SEO Audits (Part 1)

You’ve heard a lot about SEO, but you’re not sure how your site is performing. What should you focus your efforts on?  What part of your site needs the most help?  These are all questions you might ask yourself, and the best way to plan a strategy is to do an SEO audit.

One of the best ways to get a list of URLs (pages on your site) is to use a crawling tool, such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider.  Once you’ve gotten a list of your URLs, review their status code. Most of your pages should return a 200 code – a code that signals everything is OK and working properly.  If you’re seeing a 404, that means you are linking to a page that doesn’t exist on your site. Clear that up right away!

For reference, here is a list of common http status codes:

200: Success
301: Permanent Redirect
404: Page Not Found
500: Server Error

In most cases, you will see a combination of 200, 301, and 404 status codes during your crawling scan. Ideally, you should investigate any page that doesn’t show a 200.

The next thing you should review is the Title and Meta Description columns. Are your titles unique?  Are they too long?  Meta data is an important part of any SEO plan, so make sure to spend some time crafting them.

The next part of our SEO audit is to determine your site’s performance. Stay tuned for part 2 of our SEO audit blog, where we’ll be discussing this and more!