SEO Audit – In our last blog post we spoke about 5 simple website audit checks that you can undertake with relative ease and should take no more than 5 minutes. That website audit will give you a good idea as to the health of your website. In this blog post, we will look at more technical and SEO related issues that are also contained in our SEO Audit at Digital Sales.
Under normal circumstances a page should be assigned a strategic keyword and no other page on your website should target the same word string. Have you produced a spreadsheet of every page on your site and listed each keyword against each page? At Digital Sales we will analyses every page on your site and tell you how many pages you have on your site and what keywords are assigned or not assigned to each page.
A quick check, is to take a look at the page title for one page, for example, see the tab of your homepage, place your cursor over your tab:
See the pop up text: Digital Marketing Agency – Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick – Nationwide
This is your Page Title for your homepage and the primary assigned keyword is: Digital Marketing Agency
We see many old websites stuffing their homepage with a plethora of keywords, which is classed as ‘Black Hat SEO’, here are a few horrendous examples:
<title>DGW Boiler Services, Boiler Repair, Boiler replacement Dublin | DGW Boiler Services, Boiler Repair, Boiler replacement Dublin</title>
Using our Character counter here, you will see:
Page titles should be around 70 characters in length, the above page title example is 125 characters, and what is the assigned keyword for this page?
Here is another example:
<title>Heating Grants, Waterford, Tipperary, Cork – Boiler Replacement & Heating Control Special Offers from Walsh Heating and Plumbing, Gas & Oil Boilers, Ireland</title>
Yet another SEO Audit check is to analyse the use of Headers within a page and if page headers contain the assigned keyword.
For example, lets take a page on Digital Sales, perhaps most apt! The page ranking for ‘SEO Agency’. Viewing the source code, you will see:
<h1>SEO Agency – Digital Sales – Relevant Traffic. Real Results.</h1>
<h2>The Digital Sales Approach to SEO</h2>
<h3>OUR SEO AGENCY SERVICES – What can we do for you?</h3>
<h4>SEO Agency – SEO Auditing Services</h4>
<h4>SEO Agency – On Page SEO – Services</h4>
<h4>SEO Agency – Off Page SEO – Services</h4>
<h4>SEO Agency – Technical SEO – Services</h4>
An SEO Audit at Digital Sales will analyse a number of pages for On page Header allocation.
If we are provided with Search Console access, we can check for a number of issues, such as the repetition of Meta Descriptions – every page should have a unique meta description. So, using the Old version of Search Console, hit Appearance and HTML Improvements. Search engines do not like errors, they must be addressed and resolved.
This is the desired message:
‘We didn’t detect any issues with the meta descriptions on your site.’
Just like repeated Meta Description, broken links within your website will effect your SEO performance. Use our Broken Link Checker to discover if you have any broken links on your website. Broken links are a sign of bad user experience and will negatively impact on your SEO activity.
All your website images must have an Alt Tag attached and if you are employing best practice ‘on page’ SEO, then at least one image on that page should have that Keyword attached to the image alt tag. We use our very own Alt Tag Checker at Digital Sales to undertake this section of the SEO Audit.
An .xml file will tell the spiders that index your website, what pages to index, like a Table of Contents as such. Does your website have an .xml sitemap like this: https://www.digitalsales.ie/sitemap.xml on your website? And if so, when did you update your .xml sitemap last? And have you submitted your .xml to Search Console?
In order to check if you have a .xml sitemap, just type /sitemap.xml after your website url.
As you can see the SEO Audit checks above are relatively simple to undertake, if you like a full SEO audit, see this SEO audit link.
If you are a company that wants to build a world class website, needs help with your organic search position, Digital Strategy or generating online sales……do the necessary!!!…contact the Digital Sales team direct send us a mail at: info@digitalsales.com, see our contact us page for our office locations.
Diarmuid Haughian – Business Development Director – Digital Sales
Dip. International Selling, Cert. Digital Marketing, MSc. BITS, MA Career Guidance
