So you feel it is time for a new website, maybe updating its functionality, visual appearance or just a content update. For whatever reason you’re working on your website, it is important that before you send it live you perform an SEO audit! Performing an SEO audit will allow you to identify pitfalls prior to launch, giving you the heads up on fixing any errors.
Pre-launch audit
While SEO audits can be performed once the website goes live it is better to catch most of the SEO mistakes before your new site goes live.
Let’s take a look at some important points to check over before launch.
Analytics review
Tracking website analytics is crucial for performance monitoring, so ensuring seamless tracking will make sure that the data is consistent as analysing data that is inconsistent will not provide accurate results and could lead you to make unnecessary changes.
Tip: Remember that the Google Analytics tracking code is on every page.
Another great tracking code is Google Tag Manager, as you’re currently editing the website, now is a very good time to implement GTM as you will be able to add additional tags through the GTM Console at a later point in time without needing a web developer.
Technical review
Technical issues are the plague of SEO, and since you have been working on your existing site to climb the rankings you don’t want your new site to have an adverse effect, a common problem is page load times this is affected by large images or heavy text pages.
A good way to test page load times is to use Google Page Speed Insights, this tool will help evaluate your page load times, and Google will even provide suggestions for improving for both desktop and mobile versions.
Content review
If you’re rewriting site content then it is a good idea to take a look at the image sizes as you don’t need anything delaying the page load time, another good point to reviewing your content is to consider if there are any different or additional keywords that you want to optimise for? Now’s a great time to develop new pages that are more relevant to the keywords you want to optimise for.
Being able to edit the title tag and meta description on each page will help your site rank higher in organic searches so having the ability to edit these on each page is a big advantage, if you are using a WordPress site then you may need a plugin to allow you to do this.
Did You Know: If you don’t edit the meta tags and descriptions yourself, Google will pre-fill them automatically.
Link review
Another important task is to make sure that all internal links are optimised, ensuring that there is no page to page link errors that will substantially increase the user experience.
Google Search Console shows you the current internal links it sees on your website, and this is a handy feature as when you add new content you can check on how Google views this. Google does not take unethical link building lightly, and you need to ensure that all of the links to your site are good quality.
Conclusion
These are some important factors for your SEO when launching a new website, remember that SEO is a long term plan and that immediate results are unlikely, but it is important not to drop your progress by launching a new site. If you do launch a new site, you need to ensure that all of your old URL’s are 301 re-directed to your new ones. A new site doesn’t mean the end of your SEO!
Another option is to call DPOM a Google Premier Partner, and let us manage your SEO, Call us today and find out more.
