The Ultimate Guide to Conducting an Effective SEO Audit
Search engine optimization audits look at every aspect of a site’s operation. They’re concerned with everything from the actual structure of the underlying code to the content itself. Keep reading to learn how to approach an SEO audit of your website, brought to you by the SEO experts from Saba SEO, a premier SEO company San Diego businesses rely on for outstanding expertise and high-quality service.
Perhaps the best place to start conducting one is by heading over to the search console and checking for crawl errors. Any 404 messages are going to hurt your site’s ranking, since these can trick Google and Bing into thinking your pages are beginning to unravel. Check your robots.txt file to see whether it’s configured correctly. A misconfiguration could actually force search engines to flat-out avoid your site.
Investigate any server errors that come up during the audit, since these could actually point to a hardware problem. Unnecessarily long redirect chains can lead to these issues as well. If you’re using URL shorteners, look closely at the pages they’re linked to. Some people accidentally point shortening services at other shortening services, which do a number on their ranking.
Make sure all the content you post has clear headings and is readable. Try the following tips if you’ve been running into readability-related issues:
- Break up long passages into shorter sections
- Remove outdated material
- Purge any machine- or AI-generated content
- Add title and meta tags to give users a better idea of what they’re getting into
- Attach schema tags to each page
While these might seem to help humans more than search engine algorithms, both Google and Bing take overall readability into account when indexing pages. If your site appears disorganized, it could end up lower in the results pages than you might have expected. Blogs and news sites need a constant stream of material to stay on top of their respective categories. If you haven’t posted anything in a while, you’ll want to do so the moment you finish your audit.
If you need help developing an effective SEO strategy or monitoring the performance of your current SEO efforts, call on the experts from Saba SEO. We have more than 20 years of experience advising companies on how to maximize their marketing strategies. We provide exceptional SEO services San Diego businesses rely on to help them get to the next level. Call one of our knowledgeable SEO specialists today.
