With the aforementioned search query, Google revealed programs at seven institutions on the first page of the results. If your university’s degree program does not show on the first page of results for relevant searches, your marketing material may not be following SEO best practices. Considering that 75% of online visitors never browse beyond the first page of search engine results, failing to understand and implement SEO best practices can make discovering your website on Google (or Bing) akin to looking for a needle in a haystack.
perform an SEO Audits are crucial since they assist you in identifying areas of potential and increasing traffic to your website by increasing your organic search visibility. Title tags that are lacking keywords or do not correspond to the 60-character restriction, missing alt tags for pictures, and content duplication are all typical mistakes made by higher education sites that harm SEO and the user experience.
Our SEO gurus advocate perform an SEO Audit, which falls into three categories, to increase your site’s search engine results page (SERP) rating and get your program discovered by potential students.
Off-page technical components of websites such as site performance, XML sitemap, robots.txt, and other factors of relevance to web developers are examined in technical SEO Audit.
On-page SEO Audit concentrates on content and examines on-page features such as header tags, title tags, keyword optimization, and user experience.
Blog SEO Audit look at user purpose, structure, keyword optimization, and other on-page elements in blog material.
These three sorts are crucial to ensure your institution ranks well in the SERPs. Although the notion of perform an SEO Audit — much alone three separate kinds of audits — may be overwhelming to marketers who aren’t SEO gurus, our SEO experts have broken down the process into seven stages to optimize your site. A virtual assistant may assist you with an SEO audit as well as other types of activities that you may wish to outsource.
Here is How to perform an SEO Audit;
1. Evaluate Your Existing Site’s Performance
Before you begin to perform an SEO Audit, you need to understand how your present site and web pages compare to your competitors. Begin by examining indicators including page rankings, search traffic, conversions, backlink profile, and technical SEO success. Not only do these metrics give insight into how your site is presently doing and indicate areas that need improvement, but the data you gather will serve as a foundation for comparison for future SEO performance studies once you finish your audit and adopt best practices.
You may better understand where and why rival degree programs or colleges beat you by comparing your site’s SEO performance to that of best-in-class rivals — those programs that regularly rank high in Google SERPs.
To assist marketers to assess a site’s SEO performance, various SEO Audit site tools are available – Ahrefs, MOZ, and SEMrush, to name a few. SEMrush’s position monitoring tool, for example, allows users to gather and monitor accurate Google ranking data for any domain, subdomain, or URL for keywords examined daily.
2. Examine Your Website for Possible Problems
The phrase “you must crawl before you can run” applies to SEO just as much as it does to us bipeds. The first step to evaluate how your site is working is to explore it using a web crawler (aka a web spider or web robot), which is just a software or automated script that systematically scans the web, much as Google does.
Crawling your site is crucial for identifying how it’s doing and diagnosing issues since Google’s capacity to crawl and index a website is fundamental to how that website ranks on Google’s SERPs. Learn Inbound’s digital marketing specialists advocate examining how highly your site ranks for brand terms and long-tail phrases or keywords – those phrases or keywords that get less search traffic but have a better conversion rate since they are more specialized.
They also advise you to check to see whether any of your URLs have been removed from Google’s index and, if so, why. Web crawlers are also useful for automating website maintenance activities such as searching for broken links and evaluating HTML code.
DeepCrawl and the Screaming Frog SEO Spider are two famous web crawling programs. Both scan crucial information on a website fast and find any faults or bugs that need to be fixed. These and similar technologies may assist marketers in swiftly troubleshooting indexing difficulties on their websites.
3. Parse the Crawl to Aid with Data Interpretation
After a spider has finished crawling your website and pages, it is important to parse the crawl to comprehend the data. Parsing is essentially the automated collection and extraction of information from websites. Since your software is likely to include dozens, if not hundreds, of websites, breaking down the data retrieved from the crawl is a daunting undertaking.
The data processing procedure may get complex, but there are tools for that as well. SEO professionals may use the following parser tools:
According to Netpeak, this free application may assist extract aspects such as title, description, keywords, and h1 headers and is best utilized for low-volume activities and to perform an SEO Audit.
Web Scraper: This free utility is a Chrome browser extension.
Netpeak Spider: This unique search and extraction tool can parse data from HTML sites and detect error 404 pages as well as missing title tags.
4. Do an Analysis to Discover Fresh Opportunities
After crawling a website and its pages, and parsing and interpreting the data, it’s time to discover areas for development (i.e., action items). Each of the three kinds of audits outlined above will likely discover mistakes that may be fixed to increase your program’s search appearance.
We detected important content items that were adversely hurting the site’s SEO performance during an on-page and technical SEO audit for a customer.
5. Set a priority for each action item
Higher education marketers should prioritize action items and execute those that are likely to have the most effect in SERPs, concentrating initially on easy-to-fix on-site problems.
Some of the flaws detected in the perform an SEO Audit above have a greater impact on SERP ranking than others. Given that title tags and alt tags are high-priority items, but navigational components and meta descriptions, although vital, are ranked as a medium-to-high priority, higher education marketers may wish to address the easy-to-fix tag problems first.
6. Carry Out Your Action Items
It’s now time to go to work. Developers are often brought in at this step to assist with the implementation of SEO fixes found by technical audits.
Marketing managers and SEO analysts should be made aware of important on-page and blog elements to consider, such as best practices for target keyword placement, observing character limits in meta descriptions (150-160 characters) and title tags (60 characters at most), and tailoring blog content to the target audience. Additionally, underperforming sites – those with little or no organic search traffic — should be removed from your site, since they might degrade its speed.
Website and user experience designers could also be enlisted to improve navigational components to enhance click-through rates, for as by changing the footer menu to highlight top conversion-focused items that consumers can simply go to. Lead forms should be prominently placed at the top of the page so that people can easily locate and click on them.
7. Track Results to Determine Success
Monitoring SEO performance on an ongoing basis is critical for evaluating audit progress and ensuring your website continues to rank high in SERP results in the future. Perform an SEO Audit should be undertaken regularly to achieve this goal.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking organic traffic to your website. It may assist in tracking engagement metrics like conversion rate, time spent on a page, pages per visit, and bounce rate. These insights into your website’s visitor activity are a sign of website health and may inform marketers if the site’s SERP ranking is declining. Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and SEMrush are some more essential tools.
