- Speed: How fast does your website load?
- Security: Does your site have an SSL certificate?
- Mobile experience: Is your site “mobile friendly”
SEO is a combination of both positive and negative factors. You do things to positively boost yourself and do others to avoid negative effects. If you’re failing in any of these audit areas, it’s going to negatively affect your search rankings.
Speed
Your site needs to load fast. Users have little patience for load time. Search engines know this and want to give their users the best experience. So it makes sense that in order to rank well, your load times need to be quick.
- Audit your site with a speed test tool to see where your problem areas are. We recommend Pingdom Speed Test.
- Limit large images and video. Keep things simple to allow your site to be speedy.
- If you want to get more advanced, ask your web host or platform about caching, which can help a lot.
Security
Google has been pretty clear about its preference for websites with an SSL certificate. You probably know SSL as whether or not a site has a padlock icon in the browser. Lean on your web host or website service provider here. Costs will vary by provider and sometimes they included for free with your hosting. If you do have to pay, this shouldn’t be very expensive for most sites.
Mobile Experience
We’re not looking to do anything super advanced here. A common sense check on your mobile device will go a long way to tell you where your problems are. For most small businesses websites, the best advice is to keep the content and structure simple and straightforward. It’s what your customers want, and it helps keep the mobile experience consistent across all devices. Search engines keep separate indexes for desktop and mobile. If you want your site to rank well, it needs to be great for users on their phones and depending on your target market, mobile user may account for most of the traffic to your site.
Here are some free tools to help you in your audit:
