We have spoken about how it is to your benefit to hire an SEO company. Many Orange County businesses have followed that advice, and are reaping the benefits of doing so. What’s so ideal about having an internet marketing agency on the payroll is that they have many optimization campaigns under their belts, and they can help you with every aspect of site maintenance. There are some parts of a website audit that you can do yourself, though, and we will be taking a look at those today.
Checking For Major Issues
The best part about this audit process is that it won’t take you many days to do it. Instead, you’re looking at a few hours, unless your website is enormous and has thousands of pages. The best tools to have for this are Google Analytics, Search Console, Pagespeed Insights, and the Structured Data Testing Tool. Copyscape, Web Page Word Counter, and SERP Simulator are also useful. The first thing that you need to do is check to make sure that only one version of your website is browsable. That means that you should think about all the different ways that someone might try to access your site, and only make one of them accessible in a browser. For the others, do a 301-redirect to the canonical version.
Crawl The Website
Next, you should do a website crawl. Beam Us Up and Screaming Frog are excellent services for this. Having one of these running in the background will give you information on what’s working with your current SEO setup. A crawler works in the same way as a spider would for Google. Next, check with Google to make sure that your site is being indexed. This part is extremely important. If your site isn’t being indexed then you won’t rank, period. Use the Google Search Console and go to Index, then to Status. This will show you the number of pages that Google has indexed for your domain.
Do You Rank For Your Brand Name?
The final thing you should do is use Google to search for your brand name. Your site should be the first organic result. If it isn’t, that’s something that needs to be addressed. The most likely cause is that Google thinks a different site is a more appropriate result for that search term. Link building is the answer to this problem. If you build a robust backlink catalog, then Google will rapidly assign your brand more prominence.
This is only part of what you should be doing periodically when you undertake a website audit. There’s quite a bit more that you can do with the tools we mentioned, but once again, unless you’re well versed in SEO and have the time for it, this sort of thing might be best left to an SEO company. Whether you choose to employ one or not, your site needs to be optimized. If it’s not, then you’re going to be losing out on organic traffic and the sales that result from it.