Audits may not sound very exciting but there's something quite satisfying in discovering some issue that is stopping a website from performing as well as it should. The biggest problem with audits is that they can take up a lot of your time and everyone has their own system, a checklist or process to follow when doing an SEO audit.
And that's good but it also means you may be missing things that aren't on your checklist. Auditing your checklist, if you like, is an important regular job to make sure your website checks don't miss anything. Problems occur that might not have been around when you made your checklist – Google Authorship was one thing that came up then went away.
So auditing your checklist or processor system is a key part of a successful SEO audit. And here are some simple tips you may have missed originally.
#1: Check status codesStatus codes can easily be forgotten but can have a major impact on a website. For example, are your 404 pages returning the right 404 statuses? Are your redirects showing as 301 codes? Does the website have a lot of redirects and are they are necessary and functioning? There are lots of ways to check these codes – one example is a Chrome plugin called Redirect Path. This lets you check codes and redirectors as well as flagging any potential issues.
Duplicate pages are a common issue with the homepage being the one most likely to cause problems. This can be both a duplicate page and PageRank issue – most sites have a 'home' link to check for this one. Then look at the rest of the site for duplicate content. Tools should look for duplicate titles and meta description tags rather than the content itself.
Whether you have the 'www' at the front of your website or not is one issue to check and ensure Google knows which is your preferred option. Then there are the issues of adding SSL to the site, ensuring the website starts with https://. Some sites can end up with four versions of itself due to this. Moz's toolbar can help to see which site gets the best link signals and then you can set this up as the primary version.
A conversion page is somewhere a user goes after they have done something. It might be a thank you page after signing for an email opt-in or an order complete page after a transaction. These don't want to show on search results but can do if they are old legacy pages so have a tidy up to make sure none of these are hanging around and causing confusion. Or worse, allowing people to download your stuff for free and without giving their email address.
Orphaned pages are those pages that aren't connected to anything else and were forgotten during a redesign or a change. Pages or posts that aren't linked to anything else won't help the SEO profile of the website while old pages that no longer serve their purpose and are disconnected from anything else are also making things seem messy. So, either get them adopted into a family and connected to other content or remove them if they are no longer relevant.
The sitemap is a crucial tool to help you see what the search engines see. Sitemaps can tell you about redirects, 404 pages or links that point to canonical as opposed to canonical links can all show problems as Google won't index these pages. So study the sitemap to see what Google sees and make sure it is all correct. Also, watch out for site search results to ensure they are blocked as Google doesn't want to index these.
Robots.txt is the usual way to block pages from a search but that page can still drive organic traffic if Google thinks it is relevant to a user's query. So if you really don't want the page to show up, use the no, index tag or X-Robots-tag to ensure it doesn't show up. You may want to work with a developer for this if you are a little unsure how this works.
If you would like to improve your technical SEO skill sets & help to build effective marketing campaigns, then please refer to digital marketing training courses in London.
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