Large images on your website can seriously impact your site speed and performance. Ideally, you want to display images in the smallest possible size and in an appropriate format, such as WebP. Canonical tags are an important part of SEO, mainly because Google doesn’t like duplicate content.
Well, that’s it for my answer to your question: What is an SEO audit?
If you want to prioritize fixes, sort the report by estimated organic traffic from high to low. If these pages have backlinks, they are effectively wasted because they point to nothing. Mobile-friendliness has been a Google ranking factor since 2019, so it makes sense to check if your website is mobile-friendly.
What’s an SEO audit and why are they so important?
So if you tell a search engine not to crawl and/or index certain URLs or even your entire site by accident, that’s what will happen. An audit involves analyzing all elements of your site to make sure that you have not missed out on anything that could be hindering the optimization process. In many cases, some minor changes can improve your ranking significantly. So check that you’re not making the mistake of targeting the wrong keywords with your web pages, starting with the most important ones first. Learn more in our full guide to finding and fixing broken links (and backlinks).
I’ve dealt with an SEO penalty before, and reassessing keyword targeting was one of the key strategies that helped me recover my rankings. In my case, I realized I had been unknowingly over-optimizing some pages with the same keywords, causing them to compete with each other. This keyword cannibalization confused Google about which page to rank, diluting their visibility. I helped a SaaS project recover from an SEO penalty in 8 months—without using the disavow tool (which I don’t recommend anymore). Instead, I focused on building high-quality backlinks to create a healthy link profile.
Of course, the results you get will vary based on which option you choose. (Here at Bruce Clay Inc., we spend up to 160 hours preparing, delivering, and following up on each audit.) SEO expertise is not a core competency of many businesses. With an SEO audit, you can discover what is wrong and what you need to improve. With it, you can make your website SEO Anomaly better and more visible to Google leading to more traffic and conversion. Difficulty shows us how hard or easy is to rank while traffic shows us how many people search for that term during one month.
- You can tweak the timeframe to see your organic traffic performance over a longer time period.
- It is used to automatically redirect a webpage to a different URL.
- That’s more than annoying if you have a website with tens, hundreds or even thousands of pages.
- While you can create these on your own, it’s much easier and more efficient to use managed solutions, like a privacy policy generator.
- While competitors steadily capture organic traffic, conversions, and market share, your team…
A misconfigured robots.txt file is a common issue for on-site search engine optimization which is a highly important SEO audit template item to analyze during the auditing process. Connect with him on LinkedIn or through the BruceClay.com website. This type of SEO refers to making sure the backend elements of a page are optimized for search crawlers. An on-page SEO audit would include checking meta descriptions, meta titles, image alt text and compression, and more.
This is the entry-level audit suitable for beginners or those with limited resources. It focuses on fundamental issues like meta tags, keyword optimization, and site speed. A basic audit is a great starting point, ensuring your website’s essential SEO elements are in place. This can be done through various methods that include everything from robots.txt files to sitemaps.
An SEO audit enables you to examine your site’s overall performance. While most SEO audit services are “one and done,” our iterative approach allows us to make shifts and changes as we progress toward the end goal of your website optimization. Keep in mind when we perform the SEO audits, we are often making iterative suggestions as we find the most problematic errors in our review. All these tools and more come together to help us understand your current SEO position – and your potential for the future. Finally, there’s GT Metrix, another handy technical analytics tool. With it, we can analyze which pages of your website are slow, figure out why they’re slow, and make recommendations so you can make them faster.