Start by checking if your website is indexed by Google and if there are any crawl errors. Making sure Google can access and index your site is crucial for SEO success. Optimizing content for Large Language Models (LLMs) has become more and more important. Making content easy to understand for LLMs increases visibility. Use tools like Google Search Console – or your preferred SEO tool to find broken links on your site.
In fact, our study of 11.8 million search results found that the top result in Google has 3.8x more backlinks than pages in positions 2-10. Rendering is one of the stages of the overall process Google uses to analyze your page content. To determine whether it should be indexed and, if so, where it should rank. To help the algorithms understand which pages meet search intent.
- Input a keyword, and this tool shows you a score from zero to 100 that tells you how competitive the keyword is.
- But these days any penalty is likely to be a little more granular (i.e. they’ll drop a page, not your entire site).
- For example, if only a few domains link to you, you must get links from related domains.
- Plus, as clusters of multiple-language pages share each other’s ranking signals, using hreflang tags correctly can have a direct impact as a ranking factor.
- They also offer other plans like ‘Starter’, ‘Growth’, and more, with varying features and pricing.
Many websites rush straight into link building, generating hundreds or even thousands of low-quality backlinks with exact-match anchor texts, before laying any SEO groundwork. You can label almost anything – products, articles, reviews, events – to clearly explain relationships and context. This clarity helps search engines understand why your content is relevant for a given query. After auditing over 500 websites, I’ve rarely seen Core Web Vitals alone significantly improve rankings. Typically, I recommend tackling technical and indexation issues first (because if Google can’t properly crawl/index, other optimizations won’t fully matter).
For this step, I recommend using a dedicated SEO crawling tool. Semrush’s Site Audit tool is my personal favorite, as it checks for over 140 technical issues—making it one of the most comprehensive solutions in the industry. You should use the HTTPS version because it encrypts data between your server and users’ browsers—improving security, user trust, and even (possibly) giving you a slight rankings boost. SEOptimer is ideal for website owners, website designers and digital agencies who want to improve their own sites or theirs of their clients. If you’re auditing your website to prepare for a brand-new or upgraded SEO strategy, we can also help. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we offer not only SEO but also PPC services, web design services, and more.
Lastly, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability; strive for a CLS score of less than 0.1. To improve this, ensure images and embedded videos have dimensions, and avoid inserting new content above existing content unless in response to a user’s action. Another way is to use Google Analytics to view traffic from all search engines. For one client, I used user engagement metrics from SEO Anomaly Google Search Console and heatmaps to recover from a Google core update hit.
Conducting Your SEO Audit: Step-by-Step
If your website does not appear in the index, it cannot be found by users. Conducting a thorough SEO audit for your enterprise is only the beginning. It’s best to do a basic SEO audit monthly and a comprehensive audit several times per year. New content and developmental changes are made almost daily with a large website. It’s equally important to continue to monitor the website and its performance in search engines. An experienced enterprise SEO auditor will have experience working with various CDN and will know the strengths and weaknesses of your website’s server, web languages, and platform/CMS.
An SEO audit checks how well optimized your website is for search engines. It finds issues that may be hurting the site’s rankings and provides opportunities to improve them. Meta tags, such as title tags and meta descriptions, are essential for SEO.
Maybe you have lots of links from irrelevant directories or questionable foreign domains. Finally, go to the “Referring Domains” tab and look at the types of sites linking to you. The report labels pages as “Good,” “Needs improvement,” or “Poor.” Expand each issue to see the affected pages. Here, you’ll find separate reports for “Desktop” and “Mobile.” Click “Open Report” at the top of either chart for more details.
Meta & Structured Data
Page speed is vital—especially after Google dropped its Speed Update and Page Experience Update. Anyone using a phone to look for stuff on the internet isn’t going to wait around for a slow-loading site. That means the faster your site is, the more likely Google is to reward you with strong organic rankings. Using your vertical-specific keyword research, write or rewrite your meta tags, making sure to optimize them for the keywords that will help them show up in search. Ancillary keywords should, if possible, be used in H2s and in body copy.
Keyword Extractor
Look for anchor text with generic phrases like “click here” and add these to a list of issues to fix after the audit. Anchor text should include relevant keywords or describe the linked page. Indexing is the process by which search engines store webpages into their database to be retrieved when users perform searches. Track the progress of search rankings over time by country, language, search engine and device type.