You’ve got a website for your business but the work just isn’t coming through. Unfortunately, it might just be because Google and the other key search engines have no idea what your site is about.
That will surprise many who just assume that Google sees the site as we do – but they don’t. Remember they have computers crawling all of the websites not human eyes.
So in light of this new information I wanted to show you a few things to run your own SEO audit. The 3 minute DIY SEO Audit will help you ascertain if your website is being crawled and viewed the way you want it to, as well as identifying any other far-reaching issues that may be affecting your search performance.
Here’s a step by step guide.
Pages in Google’s Index
Type the following into Google’s search bar – ‘site:yoursite.com.au’ [Don’t take this too literally].This will highlight every page of your site in Google’s index. If it appears too low then Google is not crawling all of your pages. If it seems too high there’s every chance it’s seeing duplicate content, which you may be penalised for.
Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions
From the same page results in Google (above). Check the Meta Titles and Descriptions – That’s the title and the two lines of data in the search results. This data should be unique for every page, contain as much info as you can in the limited space and be relevant to the specific page.
301 Redirect
Now to your site. Type into the browser ‘www.yoursite.com.au’ and your site should come up. Now type in ‘yoursite.com.au’ into the browser and it should show up. The thing you’re looking for is whether the browser redirected to a preferred URL – With or without the www. If it did not then you have a problem. You need to establish a 301 Redirect. Basically as it stands, you have in Google’s mind, two separate home pages diluting any sort of credibility/power you have for that page.
URL Structure
Still on your site. Browse through your pages and keep note of the URL’s, you want to see tidy and tailored URL extensions, i.e. If you’re looking at your About page then you want to see something like www.yoursite.com.au/about/ and you don’t want to see www.yoursite.com.au/draftpage1.
Title Tags and Heading Tags
Browse through your pages again monitoring the page titles and sub-headings. These will be your Title tags and Heading tags. They help to tell the search engines what each page is about. Each page title and heading tag should be relevant to the page and your business. Of course this is just a 3 minute audit but the Title and Heading tags should be utilising your targeted keywords.
There is so much more you can do to optimise your website for search engine performance but this is what I decided to prioritise in the allocated 3 minutes. As a bit of an honourable mention and if you have 30-40 seconds spare from the 3 minutes, head to Google’s Page Speed Insights tool and type in your website URL. It will give you a grade out of 100 for the speed of your website. Ponder this….
40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Read more web load time stats: bit.ly/kdDwc6
— Quentin Aisbett (@OnQMarketing) December 13, 2012
I do hope you’ve been able to sneak all of the five steps into 3 minutes so I don’t look like a huge flog. If your site is looking good after checking all of the above well done. If it failed on one or more of the above I strongly suggest you get some help.
But either way, there are so many more factors to your search engine performance than I’ve noted here. So if organic traffic is important to your business, then please engage an SEO practitioner or agency.
