If you’re dealing with a penalty, my advice is to thoroughly audit your site—look for thin or ineffective content, bad backlinks, or technical issues—and tackle those step by step. With everything in one place, it’s also easier to spot patterns and draw connections. Like how ranking improvements might correlate with new backlinks. Or how technical issues could be holding your keyword performance back. SEO audits, whether completed in-house or externally with an agency, are often worth it. For businesses new to SEO, search engine optimization audits can provide a baseline for what needs fixed now vs. later to improve organic traffic.
These keywords will be the backbone of your website and based on them, you can expect slower or faster growth. Your ideal keyword should be somewhere in the middle, with medium difficulty and medium volume. Your competitor has X products (keywords) each one giving different results. By analyzing them, you are able to make your own strategy deciding where you can compete and determining which products (keywords) are untouchable. By analyzing those keywords, you are at the same time analyzing your competition. Linking to other articles is excellent for your website as it improves the quality of the content.
Is an SEO audit worth the cost?
When the team makes fixes and adjustments, they prioritize the essential tasks specified in your audit that are most likely holding you back in your rankings. By making changes to the most egregious items from your SEO audit, we can typically expect to see results faster.. It’s an excellent and convenient tool for running standard SEO audits – and it generates intuitive reports that allow us to track how your SERP positions change over time.
Just watch for patterns that suggest manipulative link building or potential spam that could trigger a Google penalty. A healthy profile should have mostly branded and generic anchors, which shows that the links have been acquired naturally. If you see an excessive number of keyword-rich anchors, that’s a red flag that could trigger Google penalties. First, check the referring domains graph to see your link growth over time.
Moz Local Listing Score
Check broken external links and broken internal links in Morningscore. Each month, check traffic trends, user behavior, and fixes made after the audit. Every quarter, you should run a fresh crawl with Screaming Frog, but keep in mind that running full scrawls is time-intensive. Also, check competitor performance and update old pages based on new opportunities.
Improve site performance and user experiences with effective site migration. Discover best practices for domain changes, server upgrades, and replatforming. Maintaining a successful website is a constant process, and website audits aren’t a one-time task. To maintain your site performance and match the latest user needs and SEO trends, make site audits a part of your regular workflow.
- Only when you fix your SEO technical issues, you’ll start getting more traffic from search engines.
- This combination allows search engines to sift through massive amounts of information and bring the most relevant results to your fingertips in seconds.
- But if there are lots of redirected links for specific URLs, you could use a plugin like “Better Search Replace” to find and replace them all at once.
- It offers an opportunity to tell Google and the other search engines which pages on your site you want to be crawled and indexed.
Using tools like Google Search Console and SEO analytics platforms, I identified pages with declining rankings and pinpointed the causes. The focus was on relevance, accuracy, and adherence to current SEO Anomaly SEO best practices. I’ve dealt with an SEO penalty before, and reassessing keyword targeting was one of the key strategies that helped me recover my rankings. In my case, I realized I had been unknowingly over-optimizing some pages with the same keywords, causing them to compete with each other.
