This is important because it helps search engines determine what kind of content is indexed on your website. If you have multiple URLs pointing to the same content, but with different numbers in place of “/”, like in these examples:
URL = http://www.example.com/index.html
URL = http://www.example.com/index2.html
Check the markup and content at the page level and see if you have any duplicate meta information or faulty code that might cause issues with how Google spiders or displays your content. You want to make sure that you fix any issues like this before it causes problems in search results.
These suggestions are a few things to look at when conducting a simple SEO audit that you can run on your website. There are certainly more complex ways to do an audit, but this gives you the basics of what you should be looking for. If your website is not currently optimized for search engines, there are tools that can help you figure out how to get started. And of course, consider using an SEO agency who can elevate your organic rankings! The most important thing is to get started with your SEO audit as soon as possible and take action on the results of that audit.
