WHAT TOOLS TO HELP YOU WITH YOUR SEO AUDIT?
A website is like a growing child: it will go through several stages that will allow it to become an adult, several failures that will make it more mature. In this phase of development, he will undoubtedly need to be accompanied, followed and even sometimes reframed.
This role of big brother, it is perhaps you who will have to take it on at some point in your professional career. Your superior asks you to put in place new levers allowing the growth of the company’s website. But how to do it? Where to start? Which SEO tools to use? These questions, we have all asked ourselves many times, helpless before the task that awaited us. However, the answer is not that complicated: do an SEO audit!
WHY AN SEO AUDIT?
An SEO audit service will allow you to examine your website before embarking on the deployment of numerous on-site optimizations. This is an important step to take to give you every chance of success in your project. Your audit must meet only one objective: to highlight the blocking points and thus identify the solutions to be deployed to allow you to increase your notoriety and your turnover.
To carry out this audit, you will have 2 solutions:
- Call on the SEO agency to carry out the most complete SEO audit you have seen
- You manage on your own
If you are in the second case, here is a non-exhaustive list of the most effective free solutions for carrying out your SEO audit.
SEO AUDIT: THE 5 TOOLS TO KNOW FOR AN EFFECTIVE ANALYSIS OF YOUR WEBSITE
GOOGLE PAGESPEED ​​INSIGHT: TEST THE SPEED OF YOUR MOBILE AND DESKTOP PAGES
As mentioned in one of our previous articles, the Mobile First Index has become the norm. Now, for large sites, it is the mobile versions of the sites that serve as the basis for the crawl of Google’s indexing robots. We therefore understand the importance of a good display speed for mobile pages: too long and your site will be penalized!
You will therefore have to audit the mobile optimization of your website by asking yourself 2 questions:
Are the images of the mobile version optimized (weight, dimensions)?
Are CSS and JS assets minified and loaded at the right time?
In most cases, the optimizations will go in this direction. Thanks to Google PageSpeed ​​Insight, you will have a fairly complete analysis of the blocking points and optimizations to be made.
Free Solution
TEST D’OPTIMISATION MOBILE VIA GOOGLE TOOL
We have just seen it: being mobile friendly has been the main issue for some time. Without a mobile-friendly version of your site, your reputation is going to take a huge hit.
To find out if the mobile version of your site meets Google’s SEO canons, use the Mountain View firm’s Mobile Optimization Test. The handling of the tool is child’s play: a field to fill in to indicate the URL of the page to be tested, a click on “Test” and the analysis of the page is done by itself. You will then have the answer to your mobile compatibility question for your website.
The solution will test a multitude of points including:
Accessibility of the page
Loading of resources (images, CSS, JS…)
Ergonomic errors (incompatible plugins, content larger than the screen, readability of texts…)
Free solution
1. DETERMINING THE QUALITY OF YOUR CONTENT
In line with the Panda (2011) and Phantom (2015) updates to the Google algorithm, content has become one of the most important points in terms of search engine optimization agency. Today, content that is not optimized around a coherent semantic field, in a clearly identified and identifiable theme, will necessarily be less well analyzed (and taken into account) by Google’s indexing robots. This is the famous doctrine “Content is king!”.
Even if there are several schools that argue about the importance to give to this content (and its optimization), it is obvious that you must pay particular attention to the quality of your content. To help you in this vast task, there is 1.fr.
Quite simple to learn, the tool will analyze your textual content to give you indicators such as:
The potential targets of your page/content
The supposed theme of your page/content
The quality of your text (form, diversity of words/phrases, etc.)
The expressions in the semantic field that are not used in your page/content
1. fr you will also offer content ideas to enrich your content according to your theme. If this solution is to be used more as a monitoring tool than as an absolute truth, it is nonetheless a solid asset for auditing the quality of your content.
(Partly) free solution
WEB DEVELOPER PLUGIN: ANALYZE SEMANTIC MARKUP
Having well-optimized content also requires implementing consistent semantic markup. By consistent semantic markup, we mean structuring your content using Hn tags that will allow indexing robots to grasp the outline of your content. It sounds complicated but in reality, it is not that much…
To explain the principle, let’s compare your content with a press article. Each press article contains a title, a chapĂ´ and intertitles which aim to summarize the main lines, the information contained in the body of the article. Basically, you should be able to understand what the article is about by just reading these markup elements. Well for website content, it’s the same thing!
The title of the page must set the tone of what will be developed there (and contain the keyword on which you wish to position yourself), the chapĂ´ will synthesize the details contained in your article and the Hn tags will allow you to enrich the semantic universe of the page (thanks to secondary queries). Each page should contain a single H1 tag and as many H2 to H6 tags as you wish.
To know the details of your semantic markup, there is a very practical plugin: Web Developper. In addition to a slew of other indicators, it offers you the possibility of simply viewing the semantic markup of your page: click on the Information tab, then on View Document Outline. A new tab opens in your browser and you have your information. Simple, fast and effective
Free Solution
SITELINER: DETECTING DUPLICATE CONTENT
We have just seen it in the previous part, which says quality content means unique content. And if there is one point on which there is consensus among all SEOs in France, it is that of content duplication: to be avoided absolutely!
To put it simply, keep in mind that for each page of your website, you must produce unique content in terms of:
Tags title
Meta-description
Textual content
Despite all your precautions, you may generate duplication of content without wanting it, most of the time due to poor consideration of pagination by your CMS. To find out if you are in this case, use www.siteliner.com to analyze your website.
This free tool will put your site through the mill to detect any duplication of content in your content. Once again, the result of this analysis is not to be taken literally, but it can already give you an indication of the quality of your content and allow you to dig into these duplication issues in more detail with more powerful.
Free Solution
BONUS: ANALYZE YOUR NETLINKING WITH AHREF
As we have just seen, onsite optimizations are one of the essential keys to a satisfactory ranking, but it is not the only success factor. Netlinking is at least as important…
Having quality links pointing to your site will give your domain credibility in the eyes of indexing robots. To do this, there are not 50 solutions: you have to create links to your domain from other domains, varying the profile of links that you will create: blogs, forums, sponsored articles… Try is to maximize the number of domains that will host a link to your website, respecting a few best practices:
A link per referring domain links that seem consistent, in the same theme as your domain a DoFollow/NoFollow distribution of around 80/20 of domains with a high reputation (DR, TF, CF)
The objective is not to make a link to make a link (even if any link is good to take). As for the content, think qualitative! It will be better to have a dozen links from domains with a good DR than hundreds of links from spammy spots.
To help you in this task, several tools are available. Our choice fell on www.ahrefs.com! Relatively easy to use, this tool will allow you to discover the referring domains that point to your site, their Domain Rating (the famous DR), the types of links (DoFollow, Nofollow), the history of your link profile, the linked pages or the most used anchors for your links. And a whole myriad of metrics, each more interesting than the next, which will allow you to have a relatively global view of the health of your website’s netlinking.
Last tips if you have taken an ahrefs license: analyzing your own link profile is good! Analyzing that of your competitor is better.
TO CONCLUDE
To succeed in your natural referencing strategy using personas, put the odds on your side to get to know your customers and users. Don’t hesitate to use your human resources and data to gather as much information as possible about them.
Focus your strategy on content creation, UX, but also internal networking with related topics that will keep your visitors on your site while making an impression.
