Performing an SEO audit on a WordPress website.
Designing and building a WordPress website is one side of the coin. Maintaining it and ensuring it reaches its target audience is the other. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique that many brands use to help their WordPress website get more traffic and reach more people.
SEO has become a standard practice for organizations and individuals looking to build and grow an online presence. According to a recent survey, half of the marketing professionals surveyed said that SEO has positively impacted their marketing performance.
An important part of implementing an SEO strategy is conducting an SEO audit. This practice helps to better understand the WordPress site and lays the foundation for a successful SEO strategy.
Understanding SEO Audit.
Auditing is a careful examination or inspection of a process, environment, or part of a work.
During an SEO audit, an expert or a team of professionals It thoroughly examines various elements of the WordPress website. This process allows you to identify how these elements affect the performance of the website in search engines.
It helps identify potential issues that may be preventing your WordPress site from performing well in Google search results. By identifying potential issues, recommendations can be made and appropriate actions can be taken to improve both technical and content-related aspects.
WordPress sites, like all websites, require a technical backbone that supports both visible and interactive content. Businesses and SEO teams should focus on both aspects when conducting an SEO audit.
Technical inspection.
A technical SEO audit involves a comprehensive examination of the technical elements of your WordPress website to improve the website's visibility in search engines.
This process ensures that search engine crawlers can effectively crawl, navigate, index, and rank web pages. A technical SEO audit includes a thorough assessment of the following:
- Website code. Users may occasionally encounter an error when trying to access the website or certain pages. Sometimes, these errors may be due to error on the part of the website visitor. However, they may also be due to code errors or deleted content.
- Indexing capability. A search engine crawler scans the pages of a website to add them to its index. There may be similar pages that these crawlers should recognize. There may also be pages that search engines should block. Sometimes, there may be issues that prevent related pages from being indexed properly. A technical SEO audit helps address these issues through canonical or non-indexable tags.
- Safety. Website security reassures website visitors and keeps their information safe. Search engine crawlers also look at security. WordPress site administrators could improve security by installing an SSL certificate and HTTPS protocol.
- Mobile compatibility. Many internet users access websites from mobile devices. For this reason, optimizing your WordPress website for mobile use is essential. Mobile compatibility is also a factor that search engine crawlers consider when ranking websites.
- Website speed. The loading speed of web pages It depends largely on the quality of the server and the file sizes of the website's media assets. Page loading speed can affect search engine rankings.
Content control.
Another important factor that affects SEO performance on WordPress is its content. It is the first thing visitors see and is what initially attracts them to the site.
Content auditing involves a systematic inventory and evaluation of a website's published content. This process helps ensure that the content addresses specific keywords and audience queries. It includes a thorough evaluation of the following elements:
- Use of content and keywords. Keywords are an integral part of creating content that ranks in search engine results.
- Title tags. A title tag allows you to give web pages titles that will appear in search results. These tags should also contain relevant keywords.
- URL structure. Search engine crawlers also evaluate the quality of URLs.
- Backlinks and anchor texts. Backlinks with well-designed anchor texts contribute to organic website traffic and boost search engine rankings.
- Website structure and internal linking. Content audit evaluates the structure and navigation of the website. Adding internal links to published content helps users navigate the website easily.
Benefits of conducting an SEO audit.
Conducting an SEO audit requires a lot of time and attention to detail, but it offers several benefits to the overall performance of the website and the business as a whole.
Below are some important benefits of conducting an SEO audit:
Better performance in SERPs.
The main goal of an SEO audit and other efforts is to improve the ranking of websites in search engines.
SEO audit helps identify potential technical and content issues. A SEO team can address these issues, improving the user experience and website performance in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Improved website performance.
Website performance is an important factor in ensuring that the website meets the needs and preferences of visitors and ranks in the SERP.
One thing to keep an eye on is website loading speeds. They can significantly impact the user experience. A slow-loading website could cause visitors to click away, increasing your bounce rate.
Better user experience.
Various factors can improve the user experience of the website. Technical and content improvements made to the website can provide better user comfort to visitors.
For example, issues like slow loading times, page errors, confusing layouts, or poorly written content could discourage users from staying on your site. Ensuring it is up and running and adhering to SEO best practices boosts page rankings and improves customer satisfaction.
Content optimization.
Different industries have niche-specific keywords that can help improve content performance in search engines. An SEO audit helps evaluate your currently published content to check for potential in terms of keyword usage, formatting, linking, and other content elements.
Conducting keyword research helps identify the right words and phrases to use in your content. However, using more general keywords often has higher competition.
For this reason, it is important to discover more specific keywords so that the target audience can find the website on WordPress.
In addition to finding and using the right keywords, an SEO audit can help format content in a way that works best for search engine crawlers. These recommendations include using appropriate headings, breaking up text into smaller paragraphs, and other formatting practices.
How is an SEO audit performed?;
An SEO audit looks at almost every aspect of the website, from the backend to the frontend. It includes a long list of tasks.
Many experienced SEO experts, such as those of Fixit.gr, may have several useful tools in their possession. However, the following steps help to understand in general how an SEO audit works.
- Website detection.
A site crawl is when software is used to simulate how search engine crawlers navigate a website. This step helps to check for potential SEO issues that may be affecting your WordPress site's performance or search engine rankings.
- Traffic drop.
Search engines like Google update their algorithms from time to time. For this reason, some pages that may have performed well in the past may suffer a drop in traffic. A human reviewer may also take a manual action that affects traffic if they see that the site is not complying with Google Search Essentials.
Another possible cause of traffic decline could be outdated content. Older blog posts or landing pages may contain information or advice that is no longer relevant to your audience.
Checking whether there were any significant drops after an algorithm update is extremely important.
- Website duplicates.
Οι επισκέπτες του ιστότοπου θα πρέπει να έχουν πρόσβαση στον ιστότοπο μόνο σε ασφαλείς διευθύνσεις. Οι ασφαλείς διευθύνσεις ιστοτόπων ξεκινούν συχνά με “https”. Εάν κάποιος πληκτρολογήσει μια μη ασφαλή έκδοση του τομέα όπως http://website.com ή http://www.website.com , θα πρέπει να ανακατευθύνει στην ασφαλή έκδοση.
If the website remains accessible on both its secure and non-secure domains, then there is a problem. Search engine crawlers see these URLs as different versions of the website and treat them as such. As a result, your WordPress website may experience indexing issues.
- Indexing issues.
Search engine results come from the search engine index, which is a database of crawled, analyzed, classified, and collected web pages. Pages must be in this index to be able to rank in the SERP.
Retargeting issues can be complicated, but many SEO software tools and WordPress plugins can help.
Another way to deal with indexing issues is to use regular tags and noindex tags.
Canonical tags allow you to instruct crawlers to index a page that may be similar to other content. For example, e-commerce sites may have many product listings with similar content, with only minor variations, such as size or color. Canonical tags allow you to index all of these individual pages that crawlers may miss because of their similarities.
Από την άλλη πλευρά, οι ετικέτες noindex επιτρέπουν να “κρύβονται” ορισμένες σελίδες από τα προγράμματα ανίχνευσης και να εμποδίζεται να ευρετηριαστούν.
- Mobile-friendliness.
Creating a mobile-friendly WordPress website improves the user experience and helps with search engine rankings. Google, in particular, heavily considers the mobile version of a website when deciding how to rank it.
- Core Web Vitals.
Google uses Core Web Vitals to measure user experience, which can affect search rankings. Analyzing website performance against these standards is crucial to boosting search engine rankings.
Google's Web Essentials include the following:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Cumulative layout shift (CLS)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Interact with the next painting (INP)
These metrics measure the performance of a website, which can affect user experience and conversion rates, bounce rates, etc.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is still a core Web Vital metric as of this year. However, Google has introduced it into its publications and has begun considering this metric as a replacement for FID as of March 2024.
- Broken pages.
Checking for broken pages and links is essential during an SEO audit. A deleted page, whether accidentally or due to an unintentional error, can disrupt website navigation and waste potential backlinks.
SEO software tools and WordPress plugins often have features that alert you to broken links.
- Site map.
A sitemap refers to the list of pages contained in the domain of the website in WordPress. It should have all the pages that search engines are required to index. The sitemap should not include dead pages, non-canonical pages, or redirects, as this can confuse search engine crawlers.
- Content customization according to SEO best practices.
In addition to resolving technical issues that may be affecting SEO performance, it is also important to adapt the website content according to SEO best practices.
Some key elements that should be included on every web page that Google will index could include the following:
- Title tags
- Metadescriptions
- Headings (e.g. H1, H2, H3, etc.)
The elements mentioned above allow search engine crawlers to understand the structure of each page, boosting potential rankings.
- Competitor analysis.
Manually identifying keywords that competitors are ranking for can take some time. However, many SEO software tools and WordPress plugins can help reduce the time and effort required to perform this task.
- Ranking tracking.
Sometimes, SEO adjustments can take some time. However, a vital part of any SEO audit and strategy is to constantly monitor your search engine rankings. This step helps to objectively plan your SEO strategy and adjust it as needed.