SEO Audit Services

On-page SEO is key to making sure that you have optimised your site for ranking on search engines.

The best way to find content to improve is to look at declining content.

Content may decline if it is seasonal or is implied seasonal.

An SEO audit should focus on a long term plan to address declining content.

Look for content that is declining.

Declining content usually refers to competing pages having usurped you in rankings.

Start by doing a simple Google search and see why other pages are performing better.

Sometimes, Google also changes the keyword specificity of a particular search term.

It reclassifies certain keywords or topics from commercial intent to informational intent or vice versa.

It might be a good idea to amend the page.

Remember, both the content and the history of the URL are instrumental in rankings.

Don’t simply discard an existing URL with a rich history in favor of a new one.

Improve and update your content.

The best way to check pagespeed of each page on your site is to check the Google Analytics page speed report.

You can get this report by browsing to Google Analytics > Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings

This report is not available in GA4.

You can also use Screaming Frog to connect page speed insights to get individual score.

Alternatively, you can check the response time report in Screaming Frog.

Use this report to find the pages that load the slowest.

Use pagespeed insights or Lighthouse to find why they load slow and fix the page speed.

Work on optimising the most used CSS / JS files.

Core web vitals are metrics introduced by Google to check how the page performs for user experience.

The core web vitals is a measure of page’s load time, its elements and relative shifts in page stability and its interactivity.

Here is a report for core web vitals from Google search console

You can also look at the page experience report in search console.

A further breakdown of what’s being measured is available by clicking on the link.

You can end up with duplicate content in a number of ways. The most common one being different URLs serving the same content.

This usually happens with CMSes like WordPress, Shopify, Magento and even Prestashop.

You can use the noindex directives on specific pages or even entire taxonomies.

The best way to detect duplicate or near duplicate pages is to use Screaming Frog to conduct an audit.

After you have crawled the site, simply head to the sidebar to find duplicate pages.

Screaming Frog detects exact duplicates and near duplicates.

It detects exact duplicates by comparing the MD5 hashes of all pages with each other.

With the near duplicates detection, it uses a 90% match using the minhash algorithm.

Both of these are extremely useful to detect content issues with your site.

If you run an ecommerce website, be careful with both near and exact duplicates. You may have duplicates detected for

• Product pages with attributes
• Category pages accessible as via different URL
• Product pages accessible via page type like single page, grouped product, complex product or bundled product

Broken links or redirects lead to poor user experience.

With that said, the best way to transfer an existing page’s authority to a new page is a 301 redirect.

You can use permanent redirects if the page has moved permanently. These include 301 , 308, meta refresh, HTTP refresh and javascript location

Use temporary redirects when the redirect may be removed in the future. These include 302, 303, 307, meta refresh and http refresh.

Although, I would recommend avoiding both meta refresh and HTTP refresh.

When you have a single page accessible from multiple URls, Google sees them as duplicates. In the absence of canonical instructions, Google will choose a single URL for all the pages.

Google will also see different URLs with similar content as duplicates. In those cases too, Google will either respect your canonical directive or choose one itself.

Canonicals help deal with crawl budgets.

If you have multiple versions of the same page accessible from different URLs, you want Google to crawl one version regularly.

You would also want Google to ignore the other versions to help Google find the most relevant content faster and often.

You can use a rel=canonical tag in your header to tell Google which URL is the canonical page.

Consider that different language versions are also considered duplicates and thus must be canonicalized.

Use the canonical section of the Screaming Frog audit to check for issues with canonicals.

Self referencing is the method of pointing to the page itself as the canonical version.

It is especially useful because while Google does a great job of finding canonicals, parameters in URLs may be unique to your domain and confusing.

It is always best practice to self reference canonicals.

Google’s John Mueller recently stated : “It’s a great practice to have a self-referencing canonical but it’s not critical.”

Consider Wikipedia’s rankings on Google.

Wikipedia ranks for most search terms on Google because of the large volume of content and great internal links.

Internal links are a great way for you to tell Google what you think the page is about.

The words that you use to create the link is called an anchor text.

Make sure you use the right anchor text to link to relevant content.

You can do an internal link audit via Screaming Frog.

Choose a URL in Screaming Frog and then choose the Inlinks tab at the bottom to look at all incoming internal links.

Make sure you look at the anchor text section of the Inlinks to see what anchor text you are using to link your content.

With anchor text, be specific.

Sometimes human reviewers at Google decide that your website is not compliant with webmasters guidelines.

They may also decide that the quality of your top ranked page is lower and you are using other methods to push the page higher in search results.

In such cases, they may decide to levy a penalty on your site.

You are unlikely to have a manual penalty unless you engage in black hat SEO or spamming the SERPs.

You can check if you have been hit with a manual penalty by simply going to the search console and looking at the manual actions tab.