How to use Website Audits to improve search quality:
Given that Google has such a heavy focus on Search quality, auditing the way that we show you in this video can be great for picking up areas and issues that are negatively impacting your user experience and SEO. We recommend doing these kinds of audits at least monthly and it’s also helpful doing one on your highest-ranking competitors to see how you compare.
There are a number of ways that you can do this. I like to use the program SEM Rush combined with Google Search Console.
We set client sites up as projects in SEM Rush with audits scheduled to automatically run.
Here are some of the areas that we like to audit:
SEM Rush:
- Internal links that are broken
- Pages that 404
- Broken internal images
- Internal pages with slow page speed
- Duplicate meta descriptions
Search console:
- HTML Improvements
This is the path that you need to follow – Click on:
“Search Appearance -> HTML Improvements”
- Optimise for mobile usability
This is the path that you need to follow – Click on:
“Mobile Usability” tab under “Search Traffic,”
- Pay attention to your index status
This is the path that you need to follow – Click on:
“Index Status” below “Google Index”
- Fixing crawl errors
This is the path that you need to follow – Click on:
“Crawl Errors”
- Checking that sitemaps are indexed
This is the path that you need to follow – Click on:
“Sitemaps” section of Google Search Console shows you the number of URLs that have been indexed
