Most small company websites lose search traffic for ordinary reasons. A page that cannot be crawled, a title that says nothing, or a site that takes too long to load on a phone will each hold a site back. An audit is the work of finding those problems and putting them in order of importance.
This is what we look at when we audit a site, in the order we usually look at it.
Can search engines reach the pages?
Nothing else matters if a page cannot be found. We check:
- Crawling rules.
robots.txtandnoindextags sometimes block pages by accident, often left over from a launch or a redesign. - The sitemap. It should list the pages you want found, and only those.
- Status codes and redirects. Broken links, redirect chains and pages that return an error all waste the attention a search engine gives your site.
- Duplicates. The same content at several addresses splits its value. Canonical tags tell search engines which address is the real one.
Can they understand the pages?
A search engine reads structure before it reads prose.
- Titles and descriptions. Each page needs its own title, and the title should say what the page is about in the words a customer would use.
- Headings. One main heading for each page, with sections under it that follow the content.
- Structured data. Markup that states plainly what a page is, such as a business, a service, an article or a product.
- Internal links. Important pages should be easy to reach from other pages, with link text that describes them.
Is the site pleasant to use?
Speed and stability are part of how pages are ranked, and they decide whether a visitor stays.
- Loading speed, measured on a mid-range phone and not only on a fast laptop.
- Layout stability. Content that jumps around as the page loads is a common and fixable problem.
- Mobile layout and accessibility. Text that can be read, buttons that can be tapped, and images with descriptions.
Does the content answer what people ask?
Technical health gets a page considered. Content is what gets it chosen.
- Search intent. For the searches you care about, we compare what your page offers with what the pages that rank today offer.
- Gaps. Questions your customers ask that no page on your site answers.
- Thin and overlapping pages. Several weak pages on one subject usually do worse than a single good one.
What you get at the end
A list of findings is only useful when it is short and ordered. We group what we find into three sets: what to fix now, what to fix next, and what can wait. For each one we explain what the problem is and how to fix it.
If you would like us to look at your site, you can request a free SEO audit.
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