Understanding how to evaluate page-level factors in an SEO audit is crucial for local businesses, digital marketing professionals, and entrepreneurs who want to establish a strong online presence.
A thorough SEO audit can point out weak spots and create a plan to enhance your website’s search engine rankings. This blog post will delve into various aspects of evaluating page-level factors during an SEO audit. We’ll discuss the importance of crawling your site for broken links and indexing issues while examining the content quality and relevance through keyword usage and readability assessments. Let’s start.
#1. Crawl Your Site
Crawling your site is one of the first steps in conducting an effective SEO audit. Crawling helps you identify any issues hindering search engine crawlers from efficiently navigating through your website, which is crucial for properly indexing its content. Various SEO tools are available to help you with this process, such as Semrush’s Site Audit and Google Search Console. Semrush’s Site Audit tool comprehensively analyzes your website’s performance by identifying crawl ability issues, redirect problems, sitemap errors, and on-page SEO concerns.
This powerful tool provides valuable insights into how well search engines can access and index your site content while offering suggestions for improvement. Google Search Console (GSC), formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is another essential resource for evaluating the technical aspects of your site during an SEO audit. GSC allows you to monitor how well Googlebot can crawl and index your web pages while providing detailed reports on potential issues like broken links or duplicate content that could negatively impact user experience and search rankings.
#2. E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
One of the most critical aspects of an SEO audit is assessing the quality of each page’s content by evaluating its Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google uses these factors to determine how valuable your website is for users. To improve your E-A-T score, follow these guidelines:
Expertise
This means that you must be an expert-level contributor in your chosen field. Seoinc.com mentions the fact that:
“You need to be an expert in your field. Expertise means you must show the creator’s skill for the Main Content or (MC) and mention it in your content. Expertise is less critical for humor or gossip websites but vital for medical, financial, or legal websites. The good news is any site can show expertise if the content is truthful and useful for users.”
Authoritativeness
“You need to show that you are an authority or the authoritativeness of the creator for the MC. And you can get this from the expertise of your writers or yourself. If your page is a community or forum discussion, the quality of the conversation drives authority. Credentials are necessary, but so are personal experiences like reviews.”
Trustworthiness
“You need to show users they can trust the creator or company of the Main Content, the MC itself, and the website. Trustworthiness is especially important for eCommerce websites asking users for credit card information. Everything about your site should make users feel safe while they’re visiting. As a starting point, you should immediately implement an SSL certificate on your site as at least 70% of first page results use SSL (It’s one of many of Google’s scoring signals).”
However, it is important to note (SEO professionals such as Marie Haynes mention this) that not all SEO professionals agree that E-A-T is a ranking factor.
How to Check
#3. Headlines
Headlines are essential to SEO, as they provide the first impression to visitors and search engine crawlers. They should be crafted carefully with a focus on SEO optimization and readability. When writing headlines for SEO purposes, it’s important to include keywords that accurately reflect the content of your page or post. This will help search engines understand what your page is about and rank it accordingly in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). However, you don’t want to stuff too many keywords into one headline, making it difficult for readers to understand what the article is about. Keeping headlines short is also important so they don’t get cut off in SERPs or social media posts.
In addition, headlines should be catchy and engaging enough to draw readers in and encourage them to click through from SERPs or social media posts. This means using creative language that captures attention without sacrificing clarity—think “How To Make Your Website Stand Out From The Crowd” instead of “Website Optimization Tips.” You may also want to consider using powerful words like “amazing,” “incredible,” or “unbelievable” if appropriate for your audience’s tone of voice.
#4. SEO Writing
Some people overlook the importance of SEO copywriting while creating content for their websites. They assume that merely writing good-quality content is sufficient and expect the traffic to come automatically. However, this is only one aspect of the process. The other crucial aspect is incorporating SEO elements into the content to ensure that Google recognizes it as high-quality content. Content freshness is also important in SEO, but it is primarily relevant for time-sensitive searches rather than for every piece of content.
#5. Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization can be a more significant issue than you might realize. Multiple pages targeting the same keyword can lead to a situation where Google is forced to choose between them. As a result, your optimization efforts may not yield much, if any, SEO value if your keywords are too similar. Additionally, keyword cannibalization can create other problems, as discussed by OnCrawl:
#6. User Engagement & User Experience
User engagement and user experience are two of the most important page-level factors to assess as part of your SEO audit. User engagement measures how users interact with your website, while user experience is an overall assessment of how easy it is for them to navigate and use the site. When evaluating user engagement, you should look at metrics such as time on page, bounce rate, pages per session, and click-through rate (CTR). These metrics will give you an idea of how engaged visitors are with your content. Spending more time on a particular page or visiting multiple pages during their session indicates that they found something interesting or useful in what they saw.
On the other hand, if people quickly leave after visiting only one page, this could indicate that nothing was engaging enough to keep them around longer. Additionally, tracking CTRs can help you identify which links are getting clicked on the most so that you can optimize those areas for better performance. In terms of user experience (UX), there are several key elements to consider when assessing a website’s UX, including navigation structure, visual design elements like the color scheme and typography choices; loading speed; mobile compatibility; search functionality; error messages; accessibility features like alt text descriptions for images, etc.; and security measures such as HTTPS encryption protocol implementation.
#7. Check for Abnormally High Bounce Rate in Google Analytics
Regarding SEO audits, one of the most important page-level factors to assess is your site’s bounce rate. A high bounce rate can indicate that something isn’t quite right with your website and could be a sign of poor user experience or low-quality content. It’s important to check for abnormally high bounce rates in Google Analytics as part of your audit process.
To begin analyzing your site’s bounce rate, you should first understand what a “bounce” actually is. In short, a “bounce” occurs when someone visits only one page on your website before leaving without taking any other action (such as clicking through to another page). This means they are not engaging with the content on the page and, therefore, not finding what they were looking for.
When examining why visitors may be bouncing from certain pages, it helps to look at how those pages fit into the overall structure of your website. Are there clear pathways from each landing page leading visitors further into the funnel? Is there enough information on each page so visitors don’t feel lost or confused? If these questions can’t be answered positively, then chances are people will leave quickly after visiting just one page – resulting in higher-than-average bounce rates.
Content quality is another key factor in determining why people might be bouncing off certain pages. Is the content relevant and up-to-date? Does it provide useful information or solutions for readers? If not, this could also increase bounces since users won’t find anything valuable on those pages and will likely move on elsewhere instead!
Lastly, make sure you’re testing all webpages’ load times too – if a webpage takes too long to load, then this could also contribute towards higher than normal bounces as users become frustrated waiting around for things like images, videos, etc…to appear properly before moving onto another section of the site!
#8. Check User Reviews
Regarding SEO audits, user reviews should be on your list. User reviews are important in determining a website’s credibility and trustworthiness. They can also provide valuable insights into how customers perceive your business or product. It’s important to assess user reviews as part of your SEO audit for several reasons:
- User Experience
User reviews can also provide invaluable insight into the customer experience with your site or product. If customers leave positive feedback regarding their overall experience with you, then this indicates that you may be doing something right when it comes to delivering value to them through your services or products.
Conversely, if there is negative feedback from customers regarding their experiences with you, this could point towards areas where improvements need to be made to ensure better customer satisfaction levels going forward.
How to Check
Frequently Asked Questions
Conclusion
The SEO audit process is essential for any website, as it allows you to evaluate page-level factors and identify areas of improvement. This comprehensive guide has outlined nine key elements that should be assessed during an audit: crawling your site, content quality and relevance, technical SEO factors, user experience considerations, off-page SEO factors, and EAT criteria. By following these steps carefully and making the necessary adjustments to optimize your web pages accordingly, you can ensure maximum visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Let OptiLocal help you evaluate and optimize your page-level factors for an effective SEO audit. Our experienced team will ensure your website is optimized to reach its full potential in the local market.
