How to improve the website. 3 essential stages

Lower loading speed, outdated design, lack of usability and, as a result, crappy position in SERP and lack of organic traffic. If these seem familiar to you, then probably you need to optimize your website. Many webmasters believe this process is expensive and complicated. In some way it’s so, especially some things like the full redesign or the mobile version establishing. But today we’re going to talk about the things that don’t require much of effort but still influence a lot on your website rankings.

Technical audit

The technical audit is the very first thing you should carry out. Checking loading speed, broken links, redirects, the site’s URLs, meta tags, pages status, backlinks — is what we mean by the technical audit. There is an impressive list of things should be checked during the audit, and it is desirable to rely such case on experienced professionals. But since most likely this material’s read by newbies, I will demonstrate how you can simplify your work with the help of such tools like Serpstat.

I took hm.com as our example and carried out an audit of 1,000 pages, including subdomains. Remember to set the enough limit to cover all pages of the site.

When the audit is over, we get a summary of the general condition of the site. All errors are represented in several groups, depending on the priority of their solutions. A special SDO score indicates how well the domain is generally optimized.

If clicking any group, we get a full list of links to pages with all errors.

It’ll make the future work a bit less complicated if exporting the list in any convenient format.

Checking the site structure

Check the site’s structure to make sure it is accurate and usable. Remember the following:

• You have to separate all pages into different groups by thematics. Your audience should be able to get access easily to each group from the site menu.
• The golden web design rule says that anything on the website must be found in no more than 3 clicks. Yes, if you own the e-store, this number can be correlated because of a large number of product groups. But anyway, make sure every product can be accessed without a headache.
• Breadcrumbs is a must for the large websites. This navigation element helps the customer to migrate between sections easily.

• Don’t forget about the search bar (again, feel free to follow asos.com)
• Avoid Flash navigation. It prevents search engines from finding the links to the sections of the website.
• Use cross linking between pages.

Content audit

Sure you know how important the good relevant content is. It attracts the audience, generates backlinks, grows traffic. But without proper optimization, even the best content may leave unnoticed. So, always check how well the content is optimized.

Here are the main points you have to pay attention to:

• 100% or at least 99.99% of texts on your website must be absolutely unique.
• Don’t miss the tags. The main title should be enclosed in the H1 tag, whereas subtitles should be in H2, H3, etc.
• The articles must be useful and respond to urgent questions from the audience. Use Google Trends to always keep a finger on the pulse with what’s currently rocking in the world, or use Serpstat Search Questions to see what exact questions are people asking the search engines concerning any topic you’re interested in.

• Don’t use keywords for the sake of keywords. Remember that the most important thing while creating any content is its easy readability and usefulness for the audience.
• Always check the text for errors before publishing. Although errors don’t straightly influence the rankings, they may prevent the search engine from indexing your website correctly. Feel free to use any proofreading tool for checking the content. I use Grammarly for this purpose.

The bottom line

To see your site at the first positions in SERP you need it to fully meet the criteria of current ranking algorithms. An audit allows to identify all the errors at the initial stage and make sure that everything is done correctly. I hope that this material will help you a bit to succeed in your work. Good luck!