If you have an online presence with your business , the SEO concept is not unknown to you. Although you do not know exactly what it means, if you know that it is important to appear in the search results of your clients . Google continually updates its algorithms so it ‘s important that you do a basic SEO audit of your site to see if you can be safe from penalties . On the other hand, it is always good to know what aspects we urgently need to correct so that Google does not send us to the “Narnia” of searches.
What is a basic SEO audit?
Table of Contents
It is a preliminary examination of a website to analyze the state of the main points on which search engine spiders are based to crawl and index our pages . The analysis will be focused on discovering the aspects that can help us improve our position in the search results. The more optimized these aspects are, the happier the bot will be with our website and therefore will give us greater visibility in the SERPs .
Points to follow in a basic SEO audit
Indexing
The very first thing is to know what the spider has saved from your site in its index. How do you know this? Easy. Type in the browser bar “site: yourdomain.com” (.es, .net, .eu, the domain extension you have). All the pages that are indexed on your website will appear . The fundamental thing you should look at is that the essential pages are indexed and unindexed, which does not make any sense, that they are visible as a contact, cookie law, privacy policy, thank you page, cart … If you have indexed this type of results You must put them noindex so as not to lose tracking budget that must be invested in your services, products or blog posts . It may also be that you find indexed pages of demo content orlorem ipsum which you must immediately remove from your website and delete your url using the S earch Console (to speed up the deindexing process).
Domain
Is your domain correct? Does it include your keyword? Is it easy to remember?
Keywords
Check that the keywords we are using are the right ones and those that are bringing us traffic. To find out what keywords are making us rank the most effective is to go to our Search Console section of Search Traffic> Search Analytics . There we will see them ordered by number of clicks, impressions, CTR and position in the SERP’s.
Titles and meta descriptions
The titles of your pages and blog posts should not exceed 65 characters so that they do not appear cut in the SERP’s with an ellipsis. They must also contain the keyword as far to the left as possible.
Meta descriptions previously had a maximum length of 155 characters . With the last update of the algorithm it has gone to 300 . In it you must also have included your keywords.
Contents
All the content on your site (both service or product pages and blog posts) must exceed 300 words to avoid being penalized as thin content or poor content . Although there are several opinions on the subject, an optimal content would be around 900 words. Keywords should be repeated around 0.5% to 1% of the total content . Being very important the presence of the same in the first paragraph of the text.
Images
Optimized and with alt attributes with keywords.
Url
The urls of your pages must have a maximum of five words and not contain strange characters. In addition they must also include the keyword.
Duplicate content
It is very important in a basic SEO audit to check the internal duplicate content of your website. The optimal percentage is not to exceed 5-7% of your website . To check how much internal duplicate content you have you can use the Siteliner tool . On the other hand, we have to know if we are copying or have been copied content because it is also a penalizable aspect . To do this, use Copyscape .
You should check that there are no two versions of your website which is a very common mistake . That is to say that both if you put your address with www as if you put it without them, the page that is shown redirects to the version that you have defined as the main one.
Bound
Both internally, making sure that we link our contents with coherence and optimal anchor texts , and externally, monitoring the quality of the incoming links and disavowing them if necessary . It is also important to test that we do not have broken links that lead to 404 errors or pages that do not exist.
Sitemap.xml and Robots.txt
Check that we have both . Sitemap where the urls that we want to index appear and Robots.txt where we specify the pages that we want to block the search engine.
Loading speed
This last aspect that I mention is one of the most important of a basic SEO audit. The loading speed has to do with points such as the server you use, the optimization of the images, the javascript / CSS code of your website, and the redirects you have. A good tool to assess your status is GTmetrix . Create a user account to establish an analysis from the closest point that would be London.
conclusion
These are the basic aspects that you have to take into account when performing a basic SEO audit. You must make a checklist and check what things you can solve by yourself and in what things you will need the help of a professional in the field due to its complexity. Aspects such as traffic drops or inexplicable sales will require the help of an expert who is capable of identifying possible penalties. This is so because the only penalty Google will warn you about is the one carried out manually by a user . The rest you will have to guess by yourself.
