SEO audits present probably the most bang on your SEO buck. But, conducting sturdy and large-scale audits sometimes takes a important quantity of effort and time. They additionally typically include a price ticket that many small to medium sized companies can’t afford.
Sometimes a full-blown SEO audit isn’t precisely what a firm wants. That’s when lite SEO audits shine.
What’s a Lite SEO Audit?
For small companies, there are occasions web sites comprise a restricted set of pages. For instance, some SMB web sites solely comprise 20 or 30 pages. They aren’t utilizing advanced CMS packages, and even dynamic pages. They merely want somebody educated to undergo the location and inform them the strengths, weaknesses, dangers, and alternatives. And they should perceive tips on how to treatment any issues which might be encountered through the audit.
Without having to spend weeks analyzing a large-scale web site that may have many variables within the combine, a lite audit tackles a small web site in a comparatively quick period of time. And though it’s labeled “lite”, an skilled SEO may glean essential insights that may rework the location at hand, and shortly.
What You Can Find
Each web site is totally different, and you’ll inevitably discover various things mistaken with each. But you could find some extremely essential points which might be typically very simple to repair (and that’s particularly the case with smaller web sites).
Since you could find a wide selection of points, I’m not going to checklist all of them right here now. Instead, I’m going to checklist the problems I discovered throughout a current lite audit, which supplied many actual life examples of points chances are you’ll encounter.
Also, my final submit lined how to use the web developer plugin to help with audits. You ought to undoubtedly test it out when you need assistance with digging into your personal web site.
Quick Background
A neighborhood small enterprise proprietor reached out to me final month explaining that the corporate’s web site wasn’t performing properly. It was mainly a web-based brochure that no person was engaged on, wasn’t being up to date, wasn’t being tracked, and to their data, equipped no worth to their enterprise in any respect. The proprietor knew that shouldn’t be the case, however had no concept the place to begin.
The firm additionally didn’t have a massive model price range to carry out an intensive audit. So I defined extra about lite SEO audits for small companies and he was onboard. The 10 sections under comprise many of the web site’s evident points, which have been recognized in a comparatively quick period of time.
The better part is that the majority of those points will be mounted shortly. Let’s face it, there’s no launch schedule for SMB web sites. They could make modifications as shortly as they should.
In addition, there have been matters lined through the audit that the corporate had by no means addressed within the first place. Those weren’t essentially issues that wanted to be mounted… they have been small enterprise alternatives.
Without additional ado, listed here are 10 essential insights I found throughout a current lite SEO audit:
1. Rogue Pages and 301 Redirects Needed
Quite a lot of pages listed have been older variations of present pages. They have been left over from an older model of the location. This is dangerous since you:
- Don’t need older pages sitting on the net for anybody to seek out.
- Don’t need a number of pages competing in search (which these pages could be since they contained comparable content material).
- Definitely wish to consolidate search fairness throughout duplicate pages (though that wasn’t essentially the case on this state of affairs). More about that later.
Needless to say, all the older pages must be 301 redirected to their newer variations. This may very well be dealt with in a short time by way of .htaccess or ISAPI_Rewrite.
2. Convert Navigation
The navigation was utterly image-based, however completely didn’t should be. The photographs have been textual content in photographs (a large pet peeve of mine).
If you’e merely going to make use of textual content, then don’t use photographs to offer the textual content. In addition, the photographs within the navigation didn’t comprise any alt textual content, which turns into the anchor textual content for picture hyperlinks.
Overall, keep away from photographs as navigational hyperlinks until you completely have to make use of them. Use descriptive anchor textual content and textual content navigation as an alternative. You’ll be significantly better off.
3. Broken Media
Important pages on the location contained hero components based mostly in QuickTime (the core visible that guests will see when touchdown on every web page). On every of the browsers I examined the location on, a lacking plugin icon confirmed up as an alternative.
That’s in all probability the quickest option to lose credibility when potential clients go to your web site. It appears to be like extraordinarily beginner, and makes guests bounce quicker than you may say “Plugin”.
Instead of utilizing QuickTime, the enterprise proprietor may very well be embedding their very own Flash video participant, their YouTube movies, a hero picture that hyperlinks to a video web page, and many others. Then they will optimize these movies utilizing video SEO finest practices.
The apparent upside contains offering movies that really play when guests land on the web page, video content material that may assist the web page at hand rank higher, and probably even yield video thumbnails within the SERPs. That’s in comparison with a damaged plugin icon.
4. Content, Glorious Content
There have been 17 pages listed on the location, and several other of these contained little or no high quality content material. Also, the location didn’t come near representing the standard of labor that the corporate produced, and held a fraction of the content material it may maintain.
It didn’t take lengthy to establish core gaps in content material based mostly on discovering goal key phrases for the corporate at hand. It’s all the time eye-opening for enterprise house owners to seek out out that their web sites don’t even comprise essential goal key phrases.
The excellent news is that they may get began instantly with constructing new content material. The dangerous information is that it takes time to generate a substantial quantity of nice content material. Better late than by no means.
Tip: Run a web site command mixed with an intitle command to seek out gaps in content material, based mostly on the right track key phrases. This is often a surprising expertise for enterprise house owners, and can present you the pages listed on the location that comprise the goal key phrases within the title tag (i.e., web site:instance.com intitle:key phrases).
5. Content Optimization
Unfortunately, their present pages have been unoptimized, and didn’t comprise goal key phrases (or the precise goal key phrases). For instance, title tags have been normal, the navigation and internal linking construction was comparatively weak and unoptimized, the content material wasn’t written totally, and many others.
Even earlier than constructing extra content material, they wanted to optimize the content material already sitting on the location. Even performing some fundamental key phrase analysis revealed a boatload of key phrases that they’d wish to rank for.
At a minimal, I made positive they understood tips on how to discover the goal key phrases for his or her present set of pages, after which tips on how to correctly optimize these pages. The modifications may very well be carried out instantly.
Tip: You can use a plugin like Search Status to shortly view on-page optimization. Just proper click on on the icon in Firefox, and click on “View Meta Tags“. You also can use the net developer plugin (lined in my last post) to verify on-page optimization.
6. NAP
For native SEO, a firm’s identify, deal with, and cellphone quantity (NAP) is extraordinarily essential. You undoubtedly wish to make sure that your NAP is constant throughout all native listings, along with your personal web site.
For the location I used to be auditing, the deal with was solely contained on the contact web page, and it was totally different than the deal with positioned of their native listings. To make issues worse, the deal with throughout native listings was inconsistent.
The outcome? They didn’t rank in any respect in native search, even for very particular searches containing the city they’re positioned in. This was a excessive precedence in my presentation.
(*10*)
Tip: Yext gives a fast audit of your native listings (at no cost). You can examine native listings, after which examine them to your personal web site.
7. Webmaster Accounts and Google Analytics
Once I dug into the location, I requested entry to the shopper’s webmaster instruments account and its Google Analytics account. Unfortunately, the enterprise proprietor had by no means set both up. They did have a rudimentary monitoring system arrange by means of their internet hosting supplier, however as you may guess, that didn’t present sufficient element to seek out out precisely how the location was performing in pure search.
Google and Bing Webmaster Tools present a boatload of knowledge, immediately from the engines. Since there are such a lot of issues you may be taught from webmaster instruments, it kills me once I see corporations with out accounts arrange. This suggestion was easy: “Set them up at the moment!”
8. Scaling Images, BMPs, and Site Speed
When hitting the location for the primary time, I observed two issues instantly. The pages loaded slowly and the photographs appeared distorted. It finally ends up the location was utilizing bitmaps (BMPs) for a few of the photographs, and people bmp’s weren’t scaled earlier than being added to the location. This resulted in large file sizes for the photographs, pressured the web page to load slowly, and resulted in poor-looking photographs. Some of the JPEGs weren’t scaled both.
Instead of utilizing BMPs, the location ought to use JPEGs for the pictures, and their webmaster ought to optimize and resize the ultimate variations previous to including them to the location. Optimization within the earlier sentence refers to reducing the file dimension whereas nonetheless sustaining prime quality photographs, and never image optimization for SEO (which they need to deal with higher as properly).
Tip: Applications like Adobe Fireworks allow you to shortly and simply optimize photographs for the net. In the screenshot above, I’m utilizing Fireworks in real-time to regulate the standard threshold on photographs and consider the visible impression. You also can see the file dimension change in real-time.
9. Canonicalization
Many small enterprise web sites don’t deal with canonicalization properly, and find yourself producing duplicate pages. There are many ways in which non-canonical variations of pages will be produced, and duplicate content material can find yourself being a massive drawback if left unchanged.
For this web site, each the www and non-www variations of the location resolved, and the location additionally used blended case. Also, the internal linking construction didn’t persistently hyperlink to the canonical variations of the URLs, which resulted within the web site being crawled with each non-www and www, with blended, case, and many others.
Using .htaccess or ISAPI_Rewrite will treatment these canonical issues. Just a few strains of code may deal with the non-www subject, in addition to the blended case subject.
Regarding the problematic inside linking, I beneficial reviewing all the inside hyperlinks and guaranteeing they level to the canonical variations of the URLs. That included each the navigation and any inline hyperlinks that have been getting used.
10. Link Building
We all know that hyperlinks are critically essential SEO-wise. Since related and highly effective hyperlinks enhance SEO energy, it’s essential to repeatedly construct hyperlinks from the precise websites (naturally).
A fast take a look at the location’s hyperlink profile revealed a large drawback. The web site had one inbound hyperlink in keeping with Majestic SEO’s contemporary index, and solely six based mostly on Majestic’s historic index. And by the best way, that one hyperlink within the contemporary index was nofollowed.
This was surprising, for the reason that web site had been round for greater than three years. It simply goes to point out that hyperlinks is not going to construct themselves… If you don’t concentrate on SEO, you will be left with a screenshot just like the one under.
This part of my findings contained probably the most suggestions, since there are a number of methods to assault the state of affairs. I defined that the corporate’s aim is to construct up extra credibility in Google’s eyes, and that constructing a sturdy pure hyperlink profile goes to take time.
They may begin with low-hanging fruit just like the associations they’re members of, the native chamber of commerce, and different organizations they’ve relationships with. In addition, their native quotation work would yield extra hyperlinks naturally (even when a few of these hyperlinks have been nofollowed).
In the second part, they may begin constructing a sturdy content material era technique, add a weblog, and write prime quality posts answering potential clients’ high questions. They may write concerning the newest developments of their business, present case research of how they helped clients, and many others.
All of this is able to yield a chance to construct pure and highly effective hyperlinks down the road. It gained’t occur in a single day, however they wanted to begin now. Actually, they wanted to begin yesterday…
Summary – Lite Can Still Be Powerful
Full-blown, sturdy SEO audits will not be crucial for each web site. Even lite audits can yield essential insights that may assist flip a web site round SEO-wise.
And for smaller websites, this course of will be accomplished comparatively shortly and with out breaking the financial institution. For small to medium sized enterprise house owners, audit findings may help you concentrate on the core issues impacting your web site, versus spinning your wheels.
And spinning your wheels is not going to lead to stronger rankings, extra hyperlinks, extra focused guests, and extra gross sales. You’ll simply want new tires.
