Your website is a valuable resource for your business. It helps you connect with customers, advertise your products and services and helps to encourage better brand awareness. Basically, your website is your shop window, front desk and your brochure, so people need to be able to find it and it needs to be in working order.
Unfortunately, like other things, websites can break, something goes wrong or stops working, often without warning. These issues can go unnoticed, and over time, errors can build up and cause damage to your website.
Whether you’ve got a shiny new website, or a custom CMS that was built in 2010, a regular SEO health check is vital to ensure your site is performing well for both the algorithm and your online visitors.
What is an SEO health check?
Also known as an audit, an SEO or website health check provides a comprehensive review of the technical and on-page issues within your website. These issues, depending on severity, can have a significant impact on your website SEO efforts.
Just like you take your car for an MOT every year, an SEO health check aims to uncover major issues that often go unnoticed or that are not visible on your website. These issues then need to be rectified, just like with a vehicle inspection, in order to get the most from your website.
Typically, a website health check will review the technical components, analyse the website content and evaluate the user experience. Together, these can directly impact SEO for a website.
How does content impact website health?
Content on your site, whether it’s in a regular blog or product description, is a key indicator to the overall health of your website. In an SEO health check, marketers will review the content on your site to ensure it is well written, offers helpful information, and is keyword optimised.
Reviewing existing content within an SEO health check helps to highlight weak areas of content within your website. With this perspective, you are then able to make improvements, whether that be updating blog posts, keyword optimising a product landing page, or simply adding more paragraphs to “low content” pages.
There are many different ways that poor content can negatively affect your site health, including:
- Duplicate content – this is where content on a webpage that is similar or identical to another page on your site.
- Spammy content – a page that uses manipulative, not helpful content with a sole purpose of selling
- Keyword stuffing – content that repeatedly overuses specific keywords within a page
- Clickbait titles – page or blog titles that are misleading
- Poorly written content – visitors should be able to understand and enjoy reading your website content.
User experience affects SEO health
User experience, although pretty self explanatory, is often overlooked by website owners. In SEO terms, user experience refers to visitors being able to use a website comfortably and in a straightforward manner.
Imagine you click onto a clothing website with the aim of finding a specific item of clothing you saw being advertised on social media. If the website is slow, buttons are unresponsive or categories are too hard to find, you’re very likely to click off and find an alternative website. Keeping user experience in the forefront of any SEO health check is vital because your site needs to work for your website visitors.
There are several different user experience elements that can impact your website’s SEO health;
- Site speed – if your site loads too slowly this will not only impact user experience, but will also directly affect your site’s rankings
- Navigation – a site’s layout is key for users to easily find what they are looking for
- Accessibility – having text that is easy to read, a well-formatted footer and responsive design elements are all key to making your site more accessible for disabled users
- Breadcrumbs – similarly to navigation, breadcrumbs allow users to jump quickly between main categories and subcategories or specific pages, encouraging users to stay longer on the site
Does bad technical SEO affect website health?
Technical SEO refers to the inner workings of a website. Often these are elements of a website that aren’t visible to the user but can directly affect the user experience and will be flagged by search engines for having poor site performance.
Low site performance, from unmaintained technical SEO, negatively impacts rankings and traffic to a website. Search engines prefer sending visitors to sites that are performing technically well in order to increase user experience and trustworthiness.
Within an SEO health check, marketers will review certain aspects of your site that is impacted by technical SEO, including;
- Broken links
- Error pages (404s)
- Site speed
- Page indexing issues
- Structured data
How a website health check can help your site
As a business owner, it can be hard to balance all the elements of your company website, particularly with other day to day logistics that can be often more pressing. This typically results in issues damaging your website to go unnoticed or unchecked. Unresolved technical issues can not only affect the SEO of your website, but it can also put off visitors from engaging or staying on your website.
Our website health check, aka, SEO audit, is designed to highlight specific issues occuring on your site. With this specific information, our team is then able to fix these concerns or advise you on the best ways to resolve them.
Proactive site fixes are one of the best ways to ensure your website is performing well for search engines and users, allowing a better opportunity for stronger visibility in the SERPs.
Our SEO health check is a convenient and time efficient way to dig into and improve the functionality and optimisation potential of your website. For more information about our SEO audits, get in touch with the team today.
