You can use the Index Status report in Search Console to see which version of your site’s URLs are canonicalized. “Best prep schools in ma” will yield some nice resource lists that may or may not already feature your client, and that represent good opportunities to reach out for external links. The thing is, there are so many facets to SEO that this process can become overwhelming, fast. We’ve simplified the SEO audit into 10 core steps in this post, but if you have a large website, you might also consider separating out your SEO audits into categories.
Get a comprehensive SEO audit with a specific checklist on how to optimize your website and hit Google’s first page.
- But, if your website features more than 100 pages, your audit could require more than 45 days.
- While high-quality, search-engine-optimized content is a great way to boost your traffic numbers, it’s what happens once those visitors are on your website that really counts.
- Do they contain session IDs and/or include tons of dynamic parameters?
- Your title tags and meta descriptions are your first chance to impress people in search results.
Consistency in quality over time is your best ally for regaining rankings and trust. This final step in your SEO audit can help you to understand—without any additional tools—the general health of your website, technical SEO errors, content duplication and so much more. There are two common types of page redirects; a 301 redirect which is permanent and a 302 redirect which is temporary.
Once the crawl is complete, you’ll get SEO Anomaly an overall optimization score, along with subscores for “Tech. The crawl stats report is a hidden gem that gives you an insight into how Google is crawling your website. The most important things to look out for in this report are spikes or gaps in crawl requests, download size and response times.
The challenge is that search engines try to be secretive about how the algorithms work, leading SEOs to rely on trial and error to understand what works best. That said, the SEO community has gleaned many insights, which is why the Google Algorithm Leak of 2024 was not Earth-shattering. In simple terms, when you search for something online, search engines sift through their index to find relevant pages.
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PPC, on the other hand, is a form of paid advertising where you pay for clicks. While there are different types of PPC, with search engine PPC, you bid for your website’s placement at the top of SERPs. These are the sponsored results you often see above the organic listings. PPC allows you to buy immediate visibility, making it a fast-track option for driving traffic to your site. Your pages should each have unique titles, headings, and meta descriptions that include unique keywords describing their content. It’s important that every page you have targets unique keywords because if they target the same keywords, Google won’t know which one to show in search results.
For example, if you have a page with strong external backlinks, linking internally from that high-authority page to weaker ones can pass authority and help those pages rank better. While log files offer the most detailed view of search engine interactions, even a quick check in Crawl Stats helps you spot issues you might otherwise miss. Google handles JavaScript in three steps (crawling, rendering, and indexing) using an evergreen Chromium browser. However, rendering delays (from minutes to weeks) and limited resources can prevent important content from getting indexed.
People will bail on your pages if they take too long to load, so you’ll want to optimize your site speed to give your audience a good experience. If you have a majority of short-tail keywords, which only contain one or two words, you’ll want to rethink your strategy. You can drive more valuable leads by using long-tail keywords for your campaign. The average web visitor can’t spot these off-page factors, and it’s difficult to identify them manually.
Your meta title is the text that appears as the blue link in search engines. An optimized meta title can improve your organic rankings and increase the CTR for users. Each page should have a unique title that includes the topic (or keyword) that that page is meant to target. Performing an SEO audit regularly helps maintain your website’s health and search visibility.
Now, I run a pretty tight ship with the blog, and this was admittedly only a minor issue. But I see many businesses, big and small, with more severe problems. Raven is by far the most superior and comprehensive toolset we found to date.
Because so many users are searching from phones or other mobile devices, considering and optimizing mobile UX supports your site’s overall performance. To fix this, determine the canonical page and implement 301 redirects. These are HTTP status codes used to correct indexed duplicate content. They alert search engines when a page moves to a new location, merging multiple page rankings into one and prompting search engines to remove duplicate URLs from their indices. This process focuses search engine authority on one version of content and clarifies which page should rank higher in search results.