Do you know – websites that use SEO are getting over 50 percent of the total traffic on the internet?
Are you planning to implement SEO in your website? If yes, then you are making the right choice. It is one of the best ways to gain organic traffic on your website. To begin, you have to perform an audit check. This audit includes several things that you need to optimize in your website. But what are those things, and how to optimize them?
Below we have given an SEO audit checklist that includes all the key elements you should analyze to achieve success in 2021.
#1 Indexing Errors
If Google isn’t able to crawl your webpages, they won’t appear in the SERPs- as simple as that. Even if you have worked hard on creating a beautiful-looking website, it won’t rank if crawlers won’t identify it. That’s why it is important to identify all the technical errors and indexing errors of your website. They are preventing the google bots from accessing your pages. Removing them will help you increase your visibility and, thus, your ranking.
How to check the technical and indexing errors?
There are various ways to check if your web pages are indexed or crawled or not. Some of the easiest and popular ones are:
- Site- Search
Till today, this is probably the easiest and fastest way that does not require any advanced knowledge or any dedicated tool. All you need to do is open Google and paste this command in the search bar: site:website.com. After pasting it, press enter. Then Google will automatically show you the exact amount of pages are indexed.
- Google Search Console
You can use the coverage report in the Google search console to find out about your indexing issues. It’s a tool by Google that is very easy to use and gives accurate information on these issues. Check this report daily and remove all the indexing issues like 500 errors, 404 errors as soon as possible. Otherwise, it will decrease the amount of organic traffic on your site.
#2 Security
Google wants its users to feel safe while browsing the web. So it favors all those websites that provide full security and encrypt data. According to Google, every online store or other websiteS where users enter their sensitive data must have SSL certificates implemented. So if you have not switched from HTTP to HTTPS, do it as soon as possible.
Remember, Google has now officially confirmed that HTTPS protocol plays an important role in the ranking process. After you are done making changes and still unsure about the security, here’s how you can gain surety: The easiest way to verify your website security is if it has a lock symbol in the address bar. If not, then it’s not secure yet!
#3 Competitive analysis
Someone has correctly said that- if you want to achieve success, keep your friends close, but your competitors even closer. Coming to the point, if you want to achieve traffic using SEO, then you cannot stay behind your competition. You have to keep your James Bond eyes on them. And the process of keeping track of your competition is known as competitive analysis. It’s one of the most important components of the SEO audit. When you are conducting competitive analysis, you should:
- Identify your strongest contender in Google.
- Compare the performance of your website. It must include:
- Quality of the sit
- The number of referring domains and backlinks.
- Web traffic
- Alexa rank
- Number of SERPs keywords
- Number of indexed pages
- Find all the common keywords
- Try to fill the backlink gap
- Analyse their content.
#4 Redirects
When we talk about an SEO site audit checklist, an important element you cannot ignore is redirects. Generally, you can have four versions of your website that are-
- http://website.com
- https:// www.website.com
- http://www.website.com
- https://website.com
- Read on to know !
The problem starts when the search engine faces difficulty in determining the main one. As a result, Google indexes all the versions as it considers them different sites. And when the pages are indexed, they won’t rank on the google searches, which won’t bring any traffic. We have a solution for this problem- you can implement that 301 redirects will bring google crawlers to the main version of your website and thus gain more organic leads.
Final Words
These were all the major elements of an SEO audit. So if you want to receive the best possible results from SEO and increase your website’s visibility in search results, optimize all the components of this technical SEO audit checklist 2021 ASAP.
