Enjoy this week’s guest post from Lindsay Li, a content marketing consultant and writer, on How to Perform a Basic Content Audit and Action Steps to Improve your SEO.
When you’re growing your small business, search engine optimization often feels like a constant churn for new content, but there are actually a few ways you can tap into the power of the content you already have to boost your rankings and improve the value of what you already “own.”
To get started, you need to run a content audit on your site. Unless your site is huge (500 or more pages), you can do this pretty simply and for free with a tool called Screaming Frog. I’m going to pause here and warn you that we are about to enter “Spreadsheet Land.”
Thinking about your content in its final form where you tell your brand story in a lovely blog post or enticing landing page is my favorite thing. But to gain growth in these spaces and make sure you are reaching your audience you sometimes have to step back and look at this information in its raw data form. As a content marketer, you might be surprised at how often I send up staring at rows of data!
When you use a site crawling tool you will pull a ton of data from your site and it might be overwhelming at first, but we are going to hone in on some key areas that can greatly improve your site performance.
The Quick Fix: Scan for Error Codes
There are two places you might have error codes on your site that you can quickly fix: internally and externally. You can quickly scan for 404 error codes and determine how you want to manage these pages internally with your developer. If you link to external sources, do a quick scan of these as well to identify if you’ve linked to a site that no longer exists or moved. Typically, this scan is a quick and easy way to address a site problem and improve the user experience.
Take a Day and Thoroughly Review Your Page Titles
Page titles are the clickable headlines that display in search engine results pages (SERPs). The title tag should be an accurate description of the content you have on the page and plays a huge role in how search engines understand what your page is about. The title tag also displays on the top of your web browser. If, like me, you have too many tabs open on a given day, a title tag helps you remember the content you will see when you click that tab. Taking title pages seriously not only improves your SEO, it also improves usability for your audience. Social networks also use your title tag to determine what displays when a link is shared.
When you perform the content audit, you will want to look for the following:
Check Your Title length
Search engines only have so much space to display your title, so if you go over you will end up with an ellipsis cutting off your hard-thought keywords. Keeping titles under 60 characters helps you fit within the 600-pixel container (this is why I love Screaming Frog—you can directly edit your text elements and calculate the pixel width inside the tool before you send the new copy over to your web developer to make the improvements). Also, if you have a long company name in all your page titles, you are cutting your title length short.
Strive for Unique Copy
If your content is repetitive, you aren’t doing yourself any favors. Try to inform both your user and the search engines with titles that give value and information about the page contents. Page titles like Home, Untitled, or New Page should be changed immediately!
Focus on Your Goals
Choose your target keyword for the page and put it near the beginning of your page title. This will help you stand out to the search engine and keep the most important information upfront. Be careful not to stuff your titles with keywords or Google will definitely penalize you.
If you have a number of products or your site has a large number of pages, you might have to put in some real work here. But the results can be a huge boost for your SEO.
Invest Time in Your Images, Friends!
I’m not even talking about image quality, although that is certainly important, and when it comes to SEO paying attention to the size and quality does have a big impact on site speed. But what I want to focus on is the copy elements of your images.
First, a fun fact: more than 20% of all searches are in Google images! That’s huge. Here’s how you can win with your images:
Craft File Names
File names for your images should be descriptive, and keyword rich without being spammy (you get dinged for this!). Most sites use whatever filename the camera provided, but consider how much better best-fit-jeans.jpg is over IMG_9876.jpg. Oh, and use dashes, not underscores.
Use Alt Text for Each Image
Write SEO friendly alt text. Alt text describes the image for assistive technology so you can reach a wider audience. Because of this, search engines browse image data for relevancy.
Your File Path Should Be Part of the Strategy
Believe it or not, your file path is also a ranking factor. If you’re an eCommerce brand especially, and all your images are stored in one folder, you’re missing a big opportunity to use keywords. For example myshop.com/denim/best-fit-jeans.jpg just gave two keyword hits, versus the traditional myshop.com/media/best-fit-jeans.jpg
Depending on how image heavy your site is, this could be a major undertaking to optimize. But probably one of the most worthwhile efforts you could make to improve your rankings.
Review your Header Tags to Improve Content Structure
Well-structured content is both visually appealing, more accessible, and can actually improve your search results or opportunity to be in a featured snippet. When you use a content audit tool, you can view how many of your pages have the appropriate number of H1s (hint, you should only have one per page!) and subsequent H2s and H3s.
While you are reviewing your headers, consider making some changes to the keywords on relevant pages that are not performing as well, effectively taking a two-pronged approach to improving content on each page. If time or budget is of the essence, I would suggest doing this with your top 10-20 pages to start.
Read and (Probably) Rewrite Your Meta Descriptions
If you thought page titles were fun, you’re going to love this. The meta description is the short bit of text that displays in SERPs. Google typically truncates the text here at around 155 characters and penalizes descriptions that are less than 50 characters. Making changes here may not have a huge impact on your SEO, but it could have a huge impact on your clickthrough rate. The content that displays is your mini ad that should be designed to compel the user to click and learn more. This is especially important as sites like Google are doing more to keep the answers to questions in the search results without compelling the user to dig further for answers.
If you don’t pay attention to your meta descriptions, the text that displays will often automatically pull the first line(s) of text from the page. Depending on how that page is structured, you may be giving the users very little reason to click on your link.
Spend Time Considering Your URL Strategy
The words you use in your URLs are searchable. So instead of a long and often useless URLs that you wouldn’t want to share with a friend, take some time to consider how you can optimize this space in the future.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend making big changes to your URLs without a larger plan in place for numerous reasons, not the least of which is you could lose valuable gains by creating unnecessary errors. Instead, think through your URL as part of your greater content strategy. This is especially true when it comes to naming your files (remember what I said about images).
Also, try not to use dates in your URLs as this tells search engines how relevant information is or, more likely, irrelevant.
If all of this seems like a LOT, it is. But taken piece by piece you can make real and potentially drastic improvements for your site, and ultimately your business.
Lindsay is a content marketing consultant and writer under her brand Lindsay Li Writes. She works with nonprofits, purpose-driven businesses, eCommerce shops, and technology companies that have a hard time telling their story by getting to the core of the message and delivering a content strategy that carry that message across multiple channels.
Find her here: https://www.lindsayliwrites.com/
Here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-li-1204/
And sometimes here: https://twitter.com/lindsayliwrites
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