And millions of people around the world hire experts like AJ Frey for their SEO audits. Still not convinced? Let me ask you? Do you think it is a coincidence that you are here? No, it’s not! You are here because our SEO experts have spent hours auditing our website to ensure that we make it on Google’s page one–which is where you found us. 

And that’s just one reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. We’re the good guys. We believe in sharing information so we’re going to share some more reasons with you. Are you ready? Here then are 5 reasons people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. But for the newbie who is just starting out in SEO and has no idea what we are talking about, let’s first define an SEO audit.

What Is an SEO Site Audit?

Well, we are going to presume that you already know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. According to Yakkety Yak (a Chicago-based marketing agency) “an SEO site audit is an analysis of the factors that impact your website ranking in organic search. 

This often includes technical back-end factors as well as on-page, content-focused elements that make a website both easier for search engine robots to crawl and easier for people to navigate”. The objective being to understand the ranking of your site and to discover how to increase traffic to your site.

Why is this Important? 

A 2020 study (Search Engine Journal) found that the clickthrough rate for websites in the first position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is 25%. For websites in the second position, this number drops drastically to 15%, and 2.5% for websites in the 10th position. And this is all on the first page!!! 

Can you imagine what happens when you get to Google’s page 2? This means if your website is not on page 1, the odds are pretty slim for consumers to find you. Why spend money to build a website if not to generate revenue. However, if no one is visiting your site, then it means no leads and ultimately no revenue. 

So now you see the purpose of SEO, you can also understand why it’s important to do an SEO audit of your website to ensure it is properly optimized for the search engines. 

Why can’t I do it for free?

Good question. Let’s look at free: 

We all know that time is money, therefore it is unreasonable to expect an SEO Expert to spend the time to do an audit for free, right? So what’s left? DIY or have a team member who’s not an expert do it. Anyone else who promises free has an ulterior motive, whereby you are going to end up being penny wise and pound foolish. 

Note that a free SEO audit will generate incomplete and misleading information, which if acted upon could harm the quality, visibility and profitability of your website. If using a third-party, he/she could provide sales-oriented recommendations to steer you towards engaging with the third-party providing the audit. I.e. “Hire us” and we will fix the problem for you. This we call the foot-in-the-door tactic.   

What you will not get for free is valuable insights, historical contexts (past and present performance) and meaningful recommendations for what to do next. The danger of missing these three necessary ingredients is that you can end up making harmful decisions due to a lack of information, the wrong information, or information designed to lead you in a predetermined direction. 

Not only will you now have to deal with the financial fallout of an uninformed decision, but you will also have to bear the additional cost of fixing it–penny wise and pound foolish.

Why it is Worth Paying for an SEO Audit

A free SEO audit, as a giveaway, only provides limited useful information in its purpose, scope and strategic value. A paid SEO audit delves deep into your marketing data to analyse the meaning and implications of the site’s SEO performance.

Not only that, but it also presents a “comprehensive picture of how SEO affects overall marketing and business goals, so the audit delivers many times the value of your investment in revenue-driving conclusions”.

Having established that you are now left with a paid SEO audit, let’s now look at the 5 reasons people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. Also, let’s give a look how SEO Expert AJ Frey, the best SEO in Canada, can audit your site and ensure your audiences discover you on Google’s first page. 

You’re hiring a team of experts

Usually, SEO experts do not work in a vacuum. So what most people don’t know is that when you hire an SEO expert, you are actually getting a team of experts working together to do a comprehensive audit on your website. 

You’re getting value for your money

When you hire an SEO expert, you’re actually getting value for your money because he/she is going to evaluate your website based on your unique needs, foci and desired conversions. There is no one-size fits all in SEO, therefore, you cannot use a template to do an SEo audit. Even if you start with a template, it must be customized to meet the needs of that particular website. 

You’re getting thoughtful, Informed Insights

You could decide to purchase the SEO tool–which is good, and even the SEO experts use them sometimes. The only problem is, you may not be able to read and understand the outcome. What does “manual actions” and “tracking/analytics” really mean, for example? An SEO expert will give you thoughtful, informed insights based on the outcome after he/she has audited your website. 

You can expect to receive quantitative and qualitative information because well-trained experts like AJ Frey are looking through every single anomaly revealed through their SEO audit of your website. 

Issues like duplicate contents, excessive redirects, low word count, unlinked pages, etc. are recorded and categorized into subheadings. The SEO audit report will not read like a fill-in-the-blank generic report used by everybody. No, every section of the report will contain thoughtful insights about your website–information that has been obtained from the data collected.  

You’re Getting Honest and Forthright Recommendations

After a thorough evaluation, you can expect an SEO expert to provide a prescriptive list of categorize recommendations fit to your budget. And one that is easily implemented by you and your team. 

Many third-party auditors will give you a description of what’s “wrong” with your website–Usually in the form of a pdf file, and that’s where they stop. However, they will not prescribe the “medicine” needed for your “broken” site. 

With an SEO expert, an SEO audit report is not just a pdf file (though you will get that too), but also includes meaningful recommendations that go beyond “check your sitemap” and “improve content”. 

The SEO expert will have a conference call or face-to-face meeting with you to discuss the findings of the SEO audit. After giving you honest and forthright recommendations, he/she will answer all the  questions you may have concerning the audit and your website. You can expect to get honest feedback.

By the time you finish, there will be no doubt as to what your next move will be. This is another reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits. If you do not have an SEO team, we will gladly assist. We have the best SEO packages in Canada, so you don’t have to worry about your bottomline. 

You will avoid Issues with Google

And the fifth reason people prefer hiring experts for their SEO audits is to avoid any issue with Google. If you know anything about SEO you know that Google has a Best Practice manual of the things one can and cannot do in order to rank on their pages. 

You’re an upstanding citizen, but unknown to you, when you decided to place your favourite keyword 20 times in your underperforming page Google sees that as a “black-hat” technique and penalises you. 

Google no longer accepts keyword stuffing (that’s what they call using a keyword too many times in one article) and so Google’s crawlers notice this on your web pages. What will happen is, you will see your page rank go down instead of rising, which means fewer people will find your page, and subsequently fewer leads and conversions.

As you can see, it’s bad enough If you make a mistake with your SEO campaign–if that’s all you had to worry about: wasted resources. However, your real problem starts when you get entangled with Google. If you’re not experienced with SEO-and most DIY web owners aren’t–you could accidentally conduct black-hat SEO techniques without fully understanding the consequences of your actions.

SEO Experts know all the rules. That’s why they are experts. A part of their job is to understand the ins and outs of the industry, to ensure they never run into legal issues. If they were to conduct “black hat” SEO, they could find themselves in trouble with Google, and you could take legal actions against them. 

Final thoughts

When It comes to SEO Audit, you could download a free SEO tool and DIY. However, if you did, and if you’re not an SEO expert, you coud not only hurt your bottomline: you could get into trouble with Google and your website could get penalised for inadvertently practicing black hat techniques.

Or, you could hire an SEO expert who will not only conduct a thorough audit of your site, but will also present the results in a timely, well-thought out manner, whether face-to-face or virtually. He/She will go through the results with you in a thoughtful way. 

Once through, you will receive a honest and forthright recommendations. So you can make informed decisions. The value you get from hiring experts for your SEO audit will be proportionally more than what it costs, if managed correctly and nurture your business to scale.

If you do not have an SEO team, we can provide SEO services to you, at a fraction of the cost seen on the Internet. Or, if you want to learn more about how search engine optimization can help your business grow, give us a call, or send us an email. AJ Frey is ready to help you!  

So there you have it. The 5 Reasons People Prefer Hiring Experts for Their SEO Audits. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the Comments box below.

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The leading issue in trying to answer that question is that there are plenty of things that factor in – including but not limited to, the type of business, industry, marketing strategies, and web design. Simply put, figuring out how long it takes for SEO to work is relative to how it is done in the first place. 

We’ve dealt with several businesses in the past who already had impractical expectations before coming in; they ask head-on if we can help them produce results in a couple of months because that is the ideal time frame they hear from their peers.

How Long Does SEO Take to Work?

The Truth About SEO

Sadly, for them and any future client, we tell them that SEO doesn’t walk on a straight line. In other words, there’s no uniform system or set of rules that govern how strategies should work and what methods should be avoided. 

Key in the term “SEO tips” in Google, and you are bombarded with thousands of opinions from everyone claiming to be experts. While there is nothing wrong with the overabundance of information, we take issue on those who cash in on misinformation, particularly about SEO campaigns that produce results in no time. 

You’re here because you want to know the truth. Don’t get me wrong – We’re not dissuading you from investing in SEO. You’re here for a reality check, and that is what we’re giving you.

Don’t worry if you are confused or scared. Everyone feels the same way when they ponder how long it’ll take for SEO to work. But before we delve on to the factors that affect the timeline and results, let’s make sure you know the basics of SEO. 

What is SEO?

SEO deals with the optimization of the pages of a website in a way that achieves favorable rank in the search engine results pages (SERPS). It stands out from all other strategies with the same objective because it involves the use of free or “organic” methods. 

SERPs contain links to pages, listings, videos, and other stuff that are relevant to a specific keyword phrase or search term. The results are ranked using an algorithm designed based on the search intent of the user. 

SEO has the most impact on a website’s ranking, but it is a broad concept that is better understood by two attributes – on-page SEO and off-page SEO. 

On-Page SEO

The only way to understand on-page SEO is by learning how a search engine like Google operates. It was mentioned earlier that search engines embrace an algorithm to examine content and rank pages through them. Google gathers content by using spiders or crawlers.

Search engines use a database (indexes) to save pertinent website info, including URLs. So, when someone searches “signs of a roof replacement,” Google displays results based on its indexes. 

On-page SEO deals with optimizing a page on a website. The search engines take multiple factors into account when ranking pages. These factors include keyword use and stemming, internal links and anchor texts, mobile responsiveness, and distribution of page authority, to name a few. 

Off-Page SEO

This is often called “link building,” for a good reason. Off-page SEO describes the process of creating a reputable inbound link profile for a website by using:

• high-authority
• relevant
• trustworthy links from other websites.

The reason why it is called “off-page” is that the work done is outside of the website. An excellent example is when you ask an authority site in the roofing industry to link to your blog post about the signs that a roof needs replacement.

When Will You See Results from Your Campaign?

Irrespective of the chosen SEO strategy, it takes time to see the results after the implementation. If you’re desperate to know how long you should wait, then the most sensible projection is four to seven months.

This is the period when you begin to see results. In other words, we’re not saying you achieve utter success in less than a year. 

The reason why we’d always come up with this modest projection is that there is a bevy of factors that affect the development of your campaign. We discuss these factors below:

Age

Being a newbie is the biggest challenge for every website trying to climb up to the search engine results pages. It’s like when you’re vying a job straight out of college, and everyone looks at you as an inexperienced prospect with a lot of risks and a few upsides.

For the most part, it takes Google a couple of months to index a newly published site. In other words, age plays a crucial factor in figuring out how long you have to wait for your website to appear on the first page of SERPs.

There are ways to help speed up your progress, i.e., obtaining links from authority sites (off-page SEO). Doing so means convincing high-ranking and relevant sites to link to you. If you’re successful in getting these links to your pages, you’re telling Google to index your site quicker. 

History

Age and history are two different things SEO’s perspective. The former refers to the time that your site has been published on the web. While the latter talks about your site’s interaction history with the search engines.

Google hands out a score on every page of a website based on factors such as trustworthiness and reputability. This score or rating exemplifies your site’s propensity to climb in the search engine rankings. Hence, the higher score your page gets, the more likely faster the climb to the first page of Google will be.

Penalties

We said earlier that there is no set of strict guidelines or rules in SEO. But don’t think Google and other search engines won’t penalize black hat strategies.

Google hates websites that break its rules, although there’s no existing document that details these rules. Any decent individual with minimal background in SEO knows what it means to break the rules.

For example, procuring backlinks from shady and spammy sources, posting duplicate content, and keyword stuffing.

If you’ve engaged in any of those black hat techniques before, it means your site has a tainted reputation online. Google and other search engines won’t forget previous penalties when they rank pages. But like everything in life, there’s always a second chance to redeem yourself. 

Final Words

SEO is a lot more complicated than most people think, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of probing into how long does SEO take to work, the best approach is to set realistic goals. And then establish an effective plan based on them. Instead of focusing on the time frame, you should weigh on the factors that affect your campaign. 

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Thankfully there are tons of free ways you can check different SEO attributes and rankings which can save you both time and money. Here are some of our favourites at Rad websites.

1) Small SEO Tools (Free)

This site is one of the best Free SEO Tools out there because it has all types of free tools you can use in order to do keyword research, site analysis and even check your competition. A part from Google’s own tools, this is probably the best you can get without entering in your credit card information. While you can’t go as deep as some of the paid tools, Small SEO Tools is great for people who want to be able to fix some of the more common SEO issues without spending a ton of time and effort.

How To Use This Tool

Enter your website into any of the offered tools but I would recommend start with the SEO website checker, especially if you’re looking for some quick SEO wins. This tool will give you an idea of how you score and how you stack up against your competition. You can then dive deeper using some of the other tools.

2) Google Analytics (Free)

This is the tool you must definitely use on a weekly basis, even if you don’t really care about SEO. Google Analytics tracks all your traffic to your website and you can analysis which marketing channels are working and which aren’t. You can see what pages your clients are most gravitating towards and which ones need improvements.

How to Use This Tool

You need to sign in to your Analytics account to start using this tool. Once you have added your website, navigate to the Tracking code under the property column and copy the code. Paste the tracking code in your SEO plugin. We recommend either Yoast or All In One SEO.

You should get verification that you’ve done this correctly. It will take a little time to get used to navigating Google Analytics as there are so many different options and customizable features but once you do, you’ll see the power of it.

3) Google PageSpeed Insights (Free)

Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that checks the speed of your site and provides suggestions to how to improve it. Page loading speed is one of the most important elements of a website. Better site speed leads to increased user satisfaction and higher rankings.

How to Use This Tool

Enter your website URL, click the “analyze” button, and the tool will automatically check the speed and overall user experience of your site and provide a score – for both desktop and mobile. You need to opt for a score above 90 to offer your users a better site experience and to increase your chances of ranking higher in the search results.

4) Google Search Console (Free)

Formally Google Webmaster, this is yet another Google tool that allows you to search for errors on your website that could potentially harm your SEO score. Primarily it allows you to check and submit a sitemap which is the overall architecture that Google views your site in.

How To Use This Tool

You’ll have to sign into your Google Search Console or create a new account if you don’t have one already. Once you are in you’re account you’ll have to attach it to your website. You can do this in a variety of ways including through domain access, your website code or a website plugin. Once you have hooked your website up, you’ll able to navigate with the bar on the left-hand site which will give you a variety of options.

5) Mobile-Friendly Test (Free)

Mobile-Friendly Test is a free tool that lets you check the responsiveness of your website on a mobile device. With Google’s emphasis on mobile-first search queries on mobile devices are at least 50% in your industry — and in many cases more. Therefore it’s important to optimize your site for mobile devices.

How to Use This Tool

Enter the URL of the site that you wish to test and then click the “run test” button. In just a few seconds, you will know if your website is mobile-friendly or not.

6) Ahrefs Backlink Checker (Freemium)

Ahrefs offers a free back-link checker that allows you to check the top 100 links pointing to any website. Back-links are important because they are one of the ways Google checks to see how popular your website is and whether the website provides useful information.

How to Use This Tool

Enter the URL that you want to analyze and the tool will not only show you your domain rating score.

7) Keyword.io (Free)

Keyword research is undoubtedly one of the most fundamental tasks that every SEO specialist needs to perform, but researching is a time-consuming process without access to the best tools. Keyword.io is an easy and free alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner and it offers lots of relevant keyword suggestions for every type of research.

How to Use This Tool

Enter your main keyword in the search box, click on the desired search engine or platform, and then select the targeted country from the drop-down list. Once you press search, a variety of options will appear.

8) Moz Local (Free)

Moz has a free tool called Moz Local which is great for local businesses that want to be found within a particular neighborhood. Moz Local offers a comprehensive view of a website’s profile and web presence. By analyzing the most popular online directory’s, it gives a score on how well you rank and where you can improve. A great thing about this tool is that you don’t need a paid Moz account in order to use it.

How to Use This Tool

Enter the company’s name and street address and click search. It will take up to 30 seconds to analyze and will display where that company is indexed and where you could add it for improved search results. It is particularly useful to create links from sites like Yelp, Facebook, and Foursquare which will increase your domain authority.

So, these are the best free SEO Tools, that you can use and get better website ranking on Search Engines. If you need our SEO Experts Help, Feel free to Contact Us.

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Myth #1 Link Building.

When Penguin 2.0 was released in 2013, it changed a lot of how ranking was done. In the past, building as many links as possible without analyzing the linking domain was how SEO typically worked. This practice was known as link stuffing, and by doing this, your website would rank higher on Google. Building links is still a very important part of SEO, however you need relevant links that actually are important to your reader.

Nowadays, it is important to focus on the quality of links you are obtaining, rather than the quantity. Sometimes less can be more if you know how exactly to build links the proper way.

Too often, when businesses hire someone to do link building, they focus on the quantity of links rather than their quality. But linking is not a numbers game anymore. You should focus on having relevant and diverse sources that link to relevant pages. Remember Google wants your content and information to be useful. If the links are useless and don’t add any value then your page will be devalued.

Myth #2 Keywords and Meta Tags

Meta descriptions are coding attributes that concisely explain the contents of web pages. In other words, they are keywords. SEO experts use them to help categorize your website and different web pages. You’ve probably seen them before on Google’s search engine results pages where they’re commonly used as page previews.

In 2009, Google announced that meta descriptions and keywords didn’t have bearing on search engine ranking. That’s not to say that these descriptions aren’t important for SEO, though.

On the contrary, in fact: Meta descriptions present a major opportunity to separate yourself from your competition and convince searchers that your page is worth navigating to.

In fact, last year Google announced that it would be increasing the length of meta descriptions to allow for more descriptive snippets.

Myth #3 Home Page Content

Have you ever come across a homepage filled with paragraphs and paragraphs of writing? A lot of people believe that the more writing you have on your homepage the better.

However, your homepage content should be long enough to clarify who you are, what you do, where you’re located, your value proposition, and what visitors should do next. If you can do all that in less words the better. Visitors should leave satisfied, not overwhelmed or underwhelmed – and certainly not confused. So, this is also one of the important SEO Myths, that you have to know.

Myth #4 Local Content

If you’re a local business, optimizing for local search won’t only help you get found, but it will help you get found by people who are nearby and more likely to buy from you, aka your ideal customers.

Google believes, (correctly for the most part) people want to find answers, things, or people that are local. A hairdresser in New Jersey is no good to you if you live in San Francisco. And because SEO search ranking is becoming that much more cutthroat, local is that much more important. Looking forward, Google will continue to take steps to curate the best local content to the surface of search results.

So, these are the SEO Myths you have to follow while creating your website. If you need some help determining the best SEO strategy for your business, talk to one of our strategists at Rad Websites. We’ll guide you through the difficulty help you define the best course of action going forward and create a plan that is sustainable and effective.

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1. Keyword Stuffing

This one is the most obvious on the list of SEO Tactics. “Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with too many irrelevant keywords so your content doesn’t make any sense. These keywords appear in a list or group, out of context, or repeated an inadequate number of times in an attempt to appear relevant to search engines.

What To Do Instead:

While mindlessly stuffing your content with keywords won’t do you any good, you can still take search engines into account and optimize your content effectively When analyzing your content for the intent behind it.

2. Creating Low Quality Content

Getting low quality content written in India for five or ten dollars isn’t going to cut it anymore. Nobody wants to read useless content and as a result Google will downgrade it. Writing high-quality articles for your website takes loads of time, money and effort.

What To Do Instead:

Check your website for low-quality content straight away, as it might be affecting your rankings. It’s better if you write fewer articles but of higher quality. Also consider writing longer articles with plenty of amazing graphics and infographics.

3. Creating Irrelevant Guest Posts

Since the early days of SEO, there has been loads of buzz around guest posting. People used to guest blog no matter how relevant the blog was or not. Guest blogging is not okay if you’re doing it solely for link building and is irrelevant. Google will sniff out irrelevant guest blogs and degrade your site.

What To Do Instead:

If most of known link building techniques are harmful and dangerous, what is there left to do in terms of improving your rankings with links? First you might have to remove some links for your rankings to go up. Second build links that actually add value to the viewer and give him or her more information on what they are seeking.

4. Heavily Using Anchor Text On Internal Links

An internal link is a link that points to another page on the same website. An anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink that often appears in blue.
Using internal links is essentially good for both the user and the search engines. It’s helpful because it allows the user to navigate a website and easily find the information for which they came to this website.

What To Do Instead:

The critical thing about internal linking is that your site structure should be shallow and logical, so focus on that instead of keyword-stuffing your links. Ideally, you should keep all your important pages not more than 3 clicks away from the homepage.

5. Creating Pages For Each Keyword Variation

Creating pages for each keyword variation was a tactic used years ago, when keywords, not intent, dominated the Google’s indexing methods. You’d want to have the maximum capacity to target each possible keyword individually.

What To Do Instead:

Throw your effort into creating well-structured, informative, and visually appealing landing pages for your products and services. Fit your keywords in a natural way into your content, headline, title. Here’re you can find the guide on how to build perfectly optimized landing pages.

Conclusion

Are you guilty of any of these SEO tactics? If you are that’s okay, most of us are. But it’s important to get updated on the latest tactics and stay in tune with Google. Google doesn’t tell you exactly how to increase rankings but they do give you important clues in what to do and what not to do.

Please reach out, we are happy to guide you through the entire process. The entire team here at Rad Websites wants to help make you stand out and be RAD!

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If you’re like a lot of businesses out there, you’re probably not getting the traction to your website that you want. You have a great-looking website, you have a great product or service yet you aren’t getting enough sales. What went wrong?

Well the first thing you need to do perform an SEO audit to see where you stand and what improvements need to be made.

What Is An SEO Audit?

As a business owner, you should know what a SEO Audit is, and why it is crucial for your online presence. You need to identify issues that could and would prevent your website from being ranked on any search engines.

SEO Audits gives you a precise and detailed perception that gives you an overview of your site’s online presence. Ignoring these identifying issues, and your efforts will be in vain.

In other words,  your hard work will be paid off once you regularly audit your site. Also, this will make sure it’s properly crawled and indexed.

Pro tip: To make your content stand out, discerning content-related issues, indexing, proper use of backlink analysis, learning site architecture, and social media engagement are important factors to use in your internet marketing.

These components when understood and practiced will be important in helping you to identify strengths, weaknesses, and your website’s potential in gaining traction online.

Keep in mind that when you lose out all on the traffic, your possible sales will go down the drain. Quite the opposite when you regularly audit your website.

SEO Tool List

So how does SEO Audit procedure go? Here are tools you need to know:

1. Moz Site Audit Tool
2. Google Analytics
3. Google Search Console
4. Google Page Speed Insight

Starting The SEO Audit

The Crawl: This procedure is so important that you need to run it first before you do the other steps. Why is this important? Because this is where you identify your website’s problems, i.e., duplicate contents, low word count, unlinked pagination pages, excess redirects.

Moz Site Audit Tool

1. Go to the tool and open application.
2. On the top right of the screen, click new site audit.
3. Create new project.
4. Then enter your domain name followed by your project name.

With the exception of the limited checked pages, there is no need to edit any settings. However, if the need arises, remove URL parameters, bypass restrictions, or allow or disallow some URLs.

1. On Page SEO Score.
2. Organic Monthly Traffic.
3. Organic Keywords.
4. Backlinks.

As you scroll down the page, ‘Top SEO Issues’ will appear. Click on any of the URL for more information on your website’s issues. This way, you can review the pages; decide whether you need additional content. It’s crucial that you’ll have an insight on how Googlebot is crawling your site. You’ll know when your site is ranking well by manually searching your site.

Other Aspects To Check

When looking for relevant search results, how many of your pages pop up after? Do they come up first in the list when searching your site? Do you see your site in the list of end results when giving assessments?

Keep in mind though that despite your page’s not being at the top rank, it doesn’t mean that your page is uncrawlable, it only suggests that you need to realize the problem and what needs to be done.

You need to do this procedure in order to know if your page’s variation is in the right arrangement, in combination with duplicates. How do you do this? Go to Google and run a “site:domain.com.”

This will list indexed URLs for your domain. If you have mix site versions, then you potentially need to addressed to it. It’s important to run site search in order to have a preview of any used subdomains.

Checking your site’s indexed URLs is another procedure, it’s like running the same procedure as the above. You’ll be surprised to see a few pages Google has indexed after doing this.

Are these the results that you expect after a search? Then if not, there’s an issue that needs to be fixed. (The main culprit is usually the faceted navigation needs to be indexed). However, if it’s less than what you expected, your site then is being crawled or indexed.

How To Use Search Console

Seeing a drop in your site’s ranking or failing to rank high as it should be is anticipated once your site has violated Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines; this is where Manual Penalty comes in. If your brand does not rank then your site will be deindexed.

You can avoid this by checking in to see whether a manual action has been issued against your site by using the Search Console; look for:

1. “Security and Manual Actions” tab down the left-hand side of the menu;
2. Look for the manual actions link.
3. Click, then you will be directed to your status.

You can relax if you see the result with a green check. On the other hand, if an issue appears in a list, then you need a Manual Actions Report.

It has been an important factor for Mobile Ranking for a long time. Remember that User Experience is prevalent in SEO success so site speed is important.

In fact, data shows that if there’s a significant bouncing from a user, this increases a slower page load. The faster the page loads, the better result from SEO and UX perspectives. Use SEMrush Site Audit report to see load time statistics and list of highlighted errors.

SEO Audits and SSL Certificates

Implementing an SSL certificate is important if your site runs on HTTP. Once you run https://www.domain.com in your browser and see that your site remains on the HTTP protocol you can relax and head on to the next step. On the other hand, you need to address this issue if you are redirected to an HTTP version.

Make sure to keep up with the trend of having a mobile-friendly site. UX is a must if you expect to reach the top. You can check this on Search Console, look for Enhancements tab in the Mobile Usability section for any issues.

SEO Audits and Indexation Issues

How to analyze and resolve indexation issues? You will see valid pages or ones that have warning, plus, excluded pages as well as coverage errors, if you go to the index tab of the Coverage page in Google Search Console.

Prevention of site from being crawled and indexed is expected if there are underlying issues. Address this ASAP! Underlying common errors include:

1. Pages that have a noindex attribute and that are submitted in a sitemap.
2. Pages blocked from being crawled in your robots.txt file but that are included in a sitemap.
3. 404 pages submitted in a sitemap.

Excluded URLs are pages that are not currently in Google’s index. This includes:

1. Pages excluded with a noindex attribute
2. Pages that redirect
3. Crawl anomalies
4. Canonicalization issues
5. Pages that are crawled but not indexed
6. Not found (404) errors
7. Pages blocked by your robots.txt file

Deeply analyze the report and only clean the areas of concern. Of course, these reports don’t need to always be cleaned up. Usually, there are specific reasons these exclusions happen, i.e., due to site migrations. Those are the best moment to clean those reports.

Page user experience is the main goal in Google’s future objectives. A combination of Core Web Vitals signals with Google’s for a better Search ranking which gives better metrics for page user experience is a feat.

Other Tips to Improve your SEO Audits

Be a social media butterfly. Use social media as your tool for your SEO efforts. Let the dynamics of this platform be a conduit for consistent backlinks and engagement. It has the power to increase the number of your backlinks.

Those who follow your content might be more likely to link to it. This increases your brand awareness through queries about your brand. Also, let us not forget the “mentions” and “tags” that social media can offer to your brand.

As we take everything into account, we have touched on some techniques on how to do SEO Audit. We have given tools and procedures on how to fix issues and deal with it to keep your site up to its rank.

Final Thoughts

Always bear in mind that search engine algorithms, best practices, market trends, and most especially your competitors are always keeping track. So make it a habit to keep your site up to date; address issues immediately after audit. Eliminate duplicates. Monitor your site analytics, and make sure you’re engaging in any social media platforms.

The more your presence you have in social media, the further you’ll push your relevant search terms. Be consistent, and your SEO ranking will soon reach the peak of success.

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If you are searching for a unique method that’s different than an ordinary blog to build backlinks from authoritative domains, infographics might be the solution for you.

What Makes Up A Good Infographic?

While there’s no secret formula to make a good infographic, there are some key aspects all share. These are three common elements good infographics all have:

1. If your infographic has an eye-catching and amazing design, you can get people to stop scrolling and pay attention.
2. A good infographic has to give useful and researched statistical data about an interesting topic.
3. Just like other content, simply by publishing your infograph, you won’t have much success unless you do your best to promote it on social media or through email.

Encourage Sharing of Your Infographics

Creating an infographic is just half the battle. Next you need to start promoting it. An easy way to do this if you make it easy to share your Infographics through social media platforms. You should provide social media sharing icons over your Infographics. So, if a reader holds the mouse over the Infographics, he or she is able is able to share it with one click.

Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites

The importance of Social Bookmarking Sites in the promotion of Infographics cannot be undermined. Sites such as Reddit, Quora, Stumbleupon, and Digg, and are popular visits with millions of daily users. Submission on such sites exposes your Infographics to a large audience and greaten the chance your infographic will go viral. They can like, vote, and share your Infographics.

Submit to Infographics Directories

You didn’t think these existed, did you? Submission on Infographics Directories can provide good backlinks for your website. A good example is Infographic Post which is a very authoritative Infographics directory site. It’s a very popular site, and you are likely to get a large number of views and shares for your Infographics once you submit on this site. While some of them require you to register, most of these sites are free to submit.

Email Popular Bloggers

You can promote your Infographics by emailing to bloggers who have active followers and publish on a regular schedule. If your Infographics is done brilliantly and interests other bloggers, they are likely to write about your Infographics and give backlink to your website.

Create an Embed Code for your Infographics

While this is somewhat technical, it’s a good technique to help spread the word. Once you have published your infographic on your website and shared it across your social media platforms, the next thing you need to do is to create an embed code for your Infographics.
It is a simple HTML code that boggers and others can use for easily sharing your Infographics. They simply need to put the embed code on their website which automatically posts your Infographics.

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What is Google My Business?

Google My Business helps business owners manage their business and help them rank. It is an essential tool to find out and adjust how your site shows in Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph, Google+ and organic search results.

You can manage your business listing by adding details such as opening hours, photos and keywords. In addition to that, it is possible to manage the reviews your customers leave behind.

Starting Your Google My Business Listing

Getting started with My Business is easy. You have to make an account and claim your business. Keep in mind that My Business is not the catch-all tool for your local SEO. It has to work in tandem with other SEO efforts.

For example, you won’t climb in results if your profile is inaccurate. But you also won’t reach the top without a well-optimized site and localized content.
If your business has been around for more than three years, it’s likely it already has a Google Business listing and you just need to claim it.

Once successfully claimed, you can manage the information just as if you started the Google My Business listing yourself years previous.

Verifying Your Google My Business Listing

Once you have submitted your business information, hours, and other service area, you’ll need to verify your listing.

Verification typically takes less than a week, in which Google will send you a verification code postcard that, once you receive, you verify with the enclosed code and your business will officially be live.

It’s probably easiest to verify your listing by postcard. This helps Google prevent false listings that will only misdirect users and derail the usefulness of Google Search and Maps, among other tools.

It’s important to know that Google won’t display your business until the business is verified. You also can’t access any page insights/analytical information or business reviews so watch out for that postcard.

Publishing Your Google My Business Listing

It’s important to use all resources GMB offers within its listing details to get the most out of your business locations and increase your SEO results.

Local search results favour the most relevant results for searches, and business offering the most detailed and accurate information will be easier to serve in search.

Don’t leave anything to be guessed or assumed; make sure your listing communicates with potential customers what your business does, where it is, and how they can acquire the good and/or services your business is offering.

How Customers Find Your Listing

While Google Business doesn’t have the best analytics, there are a few things you can learn from their insights.

“Direct” searches are for your business name or address versus a “Discovery” search. They searched for a category, product, or service that you offer, and your listing appeared.

Beside “Listing on Search” and “Listing on Maps,” you’ll see the number of views your listing received from each product in the timeframe you’ve selected. According to Google, “Views” are like “impressions” on other analytics platforms.

To see how many people found you on a particular product on a particular day, place your cursor over the appropriate segment of the graph on the day you’re interested in.

This part of Insights uses a map to show where people are that are requesting directions to your business.

Your business location is identified on the map and some of the most common spots that people request directions to your business from are shown. It even breaks the total number of direction requests down by city or neighbourhood.

Conclusion

It’s critical to remember Google Business is not a set it and forget it tool. Things change, your business changes and your Google Business should always reflect that. Keep everything active, monitor reviews and stay on top of things. If you have any questions about

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1. Your website isn’t showing up on search engines

This is the most obvious one and probably the one that is costing you the most business. It goes without saying, you should be easily found by search engines and ultimately your customers.
The goal of SEO is to make you rank very high for what you offer within your field. This is what makes SEO a powerhouse for a business of any size – you can easily scale your business. With SEO, it’s possible to be found as relevant by clients who never met you or your brand before. Your business can expand quickly without spending a ton of money to reach new clients using other, more traditional marketing methods.

Another thing to be aware of is a drastic loss of ranking. If you’ve read about any of the high-profile companies tumbling in Google rankings, you’ve probably figured out it can happen to anyone. Still, the effects can be devastating, all the more so when you don’t know the cause. Drops in ranking are a common occurrence after algorithm updates). Many websites also suddenly lose their position or are banned completely after incurring a penalty from Google, sometimes with site admin not even realizing they did anything wrong. So, this is one of the Signs You Need To Invest In Your SEO.

2. Your website is slow

This is another obvious one and just as important. Make sure your web pages and images on your site are optimized for loading speed. Amazon did a study and found that when their website loaded even a second slower than usual, they saw a drop in sales of millions of dollars. People are impatience and don’t’ want to wait
If your website isn’t performing well and you are in need of someone who just optimizes your website in such a way that all visitors find your website in a better way to understand and can quite easily navigate at your website, SEO Services is at your doorsteps.
Potential customers need to be able to find what they are looking for, and find it quickly. If someone gets ‘lost’ on your website and can’t find the information they need, they will move onto your competitors. Internal website linking is important. Having an organized and well laid out site, and menu structure is also a big part of an overall SEO strategy.

Once you add a page or post to your website, make sure to add some internal linking so that your site flows well, and also make sure that all important pages are easy to access.

3. You haven’t updated your website’s content

If your website have a blog function or updates, you need to take services of SEO. Having high quality SEO services not only improves the quality of content, but also optimize the contents based in keywords and thus in return gives you a better chance to rank high on Google.
With quality content, you can deliver your insights to the customers in a better way and can fulfill your goals to a great extent. Adding some interesting blog updates to educate your customer is a great addition, not only adding value to your customers but establishes yourself as a leader in your field.

4. Nobody can find your business in Google Maps

Google Maps is an amazing tool for businesses to get found and noticed online. With a shift toward more localized search in Google, the giant search engine has dramatically increased the importance of localized SEO.
Also, since Google grabs location data from a variety of sources, it’s possible for your business to appear in the wrong place on Google Maps. If your business isn’t showing up in the right place on Google Maps, it’s likely due to a lack of consistency in your name, address and phone number.

5. Your competitors are doing it

If you’re not showing up on Google it means your competition is doing a better job than you are.
As you’re probably well aware, the first page in a search engine means everything. In fact, in studies, it has been found that 92% of searchers don’t’ go past the first page. If you’re competition is ranking better than you, it’s definitely time to invest in some serious SEO. And gain some advantage back from them.

Conclusion

So, these are the Signs You Need To Invest In Your SEO. If you need some help determining the best SEO strategy for your business, talk to one of our strategists at Rad Websites. We’ll guide you through the difficultly help you define the best course of action going forward. And create a plan that is sustainable and effective.

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An SEO audit may not ring a bell for someone who does not consider himself a web design expert, but it is a task that anyone with basic SEO knowledge can perform. Ask anyone who knows a thing or two about how business websites should perform to succeed, and you will realize how critical a regular audit is.

A business or brand that is trying to achieve relevance through digital marketing must learn to embrace the competition. The only way to keep up is to create and run a website that brings in traffic and conversions. This is where the concept of search engine optimization comes in.

You may be able to build a website and apply an SEO strategy for it, but you do not expect your site to run on autopilot. In other words, you must have a clear understanding of how your website is performing based on the SEO strategies you are using. Hence, the sole purpose of an SEO audit is to figure out how well is your business website performing.

The audit will check the health of your website with an emphasis on the presence of spam. Doing SEO audits regularly makes sense because Google has this habit of altering its algorithms in ranking websites. Simply put, you are doing it to keep up with what is new.

SEO Audit Coverage

An SEO audit is likened to that of multiple-point car inspection. It examines your website to see how it functions and performs compared to the rest of the market. The audit essentially covers the following:

1. Keyword Use – You must know if the way you are using your keywords is on point. The keywords must bee optimized for them to help in directing traffic to your site.
2. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) – LSI defined as the context of a search. It still has something to do with keywords, specifically long tail and secondary keywords.
3. Competition – You also would want to know how you perform against the competition, especially in the aspects of links, meta tags, keywords, and overall SEO ranking.
4. Organic Search Rank – Companies that need to keep the costs down may have to reconsider their PPC strategy. If you decide to focus on your website’s organic search rankings, you need to perform an SEO audit to see your chances.

Enough of the introduction, here are the components of a comprehensive SEO audit:

1 – Site Crawl

A site crawl is the most efficient method of assessing the state of your website in its current form. It also gives you a preview of the issues that may need to be resolved sooner than later. Site crawling essentially creates an outline for the entire SEO audit.

The site crawl will cover areas like the structure of your URL, content, meta descriptions, images, links, and the structure of your website. You ask questions like how well your content is formatted and if it is fresh. Do you have a unique meta description per page? Does your website have enough links per page and do all of them work?

Furthermore, site crawling should also include the analysis of your landing page and its relationship with the inner pages. The landing page is where your site builds an initial impression, so it needs to be user-friendly and intuitive.

2 – Page Speed Analysis

Page load speed plays a critical role in keeping your site visitors motivated in browsing your site further. 60% of users will find their way out of a website when it takes more than three seconds to load. So, if your website takes too long to load pages, it will have a negative impact on conversions and will increase bounce rates. In performing an SEO audit with an emphasis on page speed, you can use a handful of free tools, including Google’s Page Speed Insights and YSlow. It is crucial to learn about your page load speed since that is the only way to figure out if there is a need to fix some elements in the design.

3 – Site Architecture Assessment

Your website needs a solid structure for it to rank high in Google. It is merely about using the right keywords and relevant content. One aspect that you should focus on is user experience, and for you to ensure that prospective clients end up liking your site, you must improve its architecture.

So, how do you improve site architecture? As you have guessed it already, you must perform an SEO audit. The audit examines things like the sitemap and URL structure. The result of the audit will also tell you if your main webpages are listed and positioned correctly and if site visitors will not have a hard time navigating through the inner pages and links.

4 – Content

Content plays an indispensable role in the effectiveness and success of your website. The failure to refresh or update content will hurt your site’s rank, so it is not merely about inserting unique and relevant information. Even if on-page content is unique and relevant, it still needs to be updated regularly since Google looks at it with a critical eye. Hence, your SEO audit should include an examination of your content.

See to it that you are using the keywords in your content naturally. It also must be consistent since the objective is to prevent being labeled as spam.

Part of examining your content is taking a closer look at the tags. Check if title tags have two salient qualities – concise and descriptive. Be reminded that extra-long titles are never a good thing for search engines.

5 – Checking the Backlinks

You probably know by now that backlinks are a crucial element of SEO. Google will grade the quality of your website based on the quality of the sites that link to it. It was prevalent back in the day to exchange reciprocal links with other websites to improve SEO. It is no longer an effective practice today, but backlinks are still relevant. This time, backlinks are more about quality instead of quantity. Therefore, you should verify in your SEO audit if the websites that links to your site come from reputable domains.

Tools for SEO Audit

Like I said at the beginning of this post, SEO audit does not have to be an overwhelming task. You can do it with the help of a tool that is readily available online. All you must do is pick the right one based on your budget and specific needs.

The first and most sensible option is Google Analytics. As someone tasked to market your brand and optimize a website, this tool is a must-have. It does not only help you by providing critical indicators of SEO metrics but will also hand out a user-friendly guide in performing SEO.

Another option is Google Webmaster Tools. It is a platform that offers a handful of reasonably priced tools needed for an SEO audit. Its most notable advantage is that you can check your website’s SEO performance based on how Google sees it. Since you are hoping to have your site ranked on top of Google, then it makes sense to use this tool.

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