How to do a Basic 3-Step SEO Audit of Your Website

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CEO Approved Content

Curious how your SEO is going? Check these three things, which can indicate the quality of results your strategy is likely to produce.

Is your SEO doing their job? Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how many people come to me angry and frustrated because they got burnt by a less-than-honest SEO.

It happens. But you don’t have to be a helpless victim.

You can take actions to protect yourself. So if you’re not confident in your SEO, do these simple checks to analyze their work:

  1. Is every page clearly optimized for at least 1 keyword?

Digital marketers still like to argue about keywords. Regardless, Google’s still a machine. While it depends less on keywords today than ever before, it needs you to clearly tell it what you want to rank for.

Your target keyword should be in the visible <H1> tag at the top of your page. And it should be within your page’s <title> tag too.

Here’s how to do that:

  1. Simply go to a website page
  2. Right-click anywhere on it
  3. Choose “View page source”
  4. Hit “Control+F”
  5. In the search box that appears, type “<title>” and go to it and do the same for <h1>
  6. You should notice an obvious phrase, or similar variation of it in both
  1. Check Your Links

In offsite search, your links will be your most powerful search signal. And there’s no reason to believe that will change anytime in the near future.

You can check yours a couple ways:

  1. Go to https://www.opensitexplorer.org and enter in your URL. It’s easier. But you get less complete info.
  2. Login to Google Webmaster Tools. Go to “Search Traffic” and “Links to Your Site” and you’ll get this screen:

Link profiles are a little tricky to analyze. Generally, you should see links from websites you recognize or trust, and with information relevant to yours. Every link profile suffers from irrelevant links. None’s perfect.

For example, fastnow.tk and fastnomoney.tk would be spam/garbage websites. Google looks for clear and persistent patterns of manipulation. So if most of your profile involves reputable sites, with just a few clunkers, you’re not doing too bad. But if you see half or most of the links from junky websites, you’ve got an issue.

It could be your SEO building spammy backlinks. But, it could also be someone starting negative SEO attacks on you, trying to trash your rankings.

  1. How Fast Do Your Web Pages Load?

Next, download Screaming Frog SEO Spider. You can actually get a ton of technical information with this. A lot of pro SEOs use it.

Anyway, I want to call your attention to “Response Time,” which is how long it takes your website to load its pages, a key component of user experience.

Check out the info below:

This website has a few responses above 1 second, and most are under that. That’s pretty good. You want to be under 4 seconds in general. Anything longer than that does serious damage to your site’s ability to convert.

Those are three simple steps you can take to check on your SEO’s work. If you find anything grossly out of whack, then it’s time to have a conversation with your SEO and see what’s going on.

They may be aware of the issue and working on it, after all. So keep an open mind. But now, at least you have a little more awareness and the ability to protect yourself.

Joshua Cabe Johnson

Joshua Cabe Johnson

Joshua Cabe Johnson has been an SEO since 2008. He has personally helped over 1000 clients with online visibility and brand strategy for SEO growth.

Visual rankings has been helping small business owners online since 2002.

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