Are you aware of the importance of good Local SEO for your website but unsure how to assess if your SEO strategy is working? Starting a business and optimizing your website for search engines is never easy, but an SEO audit can help.
A Local SEO audit evaluates the search engine friendliness of your website. Aspects like the content, links, and site structure are examined. Understanding how these components work together is crucial to optimizing your website’s organic search ranking.
What Is On-Page Local SEO?
On-page Local SEO involves optimizing each page of your website based on targeted keywords related to the page’s topic to increase its potential to appear in search results.
An on-page Local SEO audit provides the following benefits:
- Assess your website’s SEO health
- Identify issues that reduce your online visibility
- Determine if search engines can efficiently crawl and index your website
- Keep you informed of the latest changes in search engine marketing
Wondering how to get started with Local Search Marketing?
Performing an On-Page Audit
You can hire an expert or conduct the audit yourself. Your audit should be thorough and must include every page—create an Excel sheet with each page’s URL and categories as rows, with each audit element that needs evaluation as columns.
Here are the eight essential factors you should consider when auditing a webpage for SEO effectiveness.
Content relevancy and originality
Your content should be unique and free from plagiarism. Ensure that your content is engaging, informative, and valuable to your target audience. Remember, it’s not about publishing a high volume of posts; it’s about posting quality content.
Title tags and meta descriptions
Title tags tell search engines the focus of your website pages, so they should contain relevant keywords and sound natural. Meta descriptions should provide a brief overview of your page and indicate value to the reader with a call to action.
Internal links
Use internal links, ensuring that links use exact-match anchor text. Create internal links between web pages that are related to each other. Ensure that you do not have more than 2-10 internal links per page on your website.
URL formatting
Ensure that each page’s URL is unique, brief and descriptive, and formatted correctly. Descriptive URLs are excellent, but changing your URL structure significantly can affect your website’s search engine rankings, so check with an Local SEO expert first.
Functioning links
Broken links can lead to a bad user experience and harm your website’s ranking. All links should function correctly. Use a tool like “Online Broken Link Checker” to help you verify that all links on your website are working.
Logical organization
Organize your content logically, group relevant content by category, and ensure that your website has a privacy policy, disclaimer, and about page.
Image optimization
Optimize your images with ALT tags to allow search engines to identify and rank them appropriately. Compress images to reduce their size, and consider using a content delivery network to improve your website’s performance.
Website load time
Improving your website’s loading time can increase user retention and your website’s organic search ranking. Use Google’s free tool to check your website’s speed, and work to ensure every page loads within three seconds.
Ready for your audit?
Auditing your website takes time, but it’s a crucial step in optimizing your website for search engines and improving your organic search engine ranking. By thoroughly reviewing each of the above items on every page of your website, you can quickly identify several changes to make to boost your on-page SEO. On-page Local SEO factors can be easy to fix most of the time. However, depending on your SEO needs and technical abilities, an on-page audit can be challenging. If that’s the case for you, don’t hesitate to seek help from a Local SEO expert.