Run your own SEO audit

Plenty of people ask for my help with their websites.

Where to start really…. often the technical aspects of the site, or the backlink count and quality, or the clarity on the site aren’t the issue…

But I’ll skip all of that for now and just dump some cool things here that YOU can use yourself, to get a bit of an idea on some starting points for your own SEO (rank higher on Google) journey.

Track me down if you want some help… but anyway… here is some cool stuff:

All of these tools are FREE, and will give you some good feedback about your website.

The idea is that you run these SEO audit tools, make some notes about the single most important change you need to make from each audit, and then get busy doing those things.

Support is available via our Email list — join the list and when the weekly email goes out, you can reply and ask for help: https://sendfox.com/coreyhinde

Website Grader

https://website.grader.com/ — we really like this because its fast, free, and gives you a score out of 100.

The Grader will break your score down into performance, SEO, mobile, and also security. Its often the very first test we’ll run on a website to get an overall look at how the site is performing, and give us an early indication about any issues that might need fixing.

SEO P timer

https://www.seoptimer.com/ — similar to website grader, this site gives you a wide range of information, and is a great starting point. If you ran this test each month, and only worked on the 2–3 highest priority tasks, you would improve the health of your website.

GT Metrix

https://gtmetrix.com/ — the most preferred speed test site of them all. GT Metrix will tell you how fast your website is loading, and what the key issues are stopping it loading faster. Website speed is a crucial ranking factor on Google, so we recommend you run this test at least monthly and work on the issues that pop up.

Google Pagespeed Insights

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ — this is the Google pagespeed tool. Well worth running this often as well for the same reasons as above with GT Metrix.

Mobile Friendly Test

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly — Google prefers mobile friendly websites. Run this test to ensure your site is performing on mobile phones.

Serprobot

https://www.serprobot.com/serp-check.php — this is a wonderful tool that allows you to check your Google rankings on search. We use this early in an SEO campaign to see how a client site is performing before we start helping them out.

AHRefs Backlink Checker

https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker — this is used to see how your backlink profile is looking. We run this each month for websites typically, to see if the number and quality of backlinks is improving.

Website Authority Checker

https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker — over time this metric should improve as your website gets more links, more content, and gains authority. If this number is getting higher, usually that will result in higher Google rankings and more website traffic.

Broken Link Checker

https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ — its important to have no broken links on your website. Use this tool to find any. We recommend you run this every month.

Image Alt Tag Checker

https://www.seoptimer.com/alt-tag-checker — the Alt Tags on your website for images need to be up to date. This tool will help you find any that are missing. Google uses these as a ranking factor for search, so be sure to keep an eye on this each month too.

Next Steps:

Once you have worked through some of the issues you’ll find from these tests, the next part of the SEO — rank higher on Google — journey is to consider the following:

• Talk to an SEO professional about your overall plan.
• Set up a content plan so you can product content that helps you rank higher on Google.
• Work on building backlinks to your site.