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. Still—whenever possible, you should make sure all your pages are as optimized as possible for keywords that will help them show up in organic search. 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.
Benchmarking against competitors provides a direct comparison of how your site stands in terms of visibility, keyword rankings, domain authority, and user engagement. On-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing individual web pages to rank higher in search engines and earn more relevant traffic. On-page SEO focuses on making each page as clear and valuable as possible to both search engines and human visitors. Common technical problems like broken links and redirect loops can disrupt the user experience and hurt your search rankings.
In doing so, you’ll evaluate issues Google might encounter when rendering your pages with their JavaScript crawling capabilities. Errors, broken pages, overuse of JavaScript, or a complex site architecture might derail the bot from accessing critical content or use up the available crawl budget trying to figure out your site. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to evaluate key templates on the site. This data is also within the Google Lighthouse data found at web.dev.
Check for any duplicates of your website
This makes it SEO Anomaly easy for you to learn which ones need changed and then change them one by one. The requirements for a good title or description have changed significantly following Google’s many quality updates. Back when Google used keywords almost exclusively, optimizing your title tags was a glorified method of keyword stuffing. You would identify a dozen target keywords or so, and use them on a rotating basis in all your titles and descriptions, sometimes using two or more in a single entry. Today, Google’s search algorithm is much more sophisticated, and stuffing your titles with keywords is a surefire way to get a penalty.
To test page speed, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for a free analysis. If you’re wondering how to use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for SEO, all you need to do is visit the tool, enter your website, and click analyze. These sitemaps are ideal for users, as they are just a page filled with links to all the pages they could need. An XML sitemap, on the other hand, is a piece of code that you submit to Google to help make it easier to crawl and index every page on your sitemap.
Tools to Build Your Own SEO Audit Agent
You can then rewrite your tags to ensure they’re displayed correctly. It’s a handy free SEO tool for marketers looking for related keyword suggestions. In addition, KeywordsFX provides you with questions related to the topic of your target keyword and modified versions of keyword phrases. While Semrush has a suite of paid SEO tools, it also has plenty of free features that can spy on your competitor.
- As long as the links are relevant and add value for the reader, they’re worth adding.
- You can see which ones are rising and which are falling, and by how much.
- Bookmark our convenient, free site audit checklist to guide you through each step of the process.
- Make any corrections that you need to make, and get your team up to speed on the adjustments.
Additionally, update internal links to consistently point to the preferred URL version. Avoid using session IDs or unnecessary URL parameters that create duplicates. Keep your XML sitemap updated with only canonical URLs and perform regular audits to help identify and correct hidden duplications. By following these best practices, you support clear indexing, stronger authority consolidation, and improved search visibility. To avoid SEO issues caused by duplicate versions of your website, set a preferred domain (with or without “www”) in Google Search Console. Redirect all alternate versions, such as those using “http” instead of “https” or URLs with trailing slashes, to the canonical version using 301 redirects.
Automating your SEO audit process with the Search Atlas Otto SEO Tool helps streamline website optimization by handling technical, on-page, and off-page SEO tasks with minimal manual intervention. Begin by adding the Otto pixel to your website’s header, which is a small code snippet that grants Otto SEO access to analyze your site’s structure and content. The Search Atlas Site Explorer Tool’s topical dominance tab helps you compare your website’s topical authority against competitors for specific subject areas. Simply enter your site and a competitor’s, and the Search Atlas Site Explorer Tool’s topical dominance tab analyzes and scores how well each site covers various topics, highlighting strengths and gaps. Additionally, the Search Atlas Site Explorer Tool’s topical dominance tab pinpoints content areas where your site is underperforming, allowing you to refine your strategy. Auditing structured data makes sure that the markup is correctly implemented, error-free, and aligned with Google’s guidelines.