(Here at Bruce Clay Inc., we SEO Anomaly 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 better and more visible to Google leading to more traffic and conversion.
For example, the core update in August 2018 appeared to largely affect health, fitness, and medical sites that failed to demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (E-A-T). In fact, Barry Schwartz, a prominent blogger, dubbed it the “Medic” update. If it says anything other than “No issues detected,” read our Google penalties guide. To check for manual actions, go to the Manual actions report in Google Search Console. The fastest way to check whether you’ve been hit by an update is to plug your URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see if any traffic drops align with an update.
Sitechecker: best for actionable checklists
If keywords are driving traffic to your page, consider swapping them out for higher value keywords. That’s what Google Analytics does, and all you need to do to get started is add a small string of code to all of the pages you want to track. Easily track your return on investment from organic search and other marketing channels. Your SEO audit services include SEO support and training from our team.
Your pages need to be in this index to stand any chance at ranking. You’re unlikely to have a manual action unless you’ve done something drastically wrong. But it’s still important to check you’re not dead in the water before you even start. The audit can identify over 100+ issues, which can be overwhelming for beginners. So if you are new to auditing, I’d suggest focusing on the steps below rather than trying to fix all the issues one by one.
Step 5: Monitoring and tracking results
A 404 is a “page not found” error, generally caused by broken links and images within your site. For example, if a page on your site links to a piece of content that has since been deleted, anyone who clicks that link will get a 404 error. As with beefing up thin content, there are certain pages on your site where it’s not going to be feasible to fully optimize for target and ancillary keywords. You’ve squeezed “employee scheduling software” onto your homepage in multiple places. That’s a keyword best reserved for a blog post (check out our SEO blog post templates here).
Systematically checking indexing, technical performance, on-page SEO, and backlinks, helps you to address any issues before they affect your rankings. Implementing practices makes sure your site remains competitive and well-optimized for search engines. On-page SEO elements like meta tags, headings, and internal links are essential for communicating the relevance of your content to search engines. Cadence helps the document processing service provider (mentioned above) by updating these elements with the right keywords, which improved their site visibility. Broken links are URLs that point to a website that no longer exist or return an error.
Step 1: Identify link building opportunities
- The tool is evaluating your content based on Google’s own guidelines.
- Ryte’s Robot.txt Generator is a free SEO tool that can easily create a robots.txt file for you.
- If keywords are driving traffic to your page, consider swapping them out for higher value keywords.
- It should help determine what a successful SEO campaign would look like for the current website and outline the scope of the resources needed.
- Does your site have URLs of excessive length due to keyword stuffing?
- If you’re wondering exactly how much to allocate, a solid guideline is to dedicate 5% to 10% of your total revenue to marketing, with a good chunk going toward SEO.
Throughout the process, you will work with various team members at OuterBox and we’ll truly get to know your business. We hope the SEO audit is the first step in a long-term business relationship. Unsure why your website isn’t ranking higher in Google and other major search engines? As an SEO leader we provide SEO audit services that deliver a search engine optimization strategy for success. Site speed and page experience directly impact organic positions.
Naturally, if you’re creating a new piece of content, it’ll be easier to make sure you fully optimize all these elements. If you’re updating old pages, you just have to do the best you can. It wouldn’t necessarily make sense, for instance, to change a URL simply to optimize for a new keyword.