When it comes to SEO, some business owners think that it requires a degree in rocket science to perform! The truth of the matter is that SEO is not as hard as it seems. It’s merely the process of optimizing your website so that it provides a good user experience for both Google and your human visitors.
5 ways for business owners to audit their website
We’ve compiled a little list of five things that business owners can do to audit their website. If at any point you get lost or confused, feel free to reach out to us at (512) 993-9993 or on our website, and we’ll be glad to sit down and answer any questions you might have.
#1 – Responsive web design is extremely important
Is your website mobile-friendly? In May of 2015, Google announced that “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.” This means that if your current website isn’t mobile friendly, you could be losing a lot of traffic.
Many older websites don’t work correctly on today’s small smartphone screens. If your potential clients or customers can’t reach your site via their cell phone, there’s a good chance they’re hitting the back button and checking out your competitors. Google has a free tool that you can use to check if your website is mobile friendly.
#2 – Website speed does matter!
When it comes to determining how high a website should rank in the organic search results, Google takes a wide variety of factors into consideration, including the speed of a site. If a website is too slow, they can penalize it by lowering its organic rankings or sending less traffic.
Many of the major hosting companies (we won’t name any names) tend to overload their shared hosting servers. This, in turn, makes the websites hosted there very slow. GT Metrix has a free tool that you can use to check the speed of your site.
#3 – Duplicate or thin content isn’t a good thing!
Does your website have thin or duplicate content? If so, it could be suffering from a Google penalty. What is thin or duplicate content?
Thin content: This is when your website has very little content on the home or internal pages. The best way to fix this is to add some informative content!
Duplicate content: Does your website have a blog? Have you ever purchased something called “syndicated content” from companies?
The problem with this type of content is that it’s the exact same content that’s on hundreds of other websites on the web. Google considers this to be “duplicate content” and can penalize a website for it. The best thing to do is to remove it immediately.
#4 – Title tags can make all the difference in the world
Are there certain keywords that you’re trying to get your website ranked organically in the Google search results? If so, you can try to put the keywords that you’re trying to rank for in the title tags of the home and internal pages.
This is a small, but very helpful “SEO trick” that can sometimes help out a bit. Your title tags tell both Google and your human visitors what your home and internal pages are all about. For one of our customers, the only change we made was to the title tag and went from #5 to #1 in the SERP!
#5 – Broken Internal Pages (404) are never fun for the visitor
As company websites age and updates are made, some pages tend to get deleted as they’re no longer relevant. The trouble with this is that your website may be internally linking to these pages without you realizing it.
You may have forgotten to delete the link and visitors will receive a “404 not found” error message when visiting the page. Google considers this to be a low-quality experience if you have too many 404 pages.
You can perform a self-audit by going to Screaming Frog SEO and download their free crawler tool. It will crawl your website (the free version is limited to just a few hundred pages) and look for 404 pages, broken links, broken images, and other things that could cause Google to penalize your website.
Do you need a professional SEO audit of your website?
If you’ve read through this article and have any questions that weren’t answered, give us a call at (512) 993-9993 or send us an email. At Adapting Online, we’ve helped countless businesses small and large with their SEO. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your company website get better rankings in the organic search results!
Monica Thomason, Web Marketing Specialist
Monica Thomason has been involved in all aspects of internet marketing for over 15 years. She loves all things internet and truly appreciates what the internet can do for businesses. Whether you need help with content and SEO, ecommerce optimization, social media or reputation management she would love to help you!
LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter | Social Media Certified