The issue is that many times a 404 page is not useful for users, and it is not useful for search engines. When looking at the results of your website crawl, find any 404 pages that are linked from your content. Regardless of your business, industry or niche, a great process to have in your arsenal is mastering an SEO audit. Even if it’s a minimal, quick process or full-scale audit, the results are sure to pay off.
Yes, an SEO audit helps us determine how our website is performing. But, if you are a small website, you do not have to overdo it. Concentrating on stats can be a waste of time especially if there are other things that you have to take care of.
- Here, we highlight pages that have zero internal links pointing to them.
- To illustrate, I also ran Noob Norm through some other SEO audit tools (after the fixes).
- It will also help prioritize and budget your tasks while ensuring a positive ROI from SEO as a marketing channel.
- From there, go through each account to determine if they’re all consistent with the company’s branding — using the same images, logo, tone of voice, etc.
- PPC is most effective for high-competition, high-intent keywords where organic ranking is difficult.
Repair Broken URLs
Most of these updates are minor, but occasionally there are major updates that can significantly impact rankings. And Google will announce these major updates on their Search Central Blog. In most cases, it’s perfectly fine to have some low-quality links in your profile. Just watch for patterns that suggest manipulative link building or potential spam that could trigger a Google penalty.
Check Brand Name Reputation
Over time, these efforts resulted in improved keyword visibility and organic traffic recovery. It was a clear example of how addressing content credibility can turn a content devaluation into an opportunity for growth. Meanwhile, shift your focus to creating value—whether that’s through blogs, tools, or interactive content. Consistency in quality over time is your best ally for regaining rankings and trust.
For instance, you can set up automatic crawls to track the number of issues as you progress. If you work on the issues later, fewer and fewer issues should pop up, which should be reflected in the next crawl. However, new issues can surface if you add pages and products or do other work on your site. You’ll see suggested improvements, such as minimizing JavaScript execution, using browser caching, or deferring non-critical JavaScript. You can do a lot to improve your site speed, so once you have collected all the data, add it to your sheet with the rest of the tasks to tackle. This lightweight BHS Links SEO audit still finds high-priority issues without the time commitment of a full review.
However, we were always able to recover and grow after traffic declines because we were really diligent about auditing the stuff that was causing the decline. Want to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs)? A robust set of search engine optimization (SEO) tools can help you with tedious SEO tasks and streamline your processes. A website audit tool may also check your page authority, which is a score that predicts how well a page will rank on SERPs. To improve your score, seek external links from high-authority pages that outrank yours.
Combining all these insights with your site’s user behavior and engagement data will make your SEO audit come alive. It helps you understand how people use your site and how they experience it to pinpoint pages to improve. Export your findings from Google Analytics and Search Console to include in your website audit comparisons.
Also, using canonical tags incorrectly (or not at all) can seriously affect your crawl budget. Although many SEOs may tell you that on-page issues like those with meta descriptions aren’t a big deal, I personally think it is part of good SEO housekeeping. Also, an audit can highlight technical problems your website has that you may not be aware of, such as hreflang errors, canonical issues, or mixed content problems. Understanding issues found within a technical audit allows you to analyze a site fully and come up with a comprehensive strategy. On the other hand, most of the pages ranking for “best headphones” are blog posts and guides. This indicates that searchers are in learning mode, not buying mode.