To fix what is broken, you must first know what is broken. This is where an SEO Audit Checklist comes in. With the help of this, you can get a clearer picture as to how best to improve your site’s ranking on SERPs and get ahead of your competitors.
Google alone has approximately 200 ranking factors, typically:
Accessibility is crucial. Google and other search engines must know your website exists. Google bots should be able to access your site content to be able to index it. Your robots.txt file, XML sitemap and HTTP status codes are needed to allow search engine crawlers to access and index your site.
Content
Your website’s content plays a significant role in improving your engagements. Follow the points listed out below to upgrade your website ranking.
Images help you break content into different sections and add an interactive element. Here are some more factors to consider with pictures on your website:
Google’s bots are thorough. They crawl through all your pages and rank you based on whether your content is unique or not. Any plagiarism will have a negative effect and that will affect your results. (This problem most often faced by E-Commerce websites due to the nature of their content)
Loading Speed
A user will wait a maximum of 3 seconds on average for a website to load before closing the tab or end up switching tabs. Increasing your site’s speed and also its responsiveness is a necessity.
Your website’s pages should have relevant titles and descriptions. The recommended length is 30-65 characters for titles and 100-150 characters for descriptions. These should be unique for each page.
We have entered the mobile era of technology requiring your websites to be responsive. With the launch of Google’s mobile crawler back in 2015, website responsiveness is a must.
This is the rate or percentage of people leaving your website within 40 seconds. To improve this, you can use heat maps to figure out why, and from which part of your website predominantly, your potential clients are leaving.
You cannot have any broken links in your website. Make sure all the pages have proper re-directs and/or have been deleted.