June 29
13 min reading time
13 min reading time
Let's be honest: There are a lot of SEO methods out there that will improve your SEO Being able to clearly identify errors and opportunities. Whether you are a small business and trying to... Website Whether you're optimizing for organic search or hiring an agency, it can be difficult to know where to start, how in-depth your analysis should be, and which SEO tools will help you get the most useful information. Below, we've prepared 10 simple steps that will show you how to quickly and easily optimize your website for organic search.
Link building is an essential part of growing website authority, and no SEO audit is complete without recommendations for creating site-specific internal and external links.
Internal links lead Link Equity They continue within your own pages and are therefore essential for building authoritative hierarchies within your site. A straightforward and time-honored way to create internal links: When creating new content, perform a site search for older, related content that ideally has built up some equity; then look for anchor text in the old content to link to the new content.
A Chrome extension like MozBar gives you this view. Ideally, you should link from the page with the highest Page Authority (PA). Page Authority and Domain Authority (DA) are not "official" metrics. Google does not use them to index pages.
They were created by SEO software companies to provide estimates of a page's or domain's authority. However, they are still fairly accurate; and they are useful when determining which websites are linking to you.
Where would be a truly useful place to direct a website visitor from a specific page? What brings them closer to purchasing your product or service? We'll discuss this in step 2, but these are good questions to ask yourself when creating internal links.
Gathering links from various authoritative domains is the essence of increasing domain authority. A simple way to build external links is to search for resource lists that realistically represent your content and can link to you.
A simpler way to create external links—and a method that yields a higher return—is to search for unlinked mentions. After sorting by domain authority and ensuring your target isn't already linked to you, you can approach content managers via Twitter, email, etc. Ask for links back to your homepage and offer to share their articles on your social media accounts in return.
Information Architecture, or IA, is a fairly broad term that essentially means "the way information is organized." For SEO audit purposes, this means redistributing internal linking structures on your website to shift the balance to the pages you need.
It also means working closely with developers and designers to create user-friendly solutions that improve page authority without compromising UX (user experience). Perhaps your blog index only lists ten pages at a time, pushing older posts 20 to 30 clicks away from your homepage.
Increasing the number of posts per page will bring older posts closer to the homepage. Your blog's "Related Posts" and "Popular Posts" sections may contain duplicate links, or your header and footer may contain duplicate links. Replacing these duplicate links with links to other pages where you want to allocate equity will allow you to fully maximize this coveted link space.
Unless you are reviewing your own website, intelligence-based recommendations should depend on the goals of the project stakeholders. Which pages/parts of the site are they trying to direct users to? What is the main goal of your website? Your target audience and your business objectives will give you insights into how to define and organize content.
Speaking of content… your pages won't get noticed in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) if they don't have enough content. "Too little" content is content that doesn't meet the user's needs. A 300-word blog post explaining a complex concept will be considered thin.
However, it's unrealistic to put 1000-2000 words on every page of your website. Many pages are dominated by design elements—hero images, icons, etc.—call-to-action buttons, and product-focused copy. So, what content should you focus on?
Good news: When you search for duplicate content, you'll be looking at the same subsets of your website that you examined when scanning for thin content. Some search engines will penalize your website for duplicate content. Here's our take on it: Google is smart enough to detect if you're intentionally and maliciously duplicating content on your website to link the SERP to your website's URLs.
Most likely, it's not you. A more probable scenario is that if you have duplicate content, it's unintentional. Your CMS may be generating it (Content Management System) dynamically new pages that look similar and have not been manually canonized in the Search Console. Wordpress does this with archive pages.
As with upgrading thin content, there are certain pages on your website where it's not possible to... keywords to optimize completely. Let's say you are a software company for workforce scheduling. You have used "workforce scheduling software" as a keyword in several places on your homepage.
The keyword with the highest search volume and lowest competition for "employee scheduling software" is "best employee scheduling software." While you're aiming to rank for this keyword, saying "We are the best" is probably not a wise decision.
This is a keyword best reserved for a blog post. However, whenever possible, you should ensure all your pages are optimized for keywords that will help you rank in organic search. The first step is conducting keyword research.
Meta tags consist of a meta title and a meta description. They help Google understand the content of the page being crawled and are two of the most important factors Google considers when determining page rankings. They also help users find search results by defining the content of your page and thus acting as advertising for your content.
Use your vertical-specific keyword research to write or rewrite your meta tags. Make sure you optimize the keywords so they appear in search results.
Especially with meta tags—although this is also important for the overall site copy—you want to avoid compressing keywords, also known as keyword stuffing. "10 Great Instagram Captions, Good Instagram Captions, and Funny Instagram Captions That Will Make You ROFL" is not a good title.
Below are some best practices for meta tags:
Even small updates to a page signal to Google that it should crawl that page. Therefore, regular updates ensure your pages remain fresh and relevant in the eyes of search engines. There are two types of content that should be updated regularly.
The first is a top page, which we discussed in step 3. These are the pages that generate the most traffic for your business. Updating these will drive more traffic to your business. The second page is an "opportunity page." An opportunity page is a page that, if it were moved slightly higher in the SERP, would result in a significant increase in traffic.
Popular SEO products come equipped with ranking tracking features that allow you to see where pages rank for specific keywords, whether these rankings have changed, and how much traffic each keyword generates. Pages just outside the top 10 should be updated regularly to give them a chance to reach the first page.
A similar approach should be taken with pages that rank just outside the top 3. Traffic drops off sharply after the first 3 results and almost immediately after the first page. The process for performing page updates: One way to update pages is to add new information and research. For example, if you have a blog post about Google algorithm updates and a new algorithm update has just been released, this post is ready for an update.
Keeping your content up-to-date ensures it meets the needs of your organic visitors, preventing them from returning to the SERP and clicking on a different result (which can ultimately hurt your ranking). A second way to update content is to identify related keywords that have proven to drive traffic and add them to your page.
A third way to update pages is to perform general cleanup: compress images and repair or remove broken links. Cumbersome images lead to slow loading times (more in step 8). Broken links result in a poor user experience (more in step 9). Correcting these on-page elements can give your page the boost it needs to achieve the desired ranking.
A fourth type of content update is removing content from your website. It might seem obvious, but if there are pages on your site that receive little to no organic traffic, they can negatively impact your organic rankings by lowering your website's average value in Google's eyes. Look for pages with 0—or almost 0—organic visits in the past year. If you can't immediately revamp those pages to add more value, deindex them.
Page speed is crucial – especially since Google discontinued its Speed Update in May. This is partly due to the rise of mobile searches. Anyone searching the internet on a phone won't have to wait long for a slow-loading website.
This means that the faster your website is, the higher the likelihood that Google will reward you with strong organic rankings. Pagespeed Insights will be your entry point here. You'll receive detailed information about page speeds and suggestions for improvement. You can analyze page speed at a site-wide level:
As you can see, you can analyze both mobile and desktop versions of your site. Suggestions for improved page speed range from backend changes such as eliminating JavaScript and CSS in over-the-fold elements to simple image compression.
If you're looking for a quick and effective way to improve page speed, image compression is the best choice. Run each image listed in the report through a simple image compressor like this one, and then re-upload them to your CMS. Depending on the before-and-after dimensions of your images, you should see a significant performance increase.
A 404 error is a "page not found" error, generally caused by broken links and images on your website. For example, if a page on your website is linked to content that has since been deleted, anyone clicking on that link will receive a 404 error.
Contrary to popular belief, broken links do not lead to penalties. As content flows in and out and your site's structure changes over time, 404 errors will naturally occur. That said, broken links in inappropriate places can disrupt your internal linking structure. They can also be a nuisance for users trying to navigate from one page to another.
Site audit tools can identify all 404 errors on your site. Once identified, you need to prioritize them to determine the importance of each link to your link structure and user experience. Do you have a page that no longer exists or now exists at a new URL? It's a good idea to ensure that all high-traffic pages that previously linked to that page now redirect to the new page with a 301 redirect, or at least redirect back to your homepage.
In today's digital marketing landscape, using HTTP is a definite no-go. HTTPS is faster, more secure, and one of Google's ranking signals.
Checking to ensure your website is running on HTTPS is as simple as manually typing the various non-HTTPS iterations of your website domain www.site.com; site.com; http://www.site.com and making sure they all redirect to the HTTPS iteration.
You'll then want to scan the search index for locations where non-HTTPS URLs are displayed. You can use the Index Status report in Search Console to see which version of your website's URLs is canonical. If necessary, manually canonize the HTTPS versions. However, if you're finding this difficult, we're happy to help.
© 2012-2025, MIK Group GmbH | General Terms and Conditions | Imprint | Privacy policy
