If you own a small business, you know how crucial it is for customers to be able to find you online. Then, even with a solid product format or service, your small website may not be getting as much traffic as it could be, which can be incredibly disappointing to you. You may wonder, “What’s going wrong”? In fact, plenty of sites have ongoing problems related to SEO before they can be ranked higher by the search engines. Thankfully, you do not have to be a specialist to determine this. All you need to do is a simple SEO analysis to see if there are ways to solve the issues step-by-step. In this guide, we’ll demonstrate how easy it is to test and solve SEO problems.

What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a process that evaluates how well your website is performing, identifying barriers that hinder it from achieving a good search ranking, and creating a good user experience. An audit can identify some of the restrictions you may have, such as whether search engine crawlers can correctly index your site, as well as address barriers in speed, navigability, and content delivery. 

When using SEO audit tools such as Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and PageSpeed Insights, you can quickly identify those barriers as broken links, load speed, mobile usability, etc.. After completing the audit and uncovering these obstacles, you can begin evaluating and testing solutions to improve your site’s ranking and visibility.

Key Areas to Check in Your SEO Audit

A. Technical SEO Problems

1. Site Speed: The first step is to check your site’s speed, as slow pages will lead visitors to be taken to a competitor’s website and affect your rankings.
2. Mobile Friendliness: The second thing to do is check that your site is mobile-friendly, after Google has switched to the mobile-first index.
3. Broken Links and Redirection Issues: Lastly, you will need to identify and fix broken links and redirection errors. Both of which are frustrating for users and will impact search engines’ crawling of your site.
4. Secure HTTPS Connection: Finally, using HTTPS keeps your site secure, helps create trust with visitors, and helps convey reliability to search engines.

B. On-Page SEO Issues

1. Page titles and descriptions: It is so simple to optimize and a must to do! You need to start optimizing your page titles and descriptions by using relevant keywords that clearly state to search engines and users what your content is about!.
2. Content relevance: On top of that, your pages must be on-topic with what users are searching for, or they’ll click away quickly – and you will take a ranking drop!.
3. URL structure: You should also be utilizing clean URLs with keywords that indicate the topic of the page. Clean URLs help users and search engines.
4. Internal Linking: Ensure you’re linking related pages together so visitors can navigate your site while also helping search engines understand your content.

C. User Experience Signals

1. Bounce Rate and Dwell Time: First, examine the duration of the stay of the visitors to your site; typically, a high bounce rate indicates an issue with either the content or usability.
2. Clear Navigation: Second, ensure that your menu, style, and layout are so simple that they allow users to locate what they are searching for without frustration.
3. Readability and Formatting: Third, as a basic component, text should be formatted with headers and lists so users know how to quickly skim the content to identify whether they want to read it.

How to Fix Common SEO Problems

Step 1 – Run an SEO Audit

If you’ve decided to improve the SEO of your website, the best course of action is to conduct an SEO diagnostics of the site. There are several tools at your disposal, including Google Search Console, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, and Ubersuggest, which will all help the site owner identify problems on the site, such as indexing issues, mobile usability problems, slow page load, and other indicators that may adversely affect performance.

Step 2 – Fix Prioritized

At this point, you’ll want to focus on the most impactful issues first. In searching for the prioritization, you should start with the most concerning issues like “broken links”, “missing title tags”, and “duplicate content”. Create a checklist and fix them one at a time. This will keep you organized and mitigate panic or confusion.

Step 3 – Fix Gradually

Do not attempt to fix everything all at once; create a timetable in which you can fix the problems at an even pace. First, fix meta descriptions and titles, repair redirects, check images are optimized, lightning the loading time, and fix or improve the mobile layout.

Step 4 – Monitor Results

Continue to work to monitor results regularly – ideally once a month. Monitor errors, reviewing traffic, and how they engage with your site. Remember, SEO is based on consistent and regular effort to continue to fix problems, updates, and attributes that will lead to positive improvement over time.

Conclusion

You don’t have to fear taking charge of your SEO. You can start to see positive, strong changes by being consistent and deliberate, which will help your business grow and reach more online customers. Small changes today lead to significant changes tomorrow, which empower you to be deliberate in optimizing and ramping up your online digital presence. With the proper tools and the correct attitude about SEO, you can embrace your SEO changes and journey from a liability into a true business asset!

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