The quality and quantity of relevant websites sharing and linking to your content is a good sign that your content is worthwhile. You should also conduct research to determine keyword opportunities at different intent stages related to the target keyword. A thorough site crawl can identify these issues, revealing whether the appropriate tags are applied to match search demand and ensure effective SEO for faceted navigation. Start by analyzing the top-ranking sites for your target keyword on Google. Investigate why they are ranked highly, focusing on what sets them apart and how they provide value. By navigating to the last search results page, you can access a message indicating removed duplicates, revealing consolidated pages.
Backlinko readers get:
- You’ll see all the keywords your competitors’ domains rank for, but your domain doesn’t.
- This score can have a maximum value of 100, and factors in metrics such as the amount of links you have.
- All plans include site explorer, keywords explorer, site audit tool, rank tracker, and alerts.
- SEO reporting focuses on performance metrics such as keyword rankings, organic traffic, backlink growth, page speed improvements, and goal conversions.
Conducting the audit is only part of the battle – now you need to translate findings into action. In this final step, we compile the audit results into a clear set of recommendations, prioritize them, and outline a plan to implement fixes. We’ll also discuss how to maintain SEO health going forward, including adapting to Google’s changes and using automation/AI to stay ahead. By now, we’ve covered technical, on-page, off-page, and advanced audit components.
Keyword Research & Content
Core Web Vitals are metrics that Google uses to measure user experience. They measure a page’s load time, interactivity, and the stability of the content as it loads. If it’s not a manual action, you may need to check further for Google algorithm updates, as they can significantly affect your site’s organic traffic. Typically, I recommend tackling technical and indexation issues first (because if Google can’t properly crawl/index, other optimizations won’t fully matter).
As with beefing up thin content, there are certain pages on your site where it’s not going to be feasible to fully optimize for target and ancillary keywords. You’ve squeezed “employee scheduling software” onto your homepage in multiple places. That’s a keyword best reserved for a blog post (check out our SEO blog post templates here). Building links is a vital part of accruing website authority, and no SEO audit is complete without recommendations for building site-specific internal and external links. Based on factors like the quantity AND quality of your backlinks.
In order to avoid these negative consequences, it is important to regularly check for and fix any broken links on your website. Unfortunately, most search marketers only implement a link quality site audit after they’ve already been hit with a penalty. It’s easy to spot a penalty when it happens, especially if you keep a tight watch over the progress of your campaign. Your rankings will start to diminish for some or all of your keywords, and your organic traffic numbers will start to dip. In 2019 and beyond, visibility is one of the primary factors in online success. And if you want visibility, you must pay attention to the technical aspects of SEO and how Google, Bing, and other search engines rank websites and deliver search results to their users.
While Google has gotten much better at understanding text embedded in images in recent years, you still shouldn’t rely on them to index any image text on your page. Ideally, and for maximum visibility, each of these elements is defined, descriptive, and unique. Finally, Google is known to devalue sitewide and/or boilerplate links, so if you have footer navigation with the same 500 links on every page, it might be valuable to experiment with new linking practices. In general, paginated pages should be clearly linked and crawlable.
Identifying untapped keyword opportunities involves finding relevant search terms that your competitors are ranking for, but your site is not. Identifying untapped keyword opportunities is critical because it reveals blind spots in your SEO approach, which are areas where you’re losing visibility, relevance, or traffic to competitors. Analyzing your backlink profile strengthens your SEO strategy by BHS Links providing critical insights into your website’s authority, relevance, and competitive positioning. The Search Atlas Scholar Tool is an excellent tool that helps you decipher how Google evaluates and ranks content. SEO Audit 365 provides a comprehensive SEO audit report of your website that covers all aspects of on-page optimization. The report is also well-organized and provide clear insights into your website’s SEO performance.
