Once you have put in the hard work to get your website looking great, don’t let all that time and effort go to waste by neglecting to review and optimise your site correctly to ensure you are competing effectively in the search engines. We discuss the importance of performing a website audit and list 5 key points to look out for.
An SEO technical audit will assess the current health of your website and determine if there are any technical factors harming your chances of performing effectively in the search engines. It will highlight areas of improvement and development, detailing recommendations for SEO tasks, so that you can improve your ranking results. A thorough audit should also include competitor comparisons to help identify the strengths and weaknesses of your existing marketing efforts and how you can best continue to compete in the search engines.
Once you have identified key tasks, you can set out a plan to optimise your site, some factors will be more important than others, but it is important that you continue with any optimisation efforts regularly to ensure your website continues to perform well.
There are 100s of factors to take into consideration when auditing a website but we have highlighted a few important elements within five key areas that you should consider when reviewing the health of your website:
On-page Optimisation
- Correct and optimised META information
- Relevant keywords included in the content
- H1 tags
- Image file names optimised
Content
- Well written, relevant content that takes into consideration Keyword Research
Accessibility
- Check robots.txt: make sure that no part of your website or content has been blocked
- Check if XML sitemaps are listed in the robots.txt file;
- Check if XML sitemaps are submitted to Google and Bing;
Site Architecture
- Check the number of links on a page: It should not exceed 200 if possible.
- Check if vertical linking structures are there: for example, your home page should link to important category pages, and then category pages should link to sub-categories and product pages.
- Check if horizontal linking structures are there: for example, make sure relevant category pages link between each other
- Check if links are visible in your content: create internal linking between pages and content where appropriate
Technical Issues
- Properly use 301s – redirects of pages out of use
- XML sitemaps
- Do you have XML sitemaps in place?
- Are your XML sitemaps structured properly?
- Does your XML sitemap follow protocols?
How we can help check and improve your website health
Have you recently completed a website review but need more assistance? We can take care of it for you. Quick SEO audits are a great start, but if you don’t have the time or relevant knowledge to investigate and implement the more technical side of your website’s SEO, our comprehensive review and strategy planning service will help you identify what is working and what can be improved, along with an insight into how your competitors are performing.
Just give us a call on 0203 911 9715 or drop us an email at hello@firetap.co.uk – we’d be glad to help.
Online Marketing Strategy Audit and Health Check
Benchmark your online presence with best practices and your local competitors to identify and prioritise key ranking factors and technical improvements. Our audit will include:
- An overview of any technical issues identified with your website, detailing recommendations for strategic and technical improvements.
- Competitor Analysis – Our competitor research will help to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your immediate competitors with an overview of their current online marketing activities and perception from the target audience including paid advertising review and keyword ranking.
How will this website audit help me and my business?
FireTap will review and identify where you most need to improve your digital marketing and online presence via assessment of your website and social media profiles, comparing it to competitors and current rank performance.
Objectives – We will work with you to:
Following our audit, we will create a prioritised checklist of digital marketing and website performance, presenting tailored recommendations that will improve:
- Reach– recommendations to grow your audience and increase targeted traffic on your website.
- Act and Convert– recommendations to improve multi-channel customer journeys and content marketing to increase conversion.
- Engage – approaches to increase the long-term value of customers through social media, email and website improvements.
Just give us a call on 0203 911 9715 or drop us an email at hello@firetap.co.uk – we’d be glad to help.
