Deciphering an SEO Audit of your Website

This is a contributed post from Larissa Murillo at MarketGoo

You've probably had dozens of e-mails and phone calls from 'specialists' willing to do a comprehensive audit of your site's SEO for a modest sum. Well, there's no need for you to shell out your hard earned cash for an audit because you can do it yourself!

Your first step is to generate an SEO report for your site. If you've done this in the past and you couldn't get past the first sentence because of all the tech lingo, take a deep breath. This time you'll not only understand everything but be able to act on the information you see.

To generate a report, you can use anyone or combination of free tools. Here are a few we like (although a quick Google search will net you many results as well):

• MarketGoo's Free SEO Report (of course!)
• SiteGuru
• One SEO Tools

No two reports will look the same and you'll probably find you prefer a certain format over another. However they will contain similar elements because they are meant to cover the basics of your site's search-engine "friendliness".

Let's go through what each element of the audit means and why it's important.

H1 Tags

H1 tags are also often called main "Headers" or "Heading Tags". You can usually recognise it acting as the title of your page or of a post.

Why are they called h1? and do h2 and h3 exist? Yes, there is a hierarchical structure among these headers and h1 is the first because it's the most important title. H6 is of course least important.

Search engines like Google or Bing scan these headers to help determine what your site is about. They are also important for your website visitors, who look at the headers and can tell what that page is about.

Sitemap

It's a map of your site! It is a file that has all of your website's URLs and that search engines like Google should be able to easily discover and 'read'. Most DIY website platforms such as Weebly and Squarespace include it automatically do you don't need to worry about generating one and uploading it to your site.

SSL

Google has started to mark any website with an input field (such as a contact or payment form) as "Not Secure" if it doesn't have a secure connection. If your audit says your site doesn't have an SSL certificate, contact your provider such as Weebly, Squarespace, Wix etc. to see how to get one. If you didn't build your site using one of these DIY website builders, then your hosting provider likely offers them as well, and if you're tech savvy or have a webmaster, then you can get a free one from LetsEncrypt.

Speed

Speed is important for your site because we all know that a slow site is a huge annoyance for visitors, who are likely to bounce if the site is taking too long to load. When visitors bounce, Google knows! and it will take it as an indicator of something not being quite right with your site. The most common culprits for slow pages are heavy images, animated images, and autoplaying videos or any other media that is hosted on a third-party site.

Mobile

When an audit indicates your site is not mobile optimised, the reasons can range from your site being too slow on mobile devices (see previous item on speed), to your site not adjusting well to the size of a mobile screen and requiring the visitor to try and zoom in, zoom out, scroll around, etc. and in general providing a less than ideal experience. With over half of all internet traffic originating from mobile devices, there are millions of reasons to be well optimized for mobile!

404 Errors

A 404 error means that you arrived at a web address (URL) that doesn't exist. Sometimes

this means that there was a typo in the link or while the URL was being typed, but other times it means that a page that used to exist is gone.

When there are too many of these errors on your site, search engines engines don't like it, because visitors won't either. It's important to keep all links and URLs on your site working.

Page Titles

Page Titles are the text you see at the top of the browser tab when you visit a page and also appear as the clickable headline in the search engine results. As such, they are extremely important because they are often the first thing a potential visitor will see before they decide to click through to your website.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the short text that appears in search engines describing a page. This is just as if not more important than the title! This is where you get persuasive and use the right keyword to let the potential visitor know that your page is where the information they're searching for is located.

Alt-Text or Alt-Tags

Alt text errors are usually in reference to images. It's also called "alternative" text and it helps search engines as well users who might not be able to load the image, to understand exactly what it's about. Think of it like an invisible caption. It should veru concisely explain the image in 2 to 4 words.

Now that you know what these terms mean, you can easily interpret your SEO Audits by yourself! If you're ready to take the next step and fix the issues identified, you can also do that yourself which requires some dedication and self-teaching, you can make use of DIY SEO Tools, or you can go with an Agency that will assign you someone to do your SEO so you don't have to deal with it.