You’ve noticed that your site is stuck in the same position. Perhaps, you could think that it’s time to hire an expensive SEO agency to improve your link building and other scary words.
Of course, backlinks are one of the most important things as to ranking growth. But experts point out that site can climb several positions simply through correct internal optimization, without any backlinks.
We should start small: there are some simple steps before difficult ones. It this article, we’ll find out what we can do for the site right away to see the quick result.
#1. Technical Site Audit
Site audit — is the essential step of the optimization. It’s probably the first thing you should carry out on your site. Meta tags and headings, server parameters, redirects, loading speed, accessibility, indexation — all these issues are stages of technical site audit.
There are two ways to carry it out: hire the SEO agency or do it yourself using appropriate tools. Since there is no need to explain the first way, we’ll go into detail on the second one.
For this purpose, I’ll use Serpstat — an all-in one SEO tool which consists of five modules. One of them is site audit. We’ll check it out.
Serpstat website analysis tool will help you to:
- Find out the quality of your site optimization and compare it to your competitors.
- Clean up your website. It allows to find all technical errors, and it even offers the way to fix them.
- Keep track of your site optimization and never miss new errors. (missing keywords, duplicates, redirects).
- Plan your strategy and budget properly.
In details:
Create a project at Serpstat and start the audit of your site. Here is how it looks like:
Serpstat Site Audit checks sites for the following errors:
- HTTP status code (everything related to the problems with URLs);
- Meta tags (title, description issues);
- Accessibility & Indexation;
- Redirects;
- Links;
- Server Parameters
Wait a minute, and you’ll see:
SDO evaluates your site optimization (from 1 to 100). The low number means that you have some problems here.
And the detailed report:
All errors are sorted by type:
And if you click on the error, you’ll see small description and recommendation.
I was speaking about simple things which can bring a quick result, but all this stuff seems quite complicated. It just looks so.
In fact, you have the list of mistakes on your site, and you have recommendations on how to fix it. Now you need to google some things you don’t understand, and you’ll be able to handle it all yourself.
#2. Content Optimization
We all know that even useful great-written content can go unnoticed without correct optimization. This topic needs a separate article, so let’s skip the details and get to the highlights:
- Text structure. Heading, subheadings, lists, pictures should be present in any article. No one will read a bunch of the straight text.
- Correct layout (Title, H1, H2, H3, etc.) To check your meta tags and headings I offer SEO META in 1 CLICK.
- Relevant keywords but in a natural way without spamming and keyword stuffing. It means that it shouldn’t look like “buy shoes black” and it shouldn’t look like this:
- Don’t use too competitive keywords. SEO tools usually have Keyword Difficulty feature which can help with it.
- Without grammar mistakes. I find Grammarly useful for this purpose.
- Interlinking between old and new posts on your site. Add not only your old articles to the new ones but also new to old.
#3. A/B Testing
And as a bonus: crucial thing when you get stuck in the same position — is to carry out A/B testing. A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of some issue which is related to your SEO to determine which one performs better.
It’s obvious that if there is no progress, you should change something on your site. So, it’s time to try this method. You can experiment with your design, layout, navigation, SEO issues. But remember:
- to use the rel=canonical method to avoid duplicate content;
- to use 302 redirects to tell the search engine that this redirect is temporary;
- not to overuse it because it can affect your ranking.
It can be true that navigation on your site is great, but it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be better.
Final Thoughts
Running the website, you have to keep in mind a bunch of different factors. Through this article, I’m trying to remind you about some of them. It’s just a small thing you can improve on your site if the progress just stopped:
- Site audit;
- Content optimization;
- A/B testing.
Hope it helped. Don’t stop working on your site and ranking growth will be not long in coming!