Auditing Your Website To Identify SEO Problems

Here are some factors to consider as you audit your website to identify search engine optimisation (SEO) problems:

Usability

Usability is an important factor to improving sales, conversions and other actions on your website. It doesn’t have a direct effect on SEO but in the long term interactions with your site will determine the bounce rate and ultimately the positions that you acquire and keep in the Natural Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Accessibility/Spiderability

The site should be friendly to visitors and search engines and should be easily indexed by the search bots. The site architecture should be optimal for visitors to find what they need within a few clicks and search engines shouldn’t struggle to find inner pages that are important for your business.

Search engine health check

Check the search engines to see how many pages on your site have been indexed by using the syntax site:yourdomain.com and compare this with the number of unique pages you believe your site has. Also search for your brand names to see how you rank for them, then take corrective action if you rank low for your names. And check the cached versions of your pages match the live versions of your pages.

Keyword health check

Are you targeting the right keywords in your content and link building strategy? Have you included keywords in the correct density, about 2-5%, on all pages? Does more than one page target the same keyword, also known as keyword cannibalisation? Make sure you fix these and other keyword factors to ensure that your targeting is precise and will lead to good traffic volumes.

Duplicate content check

Check that you don’t have https pages that are duplicates of http pages because this could lead to a search engine penalty. Also, ensure that each page has unique content that is not duplicated on other pages.

URL check

URLs should be clean, short and descriptive and that means they should be keyword rich and not keyword stuffed. You also want them to be simple and easy to understand by both search engine spiders and human visitors.

Title tag review

Title tags for homepage and all other pages should be unique and descriptive. Company or brand names should be included at the end of the tag and not at the beginning because that is where you will add keywords that you want to rank for.

Sitemap file verification

Use the Google Search Console platform to add and verify your sitemap to make sure that all your URLs are indexed and are appearing in search results.

Internal linking checks

Check for pages that have excessive links and ensure that they are not more than 100, per Google’s advice, however it’s ok to have more on very important pages that are heavily linked to.