YouTube SEO tips
A website audit is necessary to identify the problems that your site has in order to fix them and set your priorities accordingly. Even though you might have experts dealing with every area of your site, an outsider can give you a different picture on why your site might not perform as well as you would want to. Objectivity and expertise is what a third party like us can offer you.
When we perform an website audit we focus on all the important pillars of your online success, starting from the technical side, continuing with design, content, search engine optimisation and social media metrics.
Website audit – verification:
Design – if your website has a poor design, with too many ads, ugly colors, too small or too big fonts, an insane number of links on some pages, very thin content on others etc. this might have a very strong impact on your visitors behaviour. A low quality visual experience will send back to search many of your visitors after just 2s from opening your site.
Bounce rate – delivering a bad user experience won’t go unpunished. If most users go back to search after they landed on your site then your bounce rate will be sky high and your rank on search engines will go deep ocean low. You will lose not only your position in search, but also money. Your SEO team will have a lot of work to do to get you back where you were. If you slap the users with a poor quality site, they will will slap the search engine for wasting their time and the search engine will slap you until you hit the ground of search ranking.
Indexing your website – making sure that all the pages that you want are indexed and prevent the poor quality pages from being indexed.
Internal linking and navigation – having your content and pages easy to find is very important. You don’t have to suffocate pages with hundreds of links stuffed wherever you find a little free space, you need to put the user experience first. A website audit can check the functionality of your navigation and search methods, advise you on how to improve internal linking, organization and overall performance of your website.
Errors – there are different errors that can prevent your users to see the content of your site. The most popular ones are those related to crawling, indexing, duplicates, performance on mobile.
Page value – some pages are useless or bring little value to your company. A website audit will identify the pages with the highest value and help you eliminate or improve the ones with poor performances. Also, you should make sure that your rank for the keywords that you want to be found for, and that you don’t have multiple pages pointing to the same keyword.
Content – there are many aspects to consider when it comes to content. It might be too long or too short, valuable or junk, under-optimised or over-optimised, general nonsense or highly targeted. If you want to sell something, you need a content marketing strategy and good writers to make your goal achievable.
Social media – presence, followers, engagement, they all contribute to a better rank and not only. Are you reaching your target audience on social networks? A website audit will tell you how you can get to them and what type of posts trigger more engagement so that you can focus on getting the type of engagement that you need. Also, we make sure that you have social sharing buttons in place for all your updates and that you understand the value of Google authorship.
Consistency – if in some month you grow and in others you wonder what are you doing so wrong, this should definitely be fixed. You need consistent growth to be sure that you are on the right path and that you are not investing time and money also in things that actually bring more damage to your online presence.
Going with the trend – you should study very carefully the market and the trends. The experts performing the website audit can tell you where you should focus the majority of your resources. For example if more people are going mobile, you should reshape your strategy and adapt in order to survive, to conquer more markets and to continue building your brand. If you continue to concentrate the majority of your workforce and resources into outdated trends, your income will follow the same trend.
Having a plan for SEO – as you know, SEO rules change a lot. In order to succeed you need a plan for backlinks, content publishing and frequency, social media presence and other things that you could use to to improve your rankings.
Comparing your site with your competitors – people are using various tools to do that. There are various tools to spy on your competition and see what keywords they use, their rank, their backlinks, their trend. A website audit will give you a clear view on how your competitors are doing and what you need to improve to look down on them from a higher position in search.
Sales – how could your site improve conversions? What opportunities are you missing? Are there enough pages with quality content and call to action links? Especially for small businesses with a low traffic volume, conversion rate is very important. That is why we make sure that you maximise the value of your traffic through convincing content and great design calling to action. An outsider fresh view can bring you ideas that never crossed your mind even though they have a huge potential. We don’t forget about the actual buying process either – we advise you to eliminate all distractions to make it absolutely flawless and super easy for your customers to put their billing information in there and make the purchase.
Web architecture – making sure that all pages are easy to access by both users and search engines. Having a well organized website and great functionality will leave a good impression and will encourage your visitors to stay longer on your site while visiting multiple pages.
Speed – do your pages load fast enough? There are almost infinite possibilities out there, so your visitors will wait no more than a very few of seconds for your pages to load. We have a look at your plugins to see if any of them is negatively affecting your loading page time. If the speed is not good, you will end up with a high bouncing rate.
Basic On-site SEO – make sure that your title tags are optimized, that your content is easy to understand for the search engines, that your keywords are in all places that they should be to maximize your chances for a better position in search.
Backlinks – are they good or bad? Valuable or worthless? How do you get rid of your bad inbound links from spammy websites or penalized content farms? We use the Backlink Disavow Tool, a free tool that we designed to manually filter out the bad backlinks that caused your drop in rankings.
Penalties – for the sites that have low rankings and decreased traffic, we look for penalties that might have affect it, we identify the type of penalty and the reasons behind it. A good strategy and a lot of work is needed to get rid of a penalty effects.
These are the main things a website audit can check. Of course, not all customers need the same things or have the same problems with their site, so we identify the client’s goals first, and then we focus on the things that really matter to him/her.
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