Most search engines, especially Google, like to abide by the rules you set out in the robots.txt file. So if you tell a search engine not to crawl and/or index certain URLs or even your entire site by accident, that’s what will happen. An audit involves analyzing all elements of your site to make sure that you have not missed out on anything that could be hindering the optimization process. In many cases, some minor changes can improve your ranking significantly. So check that you’re not making the mistake of targeting the wrong keywords with your web pages, starting with the most important ones first.
WebFX will help you conduct a comprehensive SEO audit
Reach out to us today to experience white-glove, concierge service that outperforms your best expectations. Let us show you why we will be the LAST marketing agency you ever engage with. The ‘Solo’ plan is priced at $10.67 per month (billed yearly at $128). They also offer other plans like ‘Starter’, ‘Growth’, and more, with varying features and pricing. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool offers a free version with limited features.
Find duplicate content
If I notice visitors aren’t staying on a site for long, or I see a lot of abandoned shopping carts — a website audit is a great way to find out why. I’d start with a website auditing tool to help analyze how my site is performing. This can help test various important facets of a site and then provide specific recommendations.
Start monitoring your website for issues and opportunities
- The robots.txt file, on the other hand, is a text file that allows you to specify how you would like your site to be crawled.
- But if there are lots of redirected links for specific URLs, you could use a plugin like “Better Search Replace” to find and replace them all at once.
- The toughest part was identifying these malicious links within the blogs, as the anchor text used was subtle and unnoticeable.
- However, rendering delays (from minutes to weeks) and limited resources can prevent important content from getting indexed.
- Your site audit tool should contain a content gap report or equivalent that indicates the webpages outranking yours with similar content.
Google can’t index pages with this warning, so it’s worth checking they’re not pages you want indexed. Google search results come from its index, which is a database of hundreds of billions of webpages. Your pages need to be in this index to stand any chance at ranking. You’re unlikely to have a manual action unless you’ve done something drastically wrong.
Remember this alt text will also be the anchor text for your featured images. So I would recommend just using your SEO Anomaly “main” keyword for each of them. Which is Googler speak for “makes them rank higher for that keyword”. Take the time to make each title and meta description as “clickable” as possible. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly interested in grabbing search traffic for a privacy policy.
