Personally, I like Screaming Frog for technical SEO and Surfer or SEO Anomaly GrowthBar for content SEO. I run a Screaming Frog audit for most of my clients and take it to the bank, it finds one or two (or more) issues every time. I use Surfer and/or GrowthBar every day for AI content creation and page auditing. They are also working on a feature that would allow for easy side-by-side comparisons of previous crawls, to chart your progress and make cohesive action plans. Surfer also has a new tool called Grow Flow that uses your Google Search Console data to identify biggest gaps in your content strategy.
And in 2018 they rolled out a new update that made speed even MORE important. And unless you redirect these versions properly, Google will consider them completely separate websites. Firstly, just under 55% of all global traffic is on mobile devices. Sure enough, because our content is designed to make Google searchers happy, the page quickly went from #15 to the #4 spot in Google. Many in the SEO industry have thought this was the case for a while, based on RankBrain.
In 2021, Google’s Core Web Vitals became an official ranking factor. But a good target is scoring 90+ in Google PageSpeed Insights (mobile and desktop), and a load time of under 2 seconds in GTmetrix. We’ve covered the topic in detail in this Page Speed Optimization Guide. But I will say that speeding up your site is something that’s worth spending time on.
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Without a clear picture of the current situation, it’s nearly impossible to develop an effective SEO strategy. An SEO audit is a structured method for getting a clear overview of how well your website is optimized. In essence, it’s a report consisting of a long list of SEO factors and how well your site or page is optimized for each one. Another common SEO mistake an SEO audit can help you fix is losing rankings for your top-performing pages.
Optimizing these with keywords can help boost your pages in the SERPs. Images not only add relevance to web pages, but also improve engagement, and can help with rankings. Additionally, Google Images is one of the largest search engines by itself in the world. Here we include 5 quick checks to make sure your images are up to snuff.
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Google is smart enough to know whether or not you’re intentionally and maliciously duplicating content on your site to clog the SERP with your site’s URLs. A more likely scenario, if you have duplicate content, is that it’s happening unintentionally. Given the above section on types of SEO audits, we’ve compiled a checklist for a pretty well-rounded SEO audit that incorporates technical, off-page, and on-page SEO.
If you are looking to optimize existing images, there are tools available, especially for more popular content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress. Large images on your website can seriously impact your site speed and performance. Ideally, you want to display images in the smallest possible size and in an appropriate format, such as WebP. Canonical tags are an important part of SEO, mainly because Google doesn’t like duplicate content. Also, using canonical tags incorrectly (or not at all) can seriously affect your crawl budget.
- With top free SEO tools like Ahrefs Backlink Checker, you can research your competitors’ backlink strategies and identify link-building opportunities for your site.
- Auditing your website on an ongoing basis is key, regardless of how long you have been doing SEO on your website.
- It helps search engines understand which version of a webpage serves users based on their language and location preferences.
- If your pages aren’t indexed, they won’t appear in the search results, and it will hurt your SEO.
- Collectively, these metrics can help us understand where your website currently stands in speed and performance – and how to fix it, if necessary.
The robots.txt file is arguably the most straightforward file on your website. Although you may advise search engines on how to crawl your site, it is easy to make errors. This report, alongside other tools, can help you to start identifying the issues that may be hindering your performance on the SERPs.
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… Your prospective SEO should be able to give you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved. If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else. Successful bloggers should see an increase in all these stats simultaneously. Make sure that all your links work properly, that they are relevant, healthy and with proper keywords.