The 15-Step SEO Audit Checklist for 2020
Being unsure about how to get everything in order when it comes to your website is deeply struggling. Most of the websites primarily fail because of this factor. That is why studying an SEO audit checklist for 2020 is the best choice to make.
An SEO audit checklist is nothing more than some steps you need to take care of at all times to give your website a higher possibility to rank higher on Google.
Using this checklist will increase the chances of getting organic traffic by 62%. We are here to help you show what you need to be concerned about when handling your website for your revenue to rise.
SEO Audit Checklist for 2020
1. Only One Version Is Indexed
A URL without the ‘www’ in front might still redirect users to your website. But this is not always the case. And what is more important is that this might not also be the case for Google. Crawlers might find different versions and index them differently. Now your website might look the same but the URLs are not the same. If every version does not redirect to the main ‘https’ then you have a problem because your website will be indexed on different versions.
Learn how to 301 redirect your website to fix this issue and then you can have your website indexed properly.
2. Get rid of “zombie pages”
Go to Google and type ‘site:yoursite.com’ and then click search. See how many results are there. If there is more than one that means that Google has indexed more versions of your website than it should. This can keep your traffic low but don’t worry because it can be fixed. These are called ‘zombie pages’ and Google considers this a bad thing.
How do you delete these zombie pages? Take a look at how this guy did it with his website. You can boost your traffic with up to 50% once you have deleted all the zombie pages of your website. More traffic means more visitors and more visitors means a higher ranking on SERP which means again more visitors for you.
3. Mobile-friendliness
Users access mostly their mobiles these days. Assuring the mobile-friendliness of your website makes it accessible to your audience’s device.
It is indicated that more than half of Google’s searches are done through mobile devices. To check your site is available through mobile phones then go to this tool. This will let you know if you are considered as an optimized site for google devices.
4. Make your website has a high speed
Websites with a slow loading speed are not preferred by crawlers. Google and other search engines love websites that have a high loading speed. Loading speed also affects user experience which is very important for SEO. So how do you make your site load faster? At first, you clean the HTML code of your website. Use Page Speed Insights to find the problems in your code. Then you do a test for your website speediness with Pingdom.com. This will allow you to see what is slowing down your website.
Then you resize the images you use on your website. A large image can take some time to load an this can slow down your website. If you are using WordPress CMS, you can find the list of image optimization WordPress Plugins on this website.
5. Fix Indexing Issues
Use Search Console to check how is your website indexing. This will show you all the pages from your website that Google is not indexing for one reason or another. Search Console will tell you what you need to fix for these pages to be indexed. Once you have fixed the issues check everything again with a tool called the Screaming Frog.
This tool will crawl your website and it will let you know all about the pages that are inaccessible.
6. Correct the SEO for your pages
SEO is probably the most important thing when it comes to ranking. But you are probably thinking that you are too busy to improve the SEO. You can do some things that don’t require that much time.
You can target some important keywords and start implementing them on your website. With time your traffic will improve and your ranking will go higher. However, you must do this from time to time to keep the ranking up. Always be on the lookout for great keywords for your website. If you are looking for keyword research services, we are here to help you.
7. Track The Ranking of the Keywords
You should also track your ranking on the search engine results page. How do you do this? Several tools can help you but one of the best tools you can use is Ubersuggest or SEMrush. This tool does not only help you find the keywords that you are searching for but also the potential keywords for which your website is ranking.
This allows you to better know what keywords you should be using on your website and how you can spread them in the most natural way possible for you to get results.
8. Study the backlinks you will use
Backlinks are very, very important. A study shows that backlinks are more important for ranking than most of the other things. How do you study your backlinks and which ones are the best you can use? Tools like Majestic SEO can help you get a refer on the links and look at data for each one of them. This way you can easily tell which website is linking you and how much are you profiting off of them.
9. Analyze your competitors
This is probably the smartest thing you can do when you are trying to improve your website. Analyzing your competitors can give you very important insights on what you can improve. Of course, you should not engage in black hat SEO techniques and steal their content because no search engine likes websites who don’t have original content.
You can use tools such as Ahrefs to analyze what your competitors are doing and which are the keywords that they are implementing to get traffic.
10. Constantly keep an eye on the organic traffic you get
Google Analytics will help you check the organic traffic that you are getting on your website. Search on Google Analytics, click on Acquisition, then All-Traffic, and click on Channels, and press Organic Search. This will let you know how many visitors does your website have from Google in the last month. Switch the timeline to 6 months and see the pattern of the organic traffic you are getting.
If you notice that the traffic is the same or has declined you don’t need to worry. At least now you know that something is wrong and you can fix it by reading further.
11. Fix links that are broken
Nobody likes to come across a 404 page when they are searching for something on the internet. This tends to lower the user experience and damage your ranking on the search page. You need to find and fix all the broken links that redirect your visitors to non-working pages.
Use Google Search Console and go on Index Report to see how many broken links does your website has and fix them all. This way your visitors don’t just increase the bounce rate by leaving your website.
12. Give out original and worthy-to-read content
Nobody can deny the power that valuable content holds. Your visitors are not on your website only to see the cute theme that you put on. They are there to get some content that is worthy to read and will teach them something. The more original is the content that you are providing to your readers the better it is.
Search engines like websites that have everything original on their pages and are not stealing the hard work of someone else.
13. Optimize UX signals
You need to know how the visitors that come along are interacting with your website. To do this, you can use tools such as RankBrain. You need to optimize for UX signals and this will guarantee that you get more traffic.
Try to find posts that are not doing very well and optimize them. Whether you add more keywords or content, anything that will make the post to rank higher than it is already.
14. Flatten the architecture of your website
You don’t want someone to come across your website and to see a total mess. That being said, you should pay attention to how the pages on your site are organized. How they are linked together and whether they point at the homepage or not. The architecture of your website matters a lot in user experience and for the crawling of your website.
When a search engine finds your website and sees that your pages are all linked together and to the homepage, it is easier for the spiders to crawl your website and index for a higher rank.
15. Launch skyscraper post
You want to publish at least one post using the Skyscraper Technique. Watch the top ten results of a keyword that you are searching for. Then what you do next is to analyze the content that you see on the results page. And last but not least you want to create content that is two times better than the one you found out.
Conclusion
Being strict on these steps and making sure your website relies on them will give you a no doubt increase in traffic. The world of SEO is more technical and complicated than just having to post great content.
It requires patience and dedication, and most importantly, a lot of your time. Creating a small team to keep your website secure and stick to these steps is the best way to see results even faster.
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