In my case, I realized I had been unknowingly over-optimizing some pages with the same keywords, causing them to compete with each other. This keyword cannibalization confused Google about which page to rank, diluting their visibility. I helped a SaaS project recover from an SEO penalty in 8 months—without using the disavow tool (which I don’t recommend anymore). Instead, I focused on building high-quality backlinks to create a healthy link profile. The domain had a legacy penalty because of its past use in the adult industry, but the owner was determined to keep it since it was a perfect match for their brand. I’ve worked with a bunch of clients dealing with SEO penalties, but one case really stuck with me.
Check Every Page on Your Website
You can also use tools like Ahref’s backlink checker to take the guesswork out of analyzing the value of the links you gathered. We won’t waste your time with sales folks who don’t know what they’re talking about. You’ll sit down with a REAL digital marketing expert who will work to understand your business, your needs, and your goals. This invaluable information enables you to make informed decisions, refine your SEO strategy, and improve your website’s overall performance.
What is Google’s Algorithm, and why does it matter for SEO?
Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of a website to meet search engine standards and improving organic rankings and user experience. Key components include optimizing site speed, enhancing mobile-friendliness, structuring URL paths, implementing HTTPS, and ensuring proper site crawling and indexing. Google Search Console is a tool that checks your site’s indexing status and how it appears on SERPs. It offers performance reports, your site’s indexing status, and insights into core web vitals like interactivity and loading performance. Use Google Search Console to perform an SEO audit and determine if you’re hitting target keywords.
You can start to attract more local customers and increase their visibility in local search results by ensuring all of the following factors are in place. See this related guide on how to optimize content for SEO which includes tips on making the page more SEO-friendly, link-worthy, and shareable. Manual actions are the official name Google gives to the penalties it doles out for violating its search engine guidelines. While these strategies take time to pay off, the long-term rewards are exponential. A larger investment can often help you create better content, build stronger authority and outperform the competition faster in SERPs.
- SEO audits often show websites placing too much emphasis on backlinks while neglecting many other critical SEO opportunities.
- Large organizations often have large, technically-complicated websites.
- “How to Do Keyword Research” is a better-optimized H3 than “how to conduct keyword research,” because it has far more volume.
- You can use PPC campaigns to test keyword strategies before implementing them in SEO.
- It would be hard, if not flat-out impossible, to obtain and go over that data manually.
You may also want to prioritize the reviewing of pages that show signs of being low-quality. You can do that in Ahrefs’ Site Audit; just head to the Content Quality report. You should always aim to use subheaders to break up your content and make it more appealing. In HTML, you can use H1-H6 subheaders to provide some structure and hierarchy to your pages. If you have a relatively small site (fewer than twenty pages), you can check all of the above manually with ease. The issue with PageSpeed Insights is that you can only check one page at a time.
Once SE Ranking crawls all the pages (which can take up to 10 minutes), it provides an illustrated overview. If you’d like to share the list of detected issues, like with an SEO team or a client, click the “Export” button in the top-right corner of the page. Then click “Export to XLSX” or “Export to CSV” depending on the file format you prefer. Then, follow Semrush’s recommendations and fix the issues one by one to improve your SEO.
The biggest culprits are JavaScript and CSS files, oversized images or too many images, poor website hosting and third-party scripts (i.e., Hotjar, social media pixels etc.). Orphaned pages are pages that are not linked from anywhere else on your website. Since Google finds and index pages via links, it is important to make sure pages can be found by optimizing internal links. Furthermore, in your crawl results it will show you how many links are pointing to each page and how many are pointing out to other pages (inlinks and outlinks). You will want to keep an eye out for pages that have too few links going to them or too many links going out.
With an audit, you set yourself up for success by creating check-ins and active processes that help you improve. Ask yourself where you could build out more content across the board. If users click away from your slow pages, Google will notice and dock your rankings. Google often shows meta descriptions in SEO Anomaly the search results, so you should try to write an enticing one for every important page. Missing H1 tags, on the other hand, usually point to bigger issues like an improperly coded theme.
The technical evaluation, however, addresses all three to maximize the user experience (UX). How is the website design working for visitors and customers? Some software have heatmaps showing what parts of a site design draw the most attention. This type of analysis helps communicate how the overall design and user experience impact visitors. Technical errors like ones related to performance, SEO, mobile, and security, can negatively impact a customers‘ experience on your website.