In my complete guide to conducting an SEO audit, I taught you how to test various parts of your website to see what improvements can be made in regards to SEO.
Now I’m going to go through each step in more detail so you and see why these issues are important and what we can do to fix them.
The Full Series:
- How to complete an SEO Audit for your blog.
- Step 1: Http vs Https
- Step 2: Rank for your brand name.
- Step 3: On page SEO.
- Step 4: Site speed.
- Step 5: Structured Data Errors
- Step 6: Broken Links
- Step 7: Mobile Site Speed
- Step 8: Indexing Errors
- Step 9: Crawl Report
- Step 10: Check the keywords you rank for.
STEP 3: ON PAGE SEO CHECKS
Okay, so now we want to do some on page SEO checks – these include your title tag, your meta description and your H1 heading.
If you are struggling to rank first for your brand like in step 2, you might find a few golden nuggets in this step to see what you can do to help your ranking. You can do this by Googling your blog, or going to your home page and inspecting the pages HTML (right click -> Inspect in Chrome). You can also stick your URL into this SERP snippet generator and you’re good to go!
My title tag is ‘skinnedcartree – A UK Lifestyle Blog’ and I have no meta description. Yuck!
Following this, I’ve changed my title tag and meta description. It won’t update on Google until my site is crawled again, but you can see it in my code:
I’m hoping this will get a bit more attention to my blog tip posts and some of the content I’ve written about York since I moved here.
Looking at my HTML, I searched for ‘h1’ to find my ‘h1’ tag empty – something I need to sort out as ‘h1’ tags are something Google looks at when selecting web pages!
As you can see, I have updated my title tag and meta tag and now it shows updated in Google. It’s pretty easy to do this using the Yoast Plugin under the ‘search appearance’ tab.
If you use blogger, change your site title in the ‘basic’ settings:
Go to ‘search preferences’ to edit the meta description.
H1 Tags on your homepage.
The H1 tag on the homepage is tricky thing. An H1 tag should be used to describe the main topic or a page or article – most themes will display the title of a blog post as the H1 tag:
If you use a H1 tag as your homepage title, this means you could end up having two H1 headings which is not best practice and can be confusing.
When writing blog posts and pages, remember the title is going to be your H1 tag and you should be optimising it with keywords! But for your home page, a site title is simple enough.
Great tips – so helpful! Thank you for sharing!
These are great tips!