How to Perform an SEO Audit in 4 Easy Steps
3) Check Your On-Page SEO
Once you’ve crawled your site and identified major issues, it’s time to resolve your on-page SEO challenges. The most common examples involve:
Site Hierarchy and Structure
The overall structure of your website will impact your SERP rankings (for better or worse) because, as a navigational blueprint, it’s the defining feature of the user experience. So, it’s important that you lay out your site in such a way that makes it easy for users to find what they’re looking for and for Google to understand what to crawl and how to crawl it. This means building or updating a site using:
- Intuitive and simple logic that allows every user to reach their destination in 3 clicks or less
- 3-7 primary navigation categories
- 5-7 secondary navigation destinations
- HTML or CSS code
- Consistent URL structures
If your site’s structure isn’t intuitive, the user experience will suffer, which will be reflected in key metrics that impact SEO (click-through rate, bounce rate, time on page, etc.). Further, Google rewards websites with great structure by creating sitelinks on SERPs that lead to key product, blog, about, and contact pages, so a well-structured website is crucial if you want to guide your target audience through every step of the buyer journey.
Duplicate Title and Header Tags
As we’ve discussed before, repurposing content is okay — encouraged, even! Duplicating content, especially in the form of title and header tags, however, places you on extremely dangerous SEO ground.
If you’re using the same tags on multiple pages, you’re giving search engines mixed messages that they’re unable to interpret, which means they’re going to crawl and rank whichever page they deemed to have better SEO. So, for example, if you’re using the same tags on a product page (high conversion value) and a blog page (less conversion value), it’s possible that the blog page might rank higher than the product page. Not good, folks.
To fix the problem, go to the “Search Appearance” section in the Google Search Console and click “HTML Improvements.” If you have duplicate tags, they’ll show up here. Then, just hop into the backend of your site and make on-page copy adjustments as necessary. But be considerate and intentional as you do so. Title and header tags are a major SEO contributor, so make sure you’re using relevant keywords that are proven to resonate with your audience.
Or, if the page(s) with a duplicate title tag is outdated and no longer relevant, you can set up a 301 redirect to the newer, more relevant page.
Missing Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions don’t directly impact your SERP rankings, but delivering an optimal user experience that improves key performance indicators (clicks, time on page, etc.) definitely does. And since adding expressive meta descriptions that clearly introduce the content on the page significantly improve the user experience, they likewise have the power to improve SEO.
Therefore, every page on your website needs to have a unique and vivid meta description that:
- Is roughly 150 characters long
- Includes a close variant of that page’s primary keyword
- Gives an accurate preview of what the user can expect when they click on the SERP link.
If you don’t include meta descriptions, users will be less likely to click on your link and more likely to bounce if they do because they won’t be prepared for what they’re presented with. Any way you slice it, failing to include a meta description will hurt your SEO efforts.
Primary and Secondary Keyword Placement
While not quite as important as they used to be, keywords remain the lifeblood of your SEO initiatives. As such, you need to designate a primary (or focus) keyword for each page and also determine secondary keywords to use throughout your copy, header tags, and alt-text. To help search engines decipher the main purpose of the page, you should include the primary keyword in your title tag, H1 tag, meta description, and the first body paragraph on the page.
In the past, lazy content creators were able to sneak one past the goalie by stuffing their pages full of keywords to achieve higher site rankings. But this made for some pretty funny (i.e., terrible) copywriting and a horrible user experience, so Google updated its algorithm to not only ignore keyword stuffing but also actively penalize people who tried to use this black hat tactic.