You own or work for a business, you have a website, you need more traffic.  If this is you then hopefully the following will help you better understand how to approach your much needed SEO website audit.  

1. Start With Your Visibility

  One of the first things if not the first thing anyone should do is check to see if your site is even being cached by Google.  By performing a cache: command in the URL in Google Chrome, or by downloading a cache plugin for other browsers, you can very quickly tell whether or not Google is crawling your page.  You also want to make sure that the content on your page is “readable” by the crawlers.  If you have maybe a block of content that is part of an image, chances are that content is not getting interpreted by Google and will not count towards helping with your site equity.  

2.  Study Your Competition

  If you have already established a targeted keyword list then you have a pretty good idea of what head-match and long-tail terms you want to rank for.  Check those terms in Google and see what your high ranking competition is doing well and try to mimic their strategies.  They must be doing something right.  

3. Check Your Meta Data

  Even if you are not a trained SEO, one of the tell tale signs that a site has or has not been optimized are the pages titles.  If your page titles do a poor job of describing the content, or are filled with unnecessary or stuffy keywords, then chances are the site has been poorly optimized if optimized at all.  These days it is truly a good practice to titling your pages as naturally as you possibly can.  Google likes a user-friendly web page and you don’t need to fill your page titles with gratuitous, quasi-relevant keywords to achieve that.  

4. Are You Suffering From Thin Content?

  Thin content is a dead end for web rankings.  Basically thin content is deemed as low quality by the search engines.   Although it is only one of 200 different Google ranking factors, it’s one of the more important ones.   Google is seeking to find who is the most authoritative source on a given subject matter to refer a consumer to.  They want to provide the best possible experience for that user and so they try to select the source with the most relevant and substantial content to show the consumer first.  

5. Cleanup Those Links

  Moz has a free tool called Open Site Explorer where you are able to check your external followed links to your site and determine whether or not they have a strong enough page authority to not be classified as a “bad link”.  These poor quality links can severely impact rankings and even possibly garner a penalty from Google.  Be sure to check your backlink profile and use the Disavow tool in Google Webmaster Tools to let Google know that you no longer wish to be affiliated with these low quality links