DIY SEO Audit: 10 Tips to Help Improve Your Rankings

Auditing your website has never been more important than in 2022 to ensure that your best practices for the search engines are in good order. So a DIY SEO Audit is a perfect answer.

In this article, I will give you 10 tips to set you on the right path and Improve your rankings. Suppose you are already using an SEO audit service, In that case, they will know how to conduct a website audit, and have a system already in place. But for those of you who want to learn and do it yourself, here are some tips:

1. Crawl through your website

The first step is always the most important when starting an SEO audit. So initiating a website crawl will enable you to identify what issues there are on the site that are holding you back.

You are not short of helpful tools to assist you with this. Take a lookout for:

• Octoparse
• io
• Scraper Wiki
• io

With these, you enter your URL, and it will work in the same way Google and other search engines do.

Once you are finished taking a look at the results. Problems could be:

• Inadequate content
• Duplicate content
• Missing links
• Multiple redirects

And maybe more; at least you have the data at hand.

2. Use Google to discover indexing issues

In addition to using a tool, why not use Google themselves and open a Google Analytics account if you don’t have one. In fact, if you don’t, you do actually need to anyway; click on the link and get started.

You can look at your preferred keywords. Then look at how many pages are ranking for the search terms, assessing their ranking.

If you are way off the top, some things need to be fixed anyway.

Indexing

By doing the keyword search, you can see how pages have been indexed by the search engine’s crawlers. Searching for your primary URL will showcase which of your pages have been indexed.

If any are missing, type in the specific URL and see if it appears.

If one or more pages aren’t indexing, meta tags could be an issue.

The tag acts to help the crawler identify what the content relates to, therefore indexing it for the right searches. If it is wrong or broken, it must be fixed.

3. Make sure your brand is ranking on page one

When considering an SEO strategy, you know that SEO doesn’t stand still, so constant content updating and site improvements are required. But your competition also knows this.

SERP rankings are no more than the search engines comparing companies in the same sector. There’s no guarantee of the number one spot, especially if your competition has a bigger marketing budget. Still, following best practices will gain momentum.

4. Conduct on-page SEO assessments

An on-page SEO audit will showcase what is working. The audit involves:

• Content analysis
• Site optimisation
• Site Indexing
• Domain authority
• Keywords

I placed keywords in there, although they don’t carry the weight of yesteryear as algorithms have advanced and become more sophisticated. Although other ranking factors are now of utmost importance; they are still a key component of SEO.

Though content is king at the moment, it needs to be engaging and plentiful. Users need to find what they want and keep them clicking through your site. So your keywords need to assist your content now.

Note: Ensure that you do not use your keywords more than four or five times throughout your text.

Tip: In 2022, make sure you place your target keyword in the first paragraph.

On-page SEO ensures your site is running correctly and tick all the boxes that Google and the other search engines are looking for their users.

If it loads quickly, is easy to navigate, has engaging content and users stay on there clicking through, that’s sublime for ranking. Remember, user experience is the buzzword now in SEO.

5. Look for and eliminate duplicate content

Duplicate content on your site is unhealthy. Duplicate content from someone else’s is plagiarism; that equals a Google penalty.

Google penalties are tough to recover from quickly. Part of your content strategy is to make trustworthy original content. Still, when many people write about similar topics and content, they are unaware they have it.

When it comes to your pages, if there is multiple duplicate content, the crawlers will think you are keyword stuffing and not providing helpful information for their users; therefore, a penalty can be issued.

Make sure you thoroughly check your content.

6. Check your page speed

Users now have less concentration span than in the past. That is why images and videos such as YouTube have come to the fore.

If your site doesn’t load quickly, remember they have another 100 sites on the first 10 pages of Google; they’ll just click on the next one. You don’t even have 10 seconds with users anymore. In fact, in as little as three seconds, users will turn off if each page does the same, then it’s eating into their time.

Therefore, images must be resized to suit your website’s parameters, and videos need to be in JPEG. You must ensure they are as TIFF and BMP are now totally useless.

7. Conduct a backlink audit

Conducting a backlink audit is to find links that point to your site. If you have low domain authority (DA) websites linked with your own, the Google algorithm will not respect this. So, therefore, you are testing their trustworthiness and authority.

You want high ranking sites linked with your website. If there are links with unrelated content or dead pages linked to you, it will drag your SEO strategy down.

You want sites with anchor tags that almost match yours.

8. Analyse your organic search traffic

Organic-search traffic is the lifeblood of any SEO as it shows the search engine that you are essential to them. When you rank high on a Google page, the user immediately trusts you, as there are no paid ads involved.

Organic traffic leads to better conversion rates, as the users don’t see it as an ad; they are more likely to take in your content.

There are plenty of web tools, from Google My Analytics to SEMRush and Ahrefs. Google My Analytics is easy to use and understand, giving you ideal insight into your SEO status, and plays a vital part in a DIY SEO audit.

You need new customers to grow your business. People searching and finding you online without knowing your company name are likely new organic traffic.

9. Finding and fixing broken links

User Experience, as I mentioned earlier in this article, is of utmost importance not just to Google and the other search engines but also to the user. Think of how often you have gone to a website that immediately turned you off.

Broken links of pages that don’t work are incredibly frustrating if you feel that what you were looking for was on that page, so people will move away from you quickly, increasing your bounce rate and affecting your rankings.

Be sure you regularly check each of your pages and your internal links to ensure they are in good working order. If not, make sure they are fixed. If you see ‘error 404,’ that is the prime example of a broken link.

10. Always look for opportunities and content gaps

Performing a website audit is not just about finding problems (which you likely will). It is about finding opportunities to improve.

Once your DIY SEO audit is complete, you’ll know what keywords you could use instead and where your page speed is not up-to-scratch, and your link strategy isn’t working.

But this leads to fixing it and improving it as you analyse the results. Using Google Analytics is very straightforward to understand and will show you the way forward.

SUMMARY

Suppose you are genuinely too busy to get involved in SEO yourself. Using an SEO audit service is a must, as you can’t be doing everything at once in business, especially if you have a team of employees. If you are, get yourself set up with Google Analytics and follow these steps in correlation with their site. They make it easy to chip away at why you aren’t hitting the inbound leads and conversion rates you are aiming for. I wish you luck this year.