Did you know that nearly 70% of searches online are longer than four words? It’s no surprise that one of the biggest mistakes in search engine optimization is targeting the wrong keywords.
Suppose you’re struggling to reach the top of Google and drive traffic to your site. Where should you be focusing? Let’s take a look at three things that should be in your technical SEO audit checklist from day one.
1.Core Web Vitals
The first thing we need to check when looking for any issues with our website is its core web vitals. These are vital factors Google considers when analyzing a webpage to see if it is worthy of prioritization or not. Here are the three vitals in more detail:
First Input Delay
First Input Delay to how long it takes for a user to interact with an element on a page after clicking on it. Suppose there is a lot of lag between clicking on a link and seeing the results of their click. Users may get frustrated and leave before even reading anything about your business.
Cumulative Layout Shift
Cumulative Layout Shift is the time taken for a webpage to load its content and all other elements such as images and videos. That can have a huge impact on whether people stay on your site or bounce off immediately. The faster this number goes down, the better!
Largest Contentful Paint
The Largest Contentful Paint refers to the time taken to load the largest item on the site. For example, if you have a large image on your homepage, this will affect the loading speed of the entire page. A slow-loading home page could mean losing potential customers.
2.Metadata and Schema Markup
Google has made it clear that rich snippets markup isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, these little bits of information can help improve rankings by providing additional context around certain data types.
For many people, fixing this can prove challenging as there’s lots of data to edit. That’s where companies offering SEO services come in with their SEO audit service, as they take on the burden of freeing you up to do what you do best!
3.Internal and External Links
Internal links refer to pages within your domain. External links point towards websites outside of yours. Internal and external links play a big role in determining where your site ranks in organic search results.
Make sure you’re linking out to relevant sites whenever possible during your SEO tech audit checklist. Doing so will boost your credibility with Google.
Visit Your Technical SEO Audit Checklist Often
Technical SEO is a term that has been around for quite some time now. It’s not something new, but it seems to be gaining more and more traction in the industry as of late.
A technical SEO audit checklist is so important because you can have all the best content on your site. But if it isn’t optimized well, nobody will see how useful your content is to them!
With the help of these three simple steps, you can ensure that everything is running well on your site. And, thus you aren’t missing out on valuable opportunities.
Keep reading our articles for more top advice on boosting your online presence!
