A website is often the first way that many customers connect with your company. So it’s obvious, that your site should meet trends of web design; be user-friendly, informative, useful; contain diverse and regularly updated content.
In this article, we will tell you a lifehack about how to find new cool ideas to develop your website. But first, let’s talk about a thing many people do not pay enough attention to. A technical audit.
A website technical audit
Why do you need to carry out any audits? Because, before getting started the website promotion, a SEO specialist always conducts an audit to determine the current condition of the site. This is necessary to make the work plan, find mistakes and “bottlenecks” of the website.
During its existence, the site may occur a change of structure, or some technical errors may appear. And as the algorithms of search engines are changing from time to time, you must always stay tuned to meet all requirements.
Regardless of who you are – a SEO specialist or site owner, we recommend to regularly conduct the technical audit of the site you promote.
Aspects of website technical audit
The main task of technical optimization is to ensure full and fast indexing of your pages. Without technical modifications, the effective promotion of the site is much more complicated or even impossible.
So here are the points you need to check:
Pages download speed.
The site code on the lack of garbage: the hidden text, commented out blocks, any invisible for the public elements.
URLs, meta tags and headers, pages
Backlinks
To carry out a technical audit, you will need tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Serpstat, etc. In our example we use Serpstat for its clear intuitive design.
How to explore the site for errors
Our optimization adventure starts with creating the new project by adding its name and the domain name. We selected hm.com as the example.
The new project appears above. In the second right-hand column, there is a Site Audit button, which is what we need. Click it, and configure audit in the popped up window. In our example, we carry out an audit of 1,000 pages, including subdomains. Normally you have to set an adequate limit to cover all pages of your website.
Pay special attention to the number of threads for crawling. The more, the audits are carried out faster. However, the more streams are involved, the more likely our crawler is going to be banned. If this happens, simply change User Agent.
After completing the audit (time depends on the domain size), we get redirected to the Audit Summary section. Here is shown evaluation of the general condition of the site, all errors are divided into different groups depending on their solutions priority. Unique SDO score indicates how well the domain is optimized.
In our example, most errors are critical.
In our example, most errors are of the highest priority. That means that the most important aspects of the site are not optimized.
Overview of divided by functional components errors is at the bottom of the same page.
In our case, most errors are about Meta Tags. Click on the icon to move to this section for further analysis.
The title and the description meta tags are used by search engines to generate snippets – pieces of information that describe the site in the search results.
Click on the drop-down list’s icon, and then the More details button. We get the full list of the pages with a presence of this error. To download them quickly, just click the Export table button, and choose any convenient format.
And we are moving on. The site of our example has 352 pages with missing H1 Heading.
Each page should have its own H1 heading. It is used to refer to the most important headlines of the first level. It is an important part of the SEO optimization of any website, highly valued by search engines.
Our next stop is Redirects. As we can see, there are no critical flaws, but it still requires attention for better performance. Pushing the More details button, you, again, will find a links list with all the wrong redirects.
Find and fix bugs in every other section too. Permanent flaw fixing is one of the keys to the success and long-term operation of the site. If it’s convenient for visitors, the website credibility and the brand awareness will increase. So, the site traffic increases and search engine lifts up the resource position in the search results.
Also, don’t forget to check backlinks. They are one of the most important sites ranking factors.
And now it’s time for the lifehack we promised at the beginning!
How to find new efficient ideas for your site
Whatever niche you choose, you will face great competition. Top players at the market always keep the finger on the pulse of all global changes and set trends to everybody else. You always have to be up-to-date with all new features of your main competitors, or you can never win the struggle.
So, when it’s time to add something new, the best source for ideas is your rivals. To find out all the original ideas of your competitors on any topic, we make the appropriate request. Let’s take the phrase ‘buy shoes us.’
Pass to Keyword Research —> SEO-analysis —> Top Pages. Here is shown the most prospective pages relevant to the entered query. Group the results by the level of potential traffic.
The highest level of potential traffic get pages that use the original functionality and design to get promoted in the search results. We go for it, note the best ideas, and, yes, borrow them.
To make sure this method works, let’s pass through the very first link in our example. The site attracts attention with it’s professionally designed interface, minimalistic design, user-friendly and intuitive interface, easy placement of the site sections; big beautiful picture etc.
Resume
To promote the site in the search results, first you need is to examine and correct its errors.
We conducted an audit of just 1000 pages of hm.com and found out many mistakes of different levels of priority. Fixing them can give a much more user- and search engine-friendly site. A regular audit is one of the keys to the technical stability of the site and the growth of organic traffic.
When it comes to updates, it’s a good thought to borrow interesting and efficient ideas of your successful competitors. Always stay tuned to make it possible to compete with the major leaders of your niche.
If some measures of site development, like the new design or mobile version, are costly, a technical audit is faster and much cheaper. All the analysis we conducted with the help of Serpstat. It is all-in-one convenient and user-friendly SEO tool which will ease you work on the website. Feel free to use it to not spend too much of your precious time. There are even different ways of how to use it for free.
Written By
Eleonora Zolotaryova is a content marketer at Serpstat. Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform.
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