The first thing I did was dive into a thorough content audit. We sorted through the site to figure out which pages were actually useful and which ones were just clutter. Instead of scrapping everything, we decided to consolidate the information. A Google penalty can be disastrous, but if you’re in the same situation, don’t panic. Make sure you always follow the best link-building practices to avoid such issues.
Ask for a technical and search audit for your site to learn what they think needs to be done, why, and what the expected outcome should be. … Your prospective SEO should be able to give you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved. If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else.
One, you’re targeting high-value keywords relevant to your business and your audience, and two, you’re maximizing your online visibility by appearing on the first page of results. That’s why SEO audits analyze your company’s keyword strategy. They look at keywords your website ranks for in search results, as well as your site traffic from those keywords. High-quality content keeps readers engaged and signals to search engines that your page is valuable and deserving of higher rankings.
But as Google’s updates constantly focus on content quality, I’d say this is the best place to start recovering from a penalty. We have only seen one SEO penalty over the years, on a site we had recently taken on. This site had a lot of over-optimized and repetitive blog articles, and a lot of spammy links. After discussing this with the developers, we found the website had been hacked. The hacker had inserted these links through an SQL injection, leading Google to interpret our content as spam.
- As such, its definitely recommended for enterprise customers that want to marry audit data with their own internal business data (clicks, revenue, gross margin, etc.).
- If you have a small website (under ten pages), then I wouldn’t worry too much about either of these files.
- No doubt SEO audit is very basic to develop a strong and powerful SEO strategy for your business.
- Properly optimized alt text allows screen readers to inform site users with visual impairments exactly what they are seeing.
Always-on audit. Site Audit crawls your website 24/7 to catch and report issues as quickly as possible.
Depending on the size of your website, you may need to request a custom quote for your audit. For example, our SEO audits include a certain number of pages. We’ve partnered with several companies, however, that have hundreds of pages on their site. Size — it’s the most influential factor on the cost of your SEO audit. That’s why a site with 100 pages will pay more for an audit than a website with 50 pages. On average, SEO audits cost $50 – $2,500 per audit on average (76% of businesses).
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They have a clear menu at the top, images, and a block-like orientation that separates the different sections of their site. You want your website to have a modern, branded feel that represents your company. For this reason, detailed or custom styling is a common feature of web design services. Review Google’s documentation to better understand these errors and how they apply to your site.
Google can’t index pages with this warning, so it’s worth checking they’re not pages you want indexed. Google search results come from its index, which is a database of hundreds of billions of webpages. Your pages need to be in this index to stand any chance at ranking.
Step 8. Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly
Here, you’ll see the report containing mobile pages with issues. To assess your entire website’s mobile-friendliness, go to Google Search Console, scroll to the Experience section, and click Page SEO Anomaly Experience. Here, you’ll see the number of mobile pages that require improvement.
It won’t provide your team with an exact price, but it offers a general idea of what implementation could cost — and if it aligns with your budget. For example, an expedited SEO audit for a 100-page site could have double the cost of an expedited audit for a 50-page website. In comparison, a larger agency can handle a much higher workload. They have enough team members, which allows the agency to charge a lower rate for their services. The experience of the agency, however, can offset these decreases.