The way of SEO audit may differ from one SEO audit agency to another but the website SEO audit checkup list remains almost the same. The difference in ultimate gains of outsourcing the best SEO check-up services for SEO score improvement comes because of the difference in technical expertise, adapted technology & tools, SEO audit perfection, approach, and experience of the hired SEO audit company. Besides planning the SEO checkup services for the widest scope, we stuff our SEO audit package with all the effective practices with an eye upon the challenges and possibilities in 2024 & beyond:-
Audit Page Titles and Title Tags
The page title tag is shown in SERPs, so, it is important to audit and optimize Page titles and title tags to tell the potential visitors about what the page is about. It results in increased clicks. The page titles are used in search engine results pages, web browsers, and social networks. Unique title content development, keyword optimization, brand name addition, making the page titles tags customer-oriented are the key activities of page titles audit.
The meta description, a snippet with 155 characters limitation, is a tag in HTML created to summarize a page's content. An optimized meta description increases the CTR because of being the organic advertisement text. Google often shows the meta-description as the summary of the webpage. Meta description audit takes care of keywords usage optimization, users’ intent orientation, text optimization, and length optimization.
Audit Website Hierarchy
The optimized hierarchical arrangement of web pages improves the UX because of placing the web pages in a particular order for convenience of users. An optimized hierarchical system is a part of users’ friendly website that is fine-tuned for informing, awareness, convincing, encouragement, action and conversion, etc. The SEO check-up company analyzes all the website hierarchy elements including positioning, size, color, contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity, texture, etc.
Audit Keyword Placement
Keyword auditing should be a not to be missed periodic exercise at least once in six months. It is the base of the SEO roadmap. The keyword placement audit gives you insights for strategic keywords placement. The keyword placement audit analyzes keyword effectiveness, volume, keyword difficulty, search volume, keyword rank etc in the context of ranking, traffic, lead generation, and conversion. The site SEO checkup agency uses many reliable tools like Google Keyword Planner to create a data-driven keyword tracking report with Google’s performance analytics that guides for optimized use and placement of keywords.
Audit Internal and External Links
Internal and external links of a website are the important assets that should be kept refreshed active and correct. Google considers numbers of healthy internal links pointing to a web page as a ranking signal telling about the importance of that particular page. The anchor text of internal links is also considered for placement in SERPs. Proper internal linking improves the indexing, improves the potential of getting valuable backlinks, improves the strengths of website, improves content value for ranking signals, adds more values for the users etc. The audit of internal and external links gives you insights about the quality and gaps in the linking of web pages.
Audit Core Web Vitals (CWV)
Core Web Vitals - CWV allows us to measure User's Web Page Loading Experience. Core Web Vitals is an important signal for the evaluation of page experience. Primarily based on users’ experience, Core Web Vitals is a set of tangible and quantifiable speed metrics introduced by Google in May 2020 to help the webmasters for auditing and improving the user experiences. The old Website Speed Report in Google Search Console (GSC) has been replaced by Core Web Vitals under Enhancements reports. Core Web Vitals are quantifiable metrics that comprises of 3 components of web page load experience - LCP, FID, CLS. The Core Web Vitals report gives us a detailed breakdown of a website’s LCP, FID and CLS performance. As being the prominent web audit specialists, we offer data-driven deep-sighted Core Web Vitals Audit services that rank your website better.
Audit UX Signals
The audit services for Users’ Experience (UX) empowers your website to stay in the organic ranking race after the rolling out of page experience algorithm update in May 2021. Everything constituting a performing website like content, backlinks, UX, security, mobile friendliness, functionality etc. needs to be taken with extra care by SEOs; it may require strategic changes in SEOs’ approach.
Google Page Experience Algorithm Update
“Page experience is a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value. It includes Core Web Vitals, which is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page.”
Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/page-experience
The key aspects of ‘Page Experience’ are:--
Core Web Vitals
The strategic approach for Core Web Vitals audit must go through all the three performance metrics –First Input Delay (FID), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
Safe Browsing
The specially trained core web vitals experts assess the possibility of the presence of any issue like phishing, hacked content, or malware etc to ensure the best browsing experience.
Non-Intrusive Interstitials
The on-page content should not obstruct the users while browsing to deliver the best ‘Visual Load Time’ experience. The webpage experience signal measures how the users experience the interaction with a webpage.
Mobile-Friendliness
Mobile-Friendly Test scales ‘how friendly your website for mobile devices is’. The exercise includes an assessment of content readability and on-page elements aligned to user experience.
HTTPS
Core Web Vitals audit services are planned to confirm the secure connection of the website as well as its suitability for recommended HTTPS.
Audit Website Speed
Performance plays a significant role in the success of any online venture, as high performing sites engage and retain users better than poorly performing ones. Sites should focus on optimizing for user-centric happiness metrics.
"Performance is vital in the success of any website because high performing websites keep and engage the users better than poor performing websites. SEOs need to optimize the website performance for the best users-centric metrics"
Source: https://web.dev/fast/
Loading time plays a key role in the performance of any website because the faster loading of webpages keep the visitors engaged and retained better. SEOs need to focus on optimizing user experience metrics by using advanced tools like Lighthouse; and, website speed is the most critical contributory element for user experience.
Audit Google Analytics and Metrics
Google analytics and metrics are a great help for the SEO masters as these reflect the weakness and strength of on-page and off-page SEO parameters. The metrics like volume of visits, unique visitors, location of users, devices used, bounce rate, average stay on the page, pages visited per session, conversion rate etc are analyzed in Google analytics and metrics audit.
Audit Bounce Rate and Reasons
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that quit the website without taking any action. Stopping a visitor from drifting, you obviously improve sale opportunities. The bounce rate is one of the RankBrain ranking factors. A study report in 2017 revealed the correlation between Google rankings and bounce rate. The slow page load speed, intrusive advertisements, too many alternative offers, unexpected & unrelated information/content, poor quality content, poor user experience, technical errors etc are the key aspects responsible for a high bounce rate of the website.
Audit Off-Site SEO Assets
Backlinks, competitors' backlink profiles, 404 errors, social media presence, anchor text, Authority, brand mentions, content Relevance, Link Acquisition, trust factors etc are the key off-site SEO assets audited by SEO audit agency. Off-page SEO tells the search engines about the website and its importance for the users. A detailed report about each aspect of off-page SEO highlights the scope of correction and improvement.
Audit Featured Snippets
Featured Snippets are the short text snippets that appear at the top of search results in order to answer a search query. Featured Snippet is taken from the most relevant web pages. Featured Snippets attract more organic traffic and clicks without higher Google ranking. Appearance in featured snippets is the guarantee for the best quality information intended by the users. According to Search Engine Land, a website with presence in featured snippet gets approximate 8% more clicks. Featured Snippets audit is focused more to make the content transparent in answering – what it is, why it is, how it does, how to do. Information presentation in a list, table structure, authority, quality of images, schema markup, etc are the other focus areas for Featured Snippets audit
Audit Indexing Issues
Indexing is the process followed by Google to gather information about a website. Indexing issues can damper the ranking gains by SEO. Audit of Indexing issues improves keyword ranking. The commonly found Indexing issues under site SEO checkup are - DNS issues, Inherited issues, URL parameters, sitemap, meta tags in source code, .htaccess, robots.txt file, penalty etc.
Audit Mobile-Friendliness
Mobile-friendliness can be checked at https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly. Having a mobile-friendly website is must because the searches through mobile devices are increasing manifold every year and mobile friendliness has become a ranking signal. In addition, Google integrated AMP listings into mobile search results on Feb. 24, 2016 for faster and better engaging UX. The major issues that affect mobile-friendliness of a website are incompatible plugins, size of website mobile version, content width, too small text, too close clickable elements, gaps in cross-platform compatibility; the SEO audit takes evaluates all the issues affecting mobile-friendliness of website.
Audit Spam Potential
Any web page content created just to improve search results ranking without any relevance to objective or value for intended visitors is seen as spam. Spamming in any form is sure to harm the ranking as well as the website by attracting a penalty that may be blacklisting also. Harm to online business reputation delivers the long-lasting severe impacts to business interests. Spamming with your website may be because of several reasons. SEO check up for spam potential evaluates all the on-page and off-page issues and possibilities like web page spam, paid links spam, content marketing spam, SEO spam, rich snippets spam, malware, phishing etc.
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