{"id":18182,"date":"2019-04-02T08:00:57","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/honeybook.site.strattic.io\/?p=18182"},"modified":"2022-07-27T06:31:54","modified_gmt":"2022-07-27T13:31:54","slug":"diy-audit-small-business-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hbb.dev.reliablepenguin.com\/blog\/diy-audit-small-business-seo","title":{"rendered":"DIY Audit: Small Business SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Photo by: J. Kelly Brito<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve read guides, listened to podcasts, and put in the work to improve your small business SEO. Having great search engine optimization is the ultimate goal, but once you\u2019ve got it, it\u2019s important that you maintain ranking. The most efficient way to test your small business\u2019 SEO is through an audit. If you are serious about growing or maintaining your ranking, then you should perform a routine audit, and the best part is \u2013 you can absolutely do it yourself!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is an SEO audit?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

An SEO audit is an analysis or test of your website to ensure that it\u2019s performing to the best of its ability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How will an SEO audit help your small\nbusiness?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Whether you have already won favor with the SEO gods or you\u2019re still chasing that first page ranking, you should be conducting routine SEO audits on your website. Doing this will help ensure that you are exhausting all efforts to grow or maintain your SEO for your small business and keep up with new search engine demands. It\u2019s recommended that you perform a website audit every six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The SEO audit can be broken down into four parts:<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

1. Technical<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Small business SEO can often feel intimidating because it has a technical side, but there is nothing you should fear! Crawlability, site indexing, site-load time, and mobile friendliness are all technical aspects you should be aware of that will help increase your search engine rankings. But with the help of Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can master these technical aspects of SEO in no time!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Page properties<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Page\nproperties include proper tagging of text (titles, headings, etc.), meta and\nalt descriptions, URL structure, and more. This may seem like a small part of\nSEO, but it is just as important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Content<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Adding new content to your website will also help your SEO as a small business. The best way to incorporate content into your website is by blogging. Make sure to consider keyword research, quality of content, relevancy, and search demand whenever you create new content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. User experience<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

User experience\nis what we often think about when referring to our website\u2019s rankings. Unique users,\nsession duration, bounce rates, and click-through rates are a few of the most\nimportant things to consider for SEO. These stats can be seen through your Google\nAnalytics account. Your website\u2019s design, captivating copy, page-load times,\neasy-to-use site navigation, and more are all things to consider that will help\nimprove your user experience and therefore your SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do I perform an SEO audit?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are\nmany ways to perform an audit and many online guides or checklists that you can\ndownload for free. However, here are 5 steps you should always take when performing\na website audit for your small business:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Start with crawling your website to evaluate your small business SEO.<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The website\ncrawl is the most important part of your audit. A crawl will find errors on\nyour website, including poor keywords, bad images, title issues, broken links,\nand more. You can perform a free website crawl through Screaming\nFrog SEO Spider and get an idea of what Google is crawling through the Google\nSearch Console. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Check your SEO score.<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

See your\nSEO performance through the SEO SiteCheckup. Your check-up\nwill consider bounce rates, load times, and more. It will also reveal any\nbroken links that your site may have, identity your most-used keywords, reveal\ncoding errors, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Check your page properties.<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

When you\nhave completed a crawl of your website, examine your results and look for duplicated\npages, titles, headers, and any other text tags that you should fix or improve.\nChecking your page properties has the potential to be the most time-consuming,\nbut it is still incredibly important and shouldn\u2019t be overlooked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Evaluate your links.<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

After you\nhave properly completed your website crawl, you will be able to determine any broken\nlinks on your site that need to be changed. Any broken links that redirect to a\n\u201c404 not found\u201d label have the potential to negatively impact your small\nbusiness\u2019s search engine optimization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Test your site\u2019s speed.<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

You can test your site\u2019s speed through Google\u2019s PageSpeed Insights tool. The best way to improve your site\u2019s load speed times is by keeping your images under 500kb (but closer to 300kb is best!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you want more website traffic, then performing a routine website audit will shine light on ways you can improve your online presence and small business SEO. Remember, performing some type of audit, even a DIY one, is always better than not performing any audit at all. Completing a website audit can help your business and lead to more customers and sales. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still not on board with the DIY thing? If you\u2019d like to have an expert take a look at your website, you can apply for a free 1-hour website audit here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Want to learn more about boosting your small business SEO? Get our Ultimate Guide to <\/em><\/strong>Small Business SEO<\/em><\/strong><\/a> here. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plus, 5 more posts you might like:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n