For instance, Google’s algorithm can index the wrong version of a page and it will get into the SERP. Or the whole website may be poorly indexed and considered spammy due to the huge number of duplicates. Essentially, orphan pages are lost pages, no longer connected to the internal linking structure of the website.
Header Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
Now, as I complete the audit, I’ll know the answers to those questions — and I’ll have actionable steps to improve my website, thus making it more competitive. The public sitemap is one that users can access to review the pages of your site, like the index of a book. Within the robots.txt file, you can include sections for specific (or all) crawlers with instructions (“directives”) that let them know which parts should or should not be crawled. These elements also present problems from a usability perspective. Visitors are often looking for a very specific piece of information when visiting your site.
Table of Contents
Speaking of content, you’ll also need to analyze the content on your website. Make sure the content is helpful, informative, and up-to-date. In this post, I’ll cover what a website audit is, the different types of audits, how to conduct an audit, and ways to use information from an audit to improve your SEO and conversions.
Google will not acknowledge various pages, only the strongest one. As a result, you will have a lot of different articles that are useless in terms of SEO and cannot be reached from the search engine. A lot of people, while trying to promote their website and rank higher in Google, start writing on the same exact topic. This may be good for your traffic as it will encourage visitor’s interested in topic to keep coming, but it can also lead to duplicate content. All in all, SEOptimer is a great site audit tool which gives you plenty of information on your site issues along with the recommendations. This is a premium SEO audit tool so if you want to crawl more pages within your website, you need to pay for their premium plans.
Google Search Console is another tool offered by Google and designed to help web admins better understand their websites. It’s a great diagnostic tool that can tell us how your SEO efforts are working – and whether there are any immediate areas of concern. Google Analytics is a free tool that is one of the best available for tracking your website’s performance. Google likes to keep certain information about its search engine algorithm under wraps, but it’s generous with information about how your website is working overall.
From crawlability issues to content issues to loading speed issues, SEMrush Site Audit will diagnose all the technical SEO related issues within your site. When it comes SEO Anomaly to SEO audit tools, SEMrush is the ultimate choice. The canonicalization of your website content is your final major technical consideration. However, having this happen is also an indication that someone isn’t cleaning up broken links and, as a result, leading users to dead ends.
While you can create these on your own, it’s much easier and more efficient to use managed solutions, like a privacy policy generator. From there, go through each account to determine if they’re all consistent with the company’s branding — using the same images, logo, tone of voice, etc. Essentially, a competitive audit allows you to see what’s working for other companies in your market so that you can incorporate those tactics into your own strategy.
This is the same data we used when we started the audit, but now, you should look at the results of the improvements. Once improvements are made, you should monitor their performance for quite a while, as some can take a long time to take effect. Ahrefs and Semrush show which keywords your pages rank for and identify gaps. A large part of SEO consists of improving written content, so review its quality and improve where necessary.
- By prioritizing fixes and leveraging a strategic mindset, you’ll solve the immediate problems and set your site on a course for sustained growth.
- An SEO audit is important because it reveals problems with any site’s SEO so you can address them and start ranking where you belong.
- Sift through page titles and metadata, zero in on duplicate content, extract site data, even generate XML site maps with ease.
- After auditing hundreds of websites, the most frequent or significant problems are not complex technical SEO issues.
- If there are no robots meta tags on the page, search engines consider that as index, follow, meaning that they can index the page and crawl all links on it.
The Site Audit tool from Ubersuggest crawls up to 100 pages for free. But if you want to crawl more than 100 pages, you should go for their premium plans which are listed below. You can click on each one of those crawled pages links to rectify issues within your site for better crawlability.