In most cases, you’ll likely want to do a more thorough check of the URL using one of the tools listed below. Most of the time, robots directives SEO Anomaly are placed in the HTML as a meta robots tag. Far less often, they are placed in the HTTP header as a X-robots-tag. You are free to check both places, but Google’s URL Inspection report will quickly tell you if indexation is allowed. If you want to take a more organized approach to learning technical SEO or training your entire team, check out the Moz Academy Technical SEO Certification.
SEO Updates
Consider the example of a broken link preventing a crucial page from being indexed. Once fixed, the page can begin ranking in search results and attracting organic visitors. Similarly, optimizing page speed enhances user experience, reduces bounce rates, and improves rankings, further driving traffic growth.
- So if you want to get higher Google rankings, you’ll love the actionable steps in this guide.
- You can also optimize your content based on your top search competitors using a custom workflow.
- To review content quality, check if the content satisfies search intent by comparing it with top-ranking pages for the same keyword.
- But it’s still important to check you’re not dead in the water before you even start.
- One major difference between the two tools is how they source keyword data.
By addressing these, you improve visibility, drive more organic traffic, and make sure your website is optimized for search engines. By analyzing their keyword targeting, backlink profile, content quality, and technical SEO (such as site speed and mobile optimization). Before assessing the impact of your SEO audit, establishing a clear baseline is crucial. This snapshot of your website’s current performance provides the foundation for measuring progress. Your baseline should include critical metrics like organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates. This underlying structure greatly impacts your search visibility and rankings.
Find and diagnose indexability issues
For a comprehensive view, Google Search Console offers insights on indexation levels, including a section for Excluded assets, indicating pages deemed unworthy of indexing. Additionally, the Mobile Friendly Testing tool is known to behave as Google’s headless browser, executing the page’s JavaScript and rendering the page. This is a great SEO tool to test if anything is stopping Google from accessing the content.
It wouldn’t necessarily make sense, for instance, to change a URL simply to optimize for a new keyword. Google is smart enough to know whether or not you’re intentionally and maliciously duplicating content on your site to clog the SERP with your site’s URLs. A more likely scenario, if you have duplicate content, is that it’s happening unintentionally.
I once took over an SEO project where the client was confused about why none of their pages were ranking. After a quick audit, I discovered their developer had pushed a sitewide «noindex» tag to production by mistake. This effectively prevented all of their pages from appearing in search results. You could say this process acts as an overall evaluation of a website’s “health” in search. Last but not least, the SEOptimer blog provides a bunch of relevant articles and tips and tricks for you to stay on top of the SEO improvement landscape.
In doing so, you’ll evaluate issues Google might encounter when rendering your pages with their JavaScript crawling capabilities. Errors, broken pages, overuse of JavaScript, or a complex site architecture might derail the bot from accessing critical content or use up the available crawl budget trying to figure out your site. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to evaluate key templates on the site. This data is also within the Google Lighthouse data found at web.dev.
To test page speed, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for a free analysis. If you’re wondering how to use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for SEO, all you need to do is visit the tool, enter your website, and click analyze. These sitemaps are ideal for users, as they are just a page filled with links to all the pages they could need. An XML sitemap, on the other hand, is a piece of code that you submit to Google to help make it easier to crawl and index every page on your sitemap.
Definitions vary and there’s a lot of scope for overlap in several areas. Some people might refer to a ‘website SEO audit’ as a technical audit, yet others would argue that only a small portion of the elements covered would qualify as ‘technical. Needless to say it’s a contentious subject, but what’s important is that when carrying out your own audits, the scope is well documented and understood by all stakeholders. Bing Webmaster Tools is a suite of SEO tools that looks at your performance data and analyzes them so you can optimize your pages on Bing search results.