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An audit should be part of any good SEO strategy. It’s the best way to identify problems before they start to affect your search engine ranking. As they grow, websites become more complex and issues start to arise, some more commonly than others. Here are the nine problems which are most commonly identified in a website audit.

Links – Bad, Broken or Missing.

The quality of links on your website is an important factor in your Google ranking. Check your website for low quality inbound links from third party websites which aren’t adding value, and broken links because the path hasn’t been changed after a blog post has been published. Review the website to make sure you haven’t missed any opportunities to add internal links too. Check your links are all secure, and that there are no links which lead to pages which no longer exist.

Poor Quality Content

Google has stated in the past that quality is key for a good ranking, but what do they mean by quality? One of the main issues is thin content – a page which really doesn’t have any content on it, and which doesn’t really justify being there. Also, having the same content duplicated over several pages is an equally bad idea. Duplicate content is fine for indexes, but can also be tricky to avoid. This is especially the case on product information pages.

Titles

Your page titles should give information about what’s on the page. If page titles are too general, vague in meaning or missing altogether, the page will be downranked. “Clickbait” page titles should be avoided at all cost.

Meta Descriptions

This is your chance to make your search engine listing stand out and encourage a user to click. A common mistake is to miss out the meta description completely, and Google just shows the first sentence from your webpage, however irrelevant.

Sitemap

Search bots expect to find a sitemap in the robot.txt file to help them understand the structure of your site.

Tags

If you’re using a content management system for your website content, make sure you understand tags and use them correctly. Keep tags short and snappy, and relevant to whatever the page is about. If you have designed pages to be read in several languages, make sure you’ve taken account of this in the tags too.

Slow Load Times

This is one of the most common issues, and Google is increasing penalties for slow loading sites.

Non-Optimised Images

Image size should be kept under 1mb, and compressed as much as possible. Always include the alt-text as this is used to make the site accessible to visually-impaired users.

Missing Pages

Most larger websites will have some links pointing to pages which have been removed, or where the URL has changed. Redirect users to the new version of the page, or remove the link if the page has been removed. 404 error pages should be customised too rather than users simply seeing the search engine default. Include a link back into the relevant parts of your website should they mistype a link.