#HowTo – How To Perform an SEO Audit on Your Own Website

Whatever platform your site is built in, if it is not optimised for SEO then you could be losing out on a large chunk of potential traffic. You could also be damaging your site in the long run and risking getting penalised by Google in the future. When your website is your lifeblood, neither of these situations are good.

Most developers are not also SEO experts, despite what they claim, and many websites end up being built with issues right from the start. Many large corporations and brands mess it up, sometimes with disasterous results.

SEO Audits Tell You What To Fix

If you commission an SEO consultant or agency to handle the SEO for your site, one of the first things they will do is carry out a full SEO audit on your site – exposing weaknesses and opportunities, along with a set of recommendations on how to improve your site performance.

This post will teach you how to perform a basic audit on your site yourself, without requiring a vast amount of SEO knowledge. Hopefully, you won’t find any glaring issues, but if you do then at least you can appoint a firm or consultant to do a more thorough audit and fix your issues.

Self-Audit SEO Checklist

1. Indexing
2. Content
3. Page Speed

If a consultant was doing a full audit for you, they would go into a lot more detail and cover more areas of the site. However, as we are simply trying to identify any major issues with your site, these 3 key areas will be sufficient.

1. Indexing

In order for users to find your website in the Google search results, you must first have your site crawled and indexed by Google. When a user performs a search, Google queries their index and returns results from it. To find out how many pages of your site Google has indexed, simply search for this:

site:http://www.yoursite.com (replacing for your actual site URL)

Then note the number of results you see reported.

This should roughly match the amount of pages you have on your website, although Google doesn’t always index everything so it doesn’t need to match perfectly.

When you should be concerned is if the results are significantly lower or higher than you were expecting. If they are a lot higher you may have issues with URL parameters and/or duplicate content which could be damaging your site, and is definitely worth getting checked out by a professional. If they are a lot lower then there is probably something wrong with your site architecture or URL structure, which means that Google isn’t able to crawl your site properly. Again, get this checked out.

In addition to making sure that your site is indexed properly, you also want to make sure that other variations of your core content are not accidentally indexed:

IP Address

Your site actually ‘lives’ on an IP address (e.g.  91.102.27.1), which is translated into your domain name for human consumption. It is the domain that we want to see indexed in the search results, and not the IP address. You can find out the IP address of your site by pinging it (How To Ping an IP Address) then use the same site operator we used above:

site:91.102.27.1

In this instance, you want to see 0 results. If you see that your whole site is indexed again under the IP address, seek professional help as they will need to clean this leak up.

https Pages

https is a secure protocol, used in addition to http, typically used in areas of websites that require a secure connection (e.g. payment pages). On most sites, it is only a few pages that require https and these are treated separately to the rest of the site. However, if your site uses relative links as opposed to absolute links (i.e. /product-page as opposed to www.yoursite.com/product-page) then potentially Googlebot could get into your site via an https URL and crawl and index the whole site again.

This means you would have two versions of the site indexed in Google, one under http and one under https. You can check for this by using the site search operator again, along with an additional operator ‘inurl’:

site:yoursite.com inurl:https -inurl:http

Again you are looking for 0 results (unless you specifically want https URLs in the index) and you should get it checked out if you see otherwise.

www vs non-www

This is not strictly an indexing issue, but important nonetheless. Basically you need to choose if you want your site to resolve like this: http://www.yousite.com or like this: http://yoursite.com (but not BOTH). Whichever you decide, you should redirect the other one.

If you are not sure which to use, try searching your site on Google and seeing which result they display – it will be the version with the most authority, and probably worth sticking with.

If you decide to go with the non-www version, you need to make sure that the www version redirects to the non-www version, via a permanent 301 redirect. You can check this through a server header checker.

2. Content

The content on your site is the main area that will enable you to:

• Attract links – good for SEO!
• Serve duplicate content – bad for SEO!

Writing content that can attract links is a whole topic of itself, so I’ll not go into that here (but this is a good starting point if you are interested). Where you can get yourself into trouble is through duplicate content.

Google hates duplicate content. Avoid it at all costs.

Duplicate content can mean the same, or highly similar, content on several pages of your own site, or on other people’s sites. Typical cases include:

• Store sites that all use the manufacturers description (i.e. multiple sites using the same description)
• Cookie-cutter pages that all use the same basic text with only 1 or 2 words changed on each
• Syndicated content that is stored on your site but also pumped out to hundreds of other depositories
• Original content that you wrote initially, that is scraped, stolen or copied by other websites

Google Webmaster Tools

As with your site copy, you want your HTML elements, such as Page Title and Meta Description, to be unique for every page. As in the example above, this isn’t always the case, and if you see a significant amount of suggestions on this page then it is probably indicative that something is wrong, and is worth getting a professional to address the issue.

The other important area to check out on Webmaster Tools is Search Traffic->Manual Actions – this will tell you if Google has put a penalty on your site that will hinder it’s ability to rank. ‘Manual Penalty’ refers to a penalty that has been placed on your site by a human tester at Google (rather than by the algorithm itself) – in some cases they can be extremely damaging to site traffic and very difficult to remove.

3. Site Speed

By site speed, we mean, quite simply, how fast your websites loads up the content. The faster your site, the better. A faster site benefits is clearly a better experience for your users, and it is also a ranking factor for Google search, so it pays to make your site faster.

Slower page result time results in an increase in page abandonment (Image Source).

There are a variety of online tools to check your page speed:

• Pingdom
• GTMetrix
• Google PageSpeed Insights

All three are worth trying, with GTMetrix giving the most useful results in terms of a ‘score’. If you have a low score, speak to your developers and try to get them to implement the suggestions across the three tools.

Another way you can improve your load speed, without needing to get developers involved, is to beef up your server. Upgrading your server to improve processing power and memory will pretty much guarantee an increase in site speed performance. As a starting point you can compare different hosting companies on whoishostingthis.com, who also offer a range of reviews to help you choose a new host.

It’s Never Too Late Too Start

Whether your site is a completely new build, or is a legacy site you’ve had for years, there is never any harm in performing a few checks on the health of your site. Although most web design companies may claim that they are also experts in SEO, don’t take their word for it – at the end of the day it is your pocket that gets hit if they have accidentally messed something up.

If you perform the audit and find you do have issues that need to be dealt with, just let me know in the comments and I can point you in the right direction.