Beginner’s Guide To SEO On-page and Off-page Auditing.

Why is my blog/website not ranking? Why is my online business page not ranking and getting organic clicks ‘traffic’? Conduct that SEO auditing. Both the Off-Site and On-Site SEO auditing or hiring an SEO expert or learning how to use free SEO tools.

Small businesses who cannot pay an SEO expert would benefit from this learning as well as students who are learning digital marketing skills and tools. Take the chance now to read through this SEO auditing project and know more on free On-Site and Off-Site SEO auditing tools.  This article explains the best way to use and conduct SEO optimization and how best to build and improve high ranking keywords for Google Ads and web optimization.

What is SERP and SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing and improving the quality of organic traffic to a website or a web page on search engines. 

• SEO optimize a website’s traffic by driving high user search queries and linking from other websites. 
• SEO improves organic search results which are unpaid traffic rather than paid traffic.

In the digital marketing and search engine world, SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. When you type a search query on Google, Yahoo, or Bing while searching for information or a product. The result page the search engine returns after a user submits a search query is called the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). 

These search engine results pages (SERPs) usually include paid search ads either as search ads, images, texts and SEO organic search results.

Example: I typed a search for Louis Vuitton Men’s ankle shoe in Google search engine.

These Google Ads results are the ‘sponsored’ results, or ‘paid search’ results. These are advertisements, and as the name indicates, that are paid by the owners for these results to show up related to the search query, or keywords that were typed into the search box. The paid search results always rank higher before the organic search results.

Google Paid Ads Example

These are Google paid ads that always appear first on Google search page anytime such products are searched on Google search engine. Google paid ads always rank higher than organic traffic ads because these Ads are paid for. These paid Ads from different company´s always have utm tracking codes that enables company`s or owners of these product track their product traffic and conversion metrics KPI and PPC: CTR, CPC, CPA, ROAS, Time on site and many more.

Organic Search Results Ads

Organic search results or natural results are the search query results Google brought up as the most relevant results because of their keywords or keyword phrase that was entered. No one pays Google for this type of organic search results, they are free search results advertisements. These websites ranked high because of their strong SEO keywords building results and backlinks from other websites.

High ranking keywords are very important for SEO organic search results. To learn more on different keyword types and how to build high ranking keywords read my next article on keyword building.

What is SEO Auditing?

SEO auditing is a process of evaluating your website organic (natural) traffic results or web page presence to see how well it is performing on search engines. 

• Conducting an SEO audit is a valuable way to know your website traffic performance.  
• How best to improve your website organic traffic results which are free.  
• A valuable way to save money and budget while getting your website to rank high anytime a search result queries that are related to your website is entered on Google search engine.

Two Types of SEO Audit.

• Content Audit
• Technical Audit.

The content audit checks both the website’s onsite and offsite efforts. In doing the content audit you check the page title tags (this is done on the website HTML), keywords used on the metadata.  If the image descriptions  and alt tags are well structured and written out  as relates to the website products and services. You use SEO tools like Moz Pro Explorer, SEM Rush, SE Ranking to conduct SEO on-site and off-site auditing for organic web traffic optimimization.

Best way to conduct your content audit is using SEO tools like Screaming Frog and BambooHR that can crawl your website and provide you a result in a spreadsheet like Excel, Google Sheet or csv file. To make use of the Screaming Frog SEO spider tool application, download it on your website and it requires Java. Type in the page URL and click start. Further articles will explain in detail how to use Screaming Frog Spider Tool and BambooHR in crawling your website contents.

SEO Screaming Frog Tool for Website Page Crawling

To conduct website competitor analysis, you can use Screaming Frog to crawl the websites of your competitors to know what titles, keywords, and descriptions they use. The main importance of content audit is to close that gap that can reduce your website ranking while improving on the search result page.

BamBooHR SEO Tool

The most important aspect of SEO content audit for offsite is looking at all the backlinks your website is generating. Especially, if they are quality backlinks. To understand your backlink, use SEO tools that help you in conducting great SEO backlink audits like Moz Pro (Moz’s Open Site Explorer ). Moz returns an analysis of the inbound links it finds, links others have made to your website or web page. This is a quick way to see if those you reached out to for backlinks did link to you.

More practical explanation on how to conduct SEO backlinks audit using Moz’s Pro Open Site Explorer will be explained in my next article. This analysis with Moz tools returns the inbound links it finds. This is a quick way to see if those you reached out to for backlinks did link to your website.

Example of using Moz Pro Explorer to conduct Inbound link and Backlink Audit for Udacity website

The three highest backlinks to Udacity Website from as could be shown using Moz Explorer SEO tool auditing.

Example: I used Moz Pro to conduct a backlink for Udacity.com. This backlink showed the highest backlink traffic Udacity is getting from other websites that mentioned Udacity on their webpage. These backlinks from other websites increase Udacity.com SEO organic search results. Thereby making Udacity ranking on Google to be high anytime there are search queries that relate to Udacity products and services.

SEO Technical Audit: Metadata

SEO technical audit analyzes and checks how well a website presence relates to best practices like user experience, on-page SEO issues and potential site problems. It is a process of checking all the technical aspects of your website pages. Just like a doctor diagnoses to find any underlying problems that could make the website not generate its purposeful ranking on Google or in any other search engine.

To conduct a technical audit on your website, you have to view the website metadata by digging into the source code of the website. You can do this in a number of ways depending on which browser and computer you are using. To view a website source code, enter in the URL bar , view-source:(web page address of the website you want to analyze). For example: view-source:amazon.com.

The technical audit checks all the metadata descriptions on the website HTML head tag, the title tag the image alt-tags description.

Further articles will explain more on other Off-Site SEO Link-Building tools like SEMRush, SE Ranking, Hubspot. More also, on tools for site performance testing like NorthCutt Google Indexed Pages Checker, Google Page Speed Insight Tool for mobile and desktop speed performance and Think with Google tool to check mobile friendliness.

 

 

Why is my blog/website not ranking? Why is my online business page not ranking and getting organic clicks ‘traffic’? Conduct that SEO auditing. Both the Off-Site and On-Site SEO auditing or hiring an SEO expert or learning how to use free SEO tools. Small businesses who cannot pay an SEO expert would benefit from this…

Why is my blog/website not ranking? Why is my online business page not ranking and getting organic clicks ‘traffic’? Conduct that SEO auditing. Both the Off-Site and On-Site SEO auditing or hiring an SEO expert or learning how to use free SEO tools. Small businesses who cannot pay an SEO expert would benefit from this…