We all know that constantly posting new and original content on your website will be good for your website’s SEO power. But having lots of original content is not enough to have higher rankings. SEO is a holistic business, and you should pay attention to its different aspects.
Technical Audit
Probably this will be the most painful part of an SEO audit if you had not set up everything in the right way when beginning. But you have to get through anyway. And you can always take steps to make things better in the future.
The first thing you have to do is to go to Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This is one of the fundamental tools to check your web page’s technical SEO.
PageSpeed Insights will provide lots of valuable information about your website’s technical situation. This tool provides information on the page level, but most of the suggestions for a page can be of use for your entire website. You can find lots of information about your pages’ loading time, optimization level of the scripts, and visuals. It would be a good idea to regularly check at least your main page’s situation on this tool.
PageSpeed Insights is a very powerful tool, but it will tell practically nothing about the technical structure of the content on your website. For this, you have to go to Bing Webmaster Tools.
You can generate SEO reports under the SEO tab in Bing Webmaster Tools. These reports will tell you what to fix in the content structure on your webpage.
Broken links and missing images can hurt your websites’ search ranking position. To prevent that, there is a tool you can use: Screaming Frog.
Screaming Frog is an SEO spider, and its free versions allow you to scan 500 pages on your website. If you don’t have a huge website, it will be more than enough.
Screaming Frog will tell you about broken links, missing images, 4xx errors, etc. on your website.
All these tools will give you a “to do” list. Prioritize the tasks and start working.
Permanent Success
If you are doing a technical SEO audit for the first time on a website that has been live for a long time, you will see that your list of things to do is quite long. To prevent this situation, you must create permanent solutions and policies.
Server Speed: Everything starts with your server. If your website isn’t hosted on a fast and always online server, all your SEO efforts will be worthless. So, evaluate the quality of your hosting provider, and if you are not satisfied with the service you get, change it before it’s too late.
CMS: The structure of the content management system of your website will play a key role in your success in SEO. A clean-coded CMS with built-in SEO features will help you more than you think for higher rankings.
Educating Content Creators and Publishers: You have to make sure that content creators and publishers know content structure requirements for a better SEO. Training them and developing content publishing policies will take less effort than correcting their mistakes later does.
