An SEO audit checklist is an important step in improving your site’s visibility on search engines. This checklist will help you easily identify opportunities for development for your life science start-up.
SEO, or search engine optimisation is the process of optimising your site so it features in the search engine results. SEO is one marketing tool you can immediately begin to optimise. An effectively optimised site increases your brand visibility and features higher and higher up the search engine results pages.
How do you know where to start?
An SEO audit can get you started on the right track. Read on to discover the tips you need for conducting your own audit.
SEO can be divided into two sections, technical SEO and on-page SEO.
Technical SEO is how your website works. Does it provide a good user experience? Does your site load quickly? How easy is it to navigate? Is the site mobile responsive?
Answering these questions may uncover gaps that are harder to immediately rectify. They could require skills from a website developer to fix. For now, you can follow the steps in this article to identify where your issues lie to then come up with an action plan to fix them!
Start by conducting a manual audit of your site. Look through the pages, what do you like about your site? Is there anything you think could frustrate visitors, such as slow loading times? Can visitors easily find the information they’re looking for? Make notes of any potential pitfalls to resolve.
At this stage, it’s also worth using your site on a mobile device. Does the content come across in the same way as it does on your desktop site? Is all the content visible?
Once your manual audit is complete, you can then start using some online tools to gather data on your website. Online tools can help you assess how your site is performing so far. Which pages do people visit? How do visitors read the information on your site? It’s hard to find a one-stop shop that examines all the data.
The free Google tools are a good place to start. Try Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Google Analytics is your all-round analytics tool. You can see how many page views you’ve received and where they’ve come from. You can also set more specific website goals – even down to e-commerce.
Google search console is a tool that looks at how many people reach your site from search engines, what keywords is your site ranking for?
2. Optimise your page loading speed
There are many other tools you can use. They provide many details about your site and its current performance. For instance, you can try Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
This tool shows how fast your site loads in practice on your audience’s device. The tool also shows the steps to take to improve loading times. This could be through large files or an excess of website plugins you’re not using.
3. Check your URL structure
Properly structured URLs will mean search engines can accurately understand the content of your website page.
Be sure your URLs use hyphens instead of underscores and that each URL has no spaces.
4. Add image alt text
Every image you upload to your site should also have accompanying alt text. This is the text that appears when people with screen readers cannot see the image.
If your website uses WordPress or something similar, there is a text box when you upload the images to make this easy to add.
Investigate your on-page SEO
On-page SEO is perhaps one of the easier areas of SEO to fix. If you have collected baseline data using Google Search Console, head over to your data. What keywords are you ranking for at the moment? Out of the pages which are ranking, are they the ones you expect? Do they match your business?
5. Undertake keyword research
You should start by identifying the main keywords related to your business. These are the words people use when searching for products or services similar to yours. Once you have identified these keywords, you can begin researching them.
Take a look at the list of keywords you are ranking for. Can you see gaps in your keywords? Do the keywords accurately reflect your business’ offering? If you don’t have baseline data, look at each of your website pages – what keywords would you like people to search for to reach the content?
The next step is to identify how to optimise your site for these missing keywords. There are many potential steps to optimise existing content. For example, you could place keywords into the title, optimising images and much more. However, you can also use the keywords as ideas for future content.
The title tag is one of the first things visitors see when they arrive at your site. This is also the only thing search engines will read before deciding whether to index your pages. Make sure it contains the keywords you want to appear in search results.
A meta description is a brief summary of what your page is about. Search engines use it as a snippet of text to display in search results. If you don’t write a meta description, Google might decide your page isn’t relevant enough to show up in search results.
It’s also worth remembering that the gaps you have identified can work to provide other types of content for your marketing campaigns. Need to write a blog post for SEO? You can turn the blog post into social media content or an email newsletter!
SEO can be a complex process, but by following the best practices outlined in this article and using the various tools available to you, you can identify areas where your website could use some improvement.
Time is precious, particularly in the life science industry.
That’s why SEO is so crucial for your website. It’s important to continually analyse your site and make necessary changes so that you stay ahead of your competitors.
It’s a continual process of evolution but if done correctly, it helps you continually reach new audiences online.
