There is one surefire way to increase your ranking on Google search: do SEO audits! Google loves sites that are easy to crawl and index, so these five SEO audits guarantee you a higher ranking.
If you want your website to rank better on Google searches, there is one surefire way: do SEO audits! Companies with well-structured websites and responding well to crawling and indexing earn a higher search engine ranking than their competitors. These five SEO audits will give you the edge over other sites in the SERPS:
1. Check for Internal Linking
While many sites have a link from the home page to every other page on the website, it is important to make sure that each page is also linked to from other pages on the site. The easiest way to do this is with a program like EpiServer, which allows you to create a content map or a list of all of your site’s pages and the pages they link to. You can then run this through a tool like Google’s Webmaster Tools and Bing Site : Search, which will give you broken links and under-linked pages so you can improve them.
2. Check for Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a serious issue that can hurt your website. Search engines try their best to deal with duplicate content, but if you are not careful, it can come back to bite you! Search Engines use duplicate content as algo to determine how likely a page is valuable to the user. Therefore, Google will give less value and ranking power to a page with duplicate content. To fix this problem, we recommend using a tool like OneSpan’s Duplicate Content Finder, which will scan your site and tell you if any duplicate content exists on your site. If it does, we highly recommend fixing it before continuing.
3. Check your Title Tags
Title tags are a very important ranking factor for Google, and they’re also super easy to overlook. Take a look at your page titles and see if they have anything in common. Many times, sites will use the same title tag for many of their pages, leading to a dilution of keyword value that hurts your site rank. It is always a good idea to check the title tag first if you’re dealing with an especially competitive market or phrase because there’s no point in getting the top rank for diluted keywords!
4. Check the Meta Description Tags
Meta Descriptions are often overlooked, but they are a very crucial ranking factor. If you are too lazy to be bothered to write a new Meta description for every page on your site, at least check your Meta descriptions on other sites. If they appear to be riddled with keywords and pull search traffic, you are doing it wrong. Try adding a unique description that is more accurate and descriptive of your page. On some pages, this might mean removing keywords from the description entirely.
5. Check your sitemap
The sitemaps you check are very important because they let Google know exactly where all of your important pages are located and whether they have been crawled. A properly constructed sitemap will show Google that the pages have not been removed, which can be a serious ranking factor and possibly hurt your site’s ability to rank in future searches.
So, if you are not getting the results you want from SEO, give these five SEO audits a try! We guarantee you will see results to your satisfaction!