SEO Audit

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

The basics of on-page SEO

• Target one page for one primary keyword
• Keyword research before building your service pages
• Focus on writing great content
• Optimize your meta titles/snippets/URLs/site architecture
• Ensure you have internal links and they are relevant
• Look at your anchor texts and be precise
• Fix duplicate content
• Check your technical SEO like robots.txt, sitemap.xml, crawlability, indexability report
• Have a good content strategy
• Improve your text readability
• Improve your media and images to load faster
• Update content often as content recency matters
• Get an SSL certificate
• Improve your page speed

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.

Audit declining content in Google Search Console

1. In Search Console, head to the Performance report
2. Select the dates to be the last 6 months and do a comparison to the previous 6 months. This is because Google only stores data for 16 months in Search Console.
3. Click the pages tab to see all pages
4. Sort the table by clicks

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 the page speed of each page on your site is the Google Analytics page speed report: Google Analytics › Behavior › Site Speed › Page Timings. This report is not available in GA4.

You can also use Screaming Frog to connect PageSpeed Insights and get an individual score, or check the response time report in Screaming Frog. Use this report to find the pages that load the slowest, then use PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to find why they load slowly and fix the page speed.

Audit unused resources with Chrome DevTools

1. Open your webpage in Chrome
2. Hit F12 and open DevTools
3. Ctrl + Shift + P
4. Type coverage and hit show coverage
5. Hit the round grey record button
6. The page will draw up the usage visualization for all the resources used (CSS/JS)
7. You can then click on a resource and the editor will highlight in blue/red what is and isn't used

Work on optimizing the most used CSS / JS files.

Core Web Vitals are metrics introduced by Google to check how the page performs for user experience. They measure a page’s load time, its elements and relative shifts in page stability, and its interactivity. You can find them in Google Search Console, and also look at the page experience report there for a further breakdown of what's being measured.

It measures

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — measures how fast the page loads. Ideal loading speed is 2.5 seconds or less.
• First Input Delay (FID) — measures interactivity. Ideal value is 100 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — measures visual stability. Ideal CLS is 0.1 or less. If you have dynamic JavaScript or Google ads running on the site, you will have this out of whack.

You can end up with duplicate content in a number of ways, the most common being different URLs serving the same content. This usually happens with CMSes like WordPress, Shopify, Magento and even PrestaShop. You can use 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 by comparing the MD5 hashes of all pages with each other, and near duplicates using a 90% match with the minhash algorithm. Both 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 via different URLs
• 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.

Use redirects if

• You have moved the domain or the page and want to pass the authority
• People can access your website through several different versions of the URL (e.g. www vs non-www)
• You are merging websites
• You removed a page and, instead of a 404 page not found, you want visitors to go to a more relevant page

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 — and to ignore the other versions, to help Google find the most relevant content faster and more 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 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 are called the 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, 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 webmaster 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 Search Console and looking at the manual actions tab.