You should always evaluate the severity and real-world impact of the issue yourself. SEO tools make our work faster, easier, and more efficient, but they still can’t fully replicate human analysis or insight. They skip essential keyword research, overlook keyword mapping, and fail to optimize their key pages first. Without this structure, you’ll be guessing and hoping your pages rank for terms that may not even match your content. The bottom line here is that you should always base your decision to optimize Core Web Vitals on your specific audience’s needs and real user data – not just industry trends. If your users live in urban areas with reliable high-speed internet, Core Web Vitals won’t affect them much.
Google search results come from its index, which is a database of hundreds of billions of webpages. Your pages need to be in this index to stand any chance at ranking. You’re unlikely to have a manual action unless you’ve done something drastically wrong. But it’s still important to check you’re not dead in the water before you even start.
For example, you can pull keyword rankings and backlink data from Semrush. Then combine it with Google Search Console data to highlight clicks and impressions. “We wanted to democratize the depth and quality of professional SEO audits, typically costing over £1,000, by making them accessible to every business, absolutely free.”
You can optimize your website performance.
An SEO audit examines technical factors, content quality, backlink health, and on-page and off-page factors. While the best SEO audit tool can provide valuable insights and recommendations to optimize your website, it’s essential to understand that no tool can guarantee improved rankings. Search engine rankings depend on various factors, including content quality, backlinks, user experience, and ongoing SEO efforts. An audit tool can guide you in the right direction, but consistent effort and strategy implementation are crucial for achieving and maintaining high rankings.
Achieved simultaneous position one rankings for car, home, and life insurance.
SEO audits are the best first step in creating an SEO strategy based on your specific website, niche, and business goals — no matter what stage the website is in. After analyzing and dealing with internal issues, we are prepared for keyword analysis. In the SEO world, keyword research and competitive analysis are almost synonymous. In a way, off-page ranking factors are the result of your work.
Use Google Search Console to see which pages get the most clicks from search. Then, analyze their meta elements to understand what’s working well. High-quality content is generally well-researched, up to date, and provides unique insights. Having a few toxic backlinks isn’t necessarily alarming, and it’s almost inevitable as your site grows. What does matter is the ratio between good and toxic links in your profile—you want the vast majority to be high-quality links.
Checking site speed beyond Core Web Vitals
Grab a free preview of my new book Digital Threads, the definitive modern marketing playbook for digital-first entrepreneurs and small businesses. Kyle is an SEO professional at Wix.com with experience across various industries. He enjoys trying and testing every aspect of SEO and believes in a data based approach. While this might be overlooked at times, it should not be underestimated. And can be done manually or with the assistance of a website crawler, depending on the size of your site.
Google will not acknowledge various pages, only the strongest one. As a result, you will have a lot of different articles that are useless in terms of SEO and cannot be reached from the search engine. A lot of people, while trying to promote their website and rank higher in Google, start writing on the same exact topic.
- But, if you are medium sized website and you noticed drop in traffic, perhaps it’s better to perform a timely audit and discover the root of the problem.
- It should help determine what a successful SEO campaign would look like for the current website and outline the scope of the resources needed.
- • In Google Search Console Coverage report, look at the valid vs. error vs. excluded pages.
- As you can see from the image above, links are broken down into indexable and not indexable and you can find the same issues across both categories.
For example, sites that implement schema often see increased click-through rates because of rich snippets. One study by Search Engine Land noted a 20-30% increase in CTR for pages with structured data generating rich results (like review stars). While I won’t claim schema will magically boost your rankings, it does make your existing rankings more effective by making them stand out. Off-page SEO, primarily your backlink profile, is the next critical area. Think of backlinks as “votes of confidence” from other sites – they remain one of the strongest ranking factors. But BHS Links quality matters far more than quantity, and bad backlinks can actually hurt you.