In general, if you have a large number of pages that aren’t being crawled or updated as frequently as you want, you should think about looking to speed up crawling. Having a big crawl budget does not guarantee that you will rank at the top of the SERPs. But if all of your critical pages are not crawled due to crawl budget concerns, it is possible that those pages may not be indexed. An XML sitemap helps Google to navigate all of the important pages on your SEO Anomaly website. Considering crawlers can’t stop and ask for directions, a sitemap ensures Google has a set of instructions when it comes to crawling and indexing your website. Note that pages will only appear in the search results if they are indexed without any issues.
Lesson #9: Internal Linking Is An Underused But Powerful SEO Opportunity
Site speed can be impacted when image files are too large or HTML and CSS needs to be cleaned up. For those with more technical experience, Semrsh’s Site Audit Tool is a very thorough reporting option, but getting started for free does require jumping through a few hoops. Assessing both the content and technical aspects of your website will open up opportunities to drastically improve the traffic and conversions your website generates. As a result, an audit will give you a chance to inspect the robustness of your website’s technical framework and infrastructure.
- There are two predominant data sets that Lighthouse/PSI use to determine your site’s score; lab data and field data.
- Your website structure and URLs are one of the best ways to communicate to search engines and users what content they can expect to find on a given page.
- If your site has pages that can’t be crawled by search engines, your website may not be indexed correctly, if at all.
- Ideally, you want to display images in the smallest possible size and in an appropriate format, such as WebP.
- It’s also critical that your company invests in an SEO audit at the beginning of a new digital marketing or SEO strategy.
Why Do an SEO Audit?
Calling out 302-, 404-, and 500-level response codes can be useful to tell users that something’s wrong. Smartphone usage worldwide has grown exponentially, and it’s important for websites to be compatible with the rising demand. Their in-depth report can look overwhelming unless you’re coming to the game with some technical chops. You would need to create an account, answer some questions about yourself, and choose to skip a trial in order to create the free audit report.
Lastly, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability; strive for a CLS score of less than 0.1. To improve this, ensure images and embedded videos have dimensions, and avoid inserting new content above existing content unless in response to a user’s action. Another way is to use Google Analytics to view traffic from all search engines. For one client, I used user engagement metrics from Google Search Console and heatmaps to recover from a Google core update hit. While most people optimize content and backlinks, I dug deeper into how users interacted with the site after landing on it.
A post-audit phone consultation and walk-through is also included in each option. For each of the ranking components that we analyze, we then provide specific action items to fix what’s wrong, along with industry best practices to help you on your way. You can schedule a weekly technical SEO audit and our Site Audit tool will automatically start crawling your website. For example, a well-optimized blog post can be shared across social media platforms to drive immediate engagement, while SEO efforts promote long-term visibility in search results.
AI Conversion Rate Optimization: How AI Is Transforming CRO Strategies
When done right, it gives you the clarity and confidence to invest where it matters most. Gordon Donnelly is a growth marketing leader who proudly started his career at WordStream. Today, you can find him creating content, hanging out in the lineup at Venice Breakwater, or helping startups go to market and scale through full-funnel demand generation. You’ll then want to scour the search index for places where non-HTTPS URLs appear. You can use the Index Status report in Search Console to see which version of your site’s URLs are canonicalized.