SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is complicated. So we’re trying to break down the complex jargon to make it easier to understand. Starting with how you can perform a free SEO audit for your own website.
What is an SEO Audit
An SEO audit is a check of your website to judge its ability to rank well on search engine results pages. The fewer issues you have across your pages, the better your ability to rank high.
How Do I Get Ranked?
Search engines ‘crawl’ through your website to see how relevant your content is to search terms compared to others. The algorithm takes many variables into account, from page speed and ‘keywords’, to any errors or external links back to your pages.
Mobile Friendliness
So, how do you get started? Well, the first thing you should do is check to see if your website is mobile-friendly. Most search traffic comes from mobile devices, so it’s important that your pages are optimised.
Your website should automatically resize to fit whatever device it’s been accessed from. This is called Responsive Web Design. WordPress offers responsive themes that you can use if needed.
Page Speed
In order to rank well, web pages should load in around 2 or 3 seconds. Any slower and your ‘bounce rate’ can increase which will affect your website SEO. Bounce rate is the number of times someone visited your site and left without accessing another page.
You can test your loading time on Google PageSpeed. PageSpeed gives you information on how to fix any errors or warnings that are slowing your pages down.
Image Optimisation
Linked into page speed is image optimisation. If you’re using visuals with large file size, it’s probably going to be a reason your web pages are slow to load.
We recommend using SVG images around your website, as they are text-based files, as well as being traditionally smaller in size. Being text-based means search engines can crawl them, so consider using them as part of your SEO strategy.
Broken Links
If your website has dead or broken links, it can cause SEO errors. These links could still be showing up in search results, and lead to visitors having a bad experience on your site. As mentioned earlier, the algorithm will pick up on this through the ‘bounce rate’ your website has.
Google Search Console is a free tool that can help you discover any broken links on your site, and give you a step by step guide on how to resolve them.
Indexing
When your pages show up in search results, it’s because they’re indexed. It might be tempting to index every page on your website, but that could actually cause problems for your SEO.
Too many indexed pages will be guiding traffic away from the pages you’re wanting people to visit. By de-indexing these pages, you should see a nice boost, as your most important pages will be the ones ranking.
Summary
By performing a free SEO audit, you should see improvements to your website traffic over time. Some of these steps can be quite time-consuming, but the results will be worth it. If you’d rather have a full professional SEO audit performed, we’d be more than happy to help. Here at Be My Social, we have plenty of experience in improving SEO rankings for businesses across the country! Get in touch today.
