How to Know if Your Website is Optimized for SEO
As a digital marketer, you know that search engine optimization (SEO) is very important, more so now than ever before. With new trends starting, such as voice search and mobile-first indexing, it is essential that you take control of your website’s SEO performance from the start and tend to any problems that arise to stay afloat.
Although most digital marketers have a clear understanding about SEO, they do not quite understand their website’s SEO. As a marketer who is confident and knowledgeable, you want to complete more SEO tasks in less time. Whether you want to check your rankings or see how well your web pages are optimized for specific search requests, SEO tools can help for any marketer.
Lucky for you, there are a variety of tools available at your disposal online that can assist you in identifying areas that need improvement. The following are six tools that will make your job easier to stay in front of your competition.
Check the Site Load Time
Some website owners do not know this factor even exists, or they do not understand how important it is. If you own a small business and your website is slow, then your SEO will be poor. In other words, you will be able to meet different issues, such as Google Rankings drops, high bounce rates, and low sales results.
If you own a larger business and your website is slow, then you could lose billions of dollars per second. For instance, Amazon stated they could lose $1.6 billion in sales each year because of a slow load time of just one second.
When you have slow site speed, it impacts your website rankings and requires you to make improvements for SEO. One tool you can use to check your website loading speed is Finteza. It lets you know how long it takes for your users to gain access to all your web page features, how fast they can download your content, what resources slow down your webpages the most, and how your website loads on different devices and in different counties. Finteza offers real analytical data and diagnostics you can count on, as well as lets you reveal any potential problems and fix them any time.
Track Keyword Rankings for Certain Keyword Phrases
Knowing how each web page is doing based on keyword phrases is important to increase traffic. Identifying the right keywords, making sure to fully respond to the search query, and to please the user intent is the best way to long-term SEO success.
When you determine how your keywords rank, you can decide if you are going in the right direction. One of the fastest ways to check the page ranking for a certain keyword is to look in SE Ranking. This software provides a variety of toolkits, including a keyword rank tracker. It also lets you see what keywords your website page is ranking, keywords’ monthly search volume, KEI, traffic prediction, and visibility rating. You can also compare your page performance to your competition’s, find more lucrative keywords, monitor quality backlinks, and get the most out of similar on-page website SEO opportunities. Along with global rankings, SE Ranking monitors Google SERP features, Map results, and Google Ads positions for a variety of locations and devices.
Check the Mobile Friendliness
Mobile friendliness is a must due to mobile-first indexing, which is where Google mainly uses the mobile version of the website content for indexing and ranking. In the past, the index mainly used the desktop version of a page’s content when assessing the relevance of a page to a user’s request.
Since Google continues to believe that mobile friendliness is a major ranking factor, it is vital to optimize your website for mobile users. When you plan for mobile users, avoid long scrolls, consider different devices and screen sizes, and different considerations for surfing on mobile. To see if your website is mobile friendly, check out Varvy. This tool allows website owners to test their site within seconds and see how their website performs. It is free of charge; therefore, you will need to enter URL to begin using it.
Varvy will provide recommendations and guidelines on how you can improve your website’s mobile friendliness and increase mobile rankings. It also provides other features you might find useful, including page speed optimization, page security, paid links finder, search engine optimization, and much more.
Check the Technical Structure
Quality content, visual and functional appeal, backlink profiles, keyword research, good navigation, and many other factors are what makes a website successful. However, the one thing they all have in common is their technical structure. It makes an impact on your keyword rankings and user engagement.
If you want to understand how your technical SEO performs, consider using HubSpot’s Website Grader. There is no charge, and it helps website owners find search engine optimization opportunities. It creates personalized reports based on your site’s performance, on-page SEO, mobile, and security.
All you must do is enter your URL and email to get a score (1-100) and a detailed report. It also comes up with actionable suggestions and strategies on how to increase your website grade. HubSpot does provide many paid SEO tools so you can better direct your SEO efforts.
Check Content Relevance
Just because you have intriguing content does not mean you will generate traffic from search engines and gain high rankings for your target keywords. It is essential to know user content and use it to better your SEO.
For this to happen, you must come up with the correct content that interests your target audience, optimize it for relevance, and advertise it where you want to see it. If you do not optimize your content, it can become devalued. Make sure you fully understand the intent of target keywords, complete the SERP analysis of these keywords, determine what type of content is ranking well, investigate semantically related keywords, answer all questions users have, and enhance content for these terms.
To obtain valuable statistics about questions people might ask online, consider using the cost-free tool Answer the Public. This tool offers keyword alternatives based on search requests and shows a great graphic with questions and phrases people often use when searching for that keyword.
Audit Internal Links
Internal linking is imperative from different SEO viewpoints. They open opportunities that let you move from one room to another. However, when a website grows older, it becomes hard to keep a solid interlinking structure and keep a consistency through your site.
Keep in mind that the way your web pages are interlinked aids Google in understanding how your pages are connected and its roles. Be sure to pick the optimal type of structure that best meets your business needs.
To ensure your links on a web page are working, consider using Check My Links. It is a Chrome Extension that goes through web pages and discovers which ones are valid and which ones do not work. This tool will highlight the good links in green and the bad links in red to make sure you spot them easily and take quick measures to fix them.
Bottom Line
Although there are other areas you can check, these are some of the key ones to see if your website is optimized for SEO. These tools provide many useful features and can result in remarkable findings when used correctly. Whatever tool you decide to use, be sure to maximize all the value you can get from it.
If you are looking for more suggestions or simply need some direction in how to optimize your SEO, contact Intergetik Marketing Solutions. Our staff take pride in helping our clients and want to make sure you are getting the results you are seeking. Contact us today!