How a Basic SEO Audit Can Help Small Businesses

A basic SEO audit can be a crucial aspect of getting SEO on point for someone who has a small business. With regard to one’s SEO having the skills to perform a basic SEO audit can really empower one as a business owner.

What Are The Tools Of The Trade?

One can take help from many tools to audit their site. Most have a monthly fee, but one can follow the freely available tools as well like;

• Google analytics
• Google search console
• Screaming Frog SEO spider

One should consider the following areas if one wants a basic SEO audit for a small local business.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

One can basically check a few factors with the help of Google Analytics;

• Whether its installed correctly on every page
• Setting up of important actions on the site as conversions
• Correctly configuring Analytics for HTTP/HTTPS

GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

These help on seeing the correct diagnostic data within the Search Console like;

• Setting it up with correct protocol and URL
• Sitemaps tab has the lists of the current sitemap
• Mobile Usability doesn’t show errors on mobile

Here any issues are investigated and remedied.

RESPONSE CODES

Jump to the response code tab after opening the screaming frog crawl for the site. Overview tab to the right-hand side of the screen is useful.

URI/URL

One should review the URLs and the URL tabs of the pages on the site. Here one needs a set of lower-case URLs which accurately describes the site’s content.

STRUCTURE

Next thing is to file cabinet structure where the relevant pages are put together. For example;

• www.examples.com
• www.examples.com/seo
• www.examples.com/seo/management

A clear signal relating to the content of each page is provided by the structure of the site.

PAGE TITLES

One will have to jump into the screaming frog and look at the “page titles” tab to review the page titles. Page titles should be around 40 to 65 characters to best suit the available space.

META DESCRIPTIONS

One should consider this an opportunity to add some sales copy to entice the users to click as the search engines use the text from one’s Meta description when they are listing one’s site.

HEADERS

One can review their H1 and H2 tags from screaming frog and make sure that it’s optimized sensibly.

SITE SPEED

With three different tools one can check the site’s speed;

• Google page speed insights
• Google mobile speed test
• Pingdom

Providing a solid overview of improvements, these tools are also free to use.

TECHNICAL SEO

Few technical tests include;

• Error pages returning to 404 code
• Showing a useful 404 error page
• URLS working on either HTTP or HTTPS
• URLS working with either www or without them
• When fetched and rendered page copy should be shown
• One’s site should make use of HTTPS
• Due to any other domains or subdomains, the site shouldn’t be duplicated

One will find solutions and areas of improvements by following the steps mentioned and one will continue to improve and stay competitive as well.