Perform your own SEO Audit
34 – Perform your own SEO Audit
Knowing how to perform your own SEO audit will allow you to come up with your own list of actions to help improve your search engine visibility and allow you to gain more readers.
Technical SEO
SEO plugin
Install the Yoast SEO plugin or similar and set it up correctly. This will take care of a lot of the technical seo setup that you need such as creating your sitemap for you.
Google Search Console
Ensure that you have submitted all 4 variations of your website url to Google Search Console. This would be as follows
- https://www.blogonuk.com
- https://blogonuk.com
- www.blogonuk.com
- blogonuk.com
Ensure you have submitted your sitemap to Google Search Console
Check Google Search Console for coverage. mobile usability, manual actions and security issues.
Most bloggers will find the vast majority of their traffic is from a mobile device. This means that it is really important that your site is mobile friendly. Most themes are but it is worth checking every page to ensure that this works well. You can also run it through the Google Mobile friendly site test.
Site structure
You should try to ensure that your site does not have too many categories and that they are of similar sizes. You will need to ensure your tag and category pages are seo optimised or no indexed.
Check your menu structure leads your readers and search engines to your most important content.
Create cornerstone content that highlights the keywords that you want your site to rank for, you should have one piece of content per category as a minimum. Use these pieces of content to link your other content to it. Your cornerstone content should have the most links pointing at it.
Internal links – no content should be orphaned on your site, this means that it should have at least one link pointing at it and one pointing away from it to another internal post.
Broken links
Check all of your broken links and fix them by either removing the link or updating it.
Content
SEO writing
Your content needs to be useful for your readers but you can also write it for SEO as well. Using headers, rich snippets, descriptive titles and answering the questions your readers want answering will make a big difference.
SEO optimisation
After writing content look at how to optimise it. Yoast can help you with this if you add the focus keyword. Ensure that you have a meta description and that you check the readability analysis.
Updating old content
You need to regularly go through old content to update it, delete it or no index it. Google wants sites to be relevant so having a lot of old, out of date content can harm your ratings.
Site Speed
Check your speed
Using Google Site Speed test or GTMetrix take a look at how your site is performing. Your site speed can be affected by your host as well as by your site build.
Images
Running an image optimisation plugin on your site will help to reduce the sizes of the images which will improve the page loading time. Enable lazy loading and webP images.
Clean up your dashboard
Remove old plugins and themes that are no longer in use.
Now you should have a list of easy to implement changes that you can perform to help improve your sites SEO and get seen by more people.
