Introduction
The Internet is a big place and it’s not getting any smaller. With more than 2 billion websites in existence, competition is fierce. If you want to stand out in the crowd, you need to do your research before developing a website. One of the best ways to get started with SEO is by running some tests on your existing content and site structure. These three tests are easy to run and can help ensure that your new site will be ready for search engines when it launches later this year:
Do a Full Content Audit
A content audit is a bird’s eye view of your website and its content. It helps you figure out what works, and what needs to be changed.
A full content audit should always include these six things:
- The number of pages on the site
- How many words are on each page
- How many images are on each page (and how many times do they appear)
- How much time has been spent creating, editing, and updating each piece of content (these numbers should all add up to exactly 100%) In other words, if there are 10 posts on your blog, then you want to know how much time was spent writing those posts from start to finish—not just compiling them together into an article in WordPress for example) You don’t want any hidden costs here!
Check for duplication of content
Let’s assume you’ve completed the first test and found no duplicate content. Now it’s time to dig deeper and look for other issues that could be causing you trouble.
One of the most common causes of duplicate content is when a page (or even an entire website) copy-and-pastes its own content across multiple pages. This isn’t good for user experience, because users don’t want to read the same thing over and over again. It also isn’t good for SEO, because Google doesn’t like it when people create spammy tactics like this one: once they see someone copying their own content all over the place, they’ll penalize them in search rankings or remove them from search results altogether!
Make sure your site has an SSL certificate
If you have an e-commerce site, you need an SSL certificate. It’s as simple as that.
Why? Because encryption is important for SEO, customer trust, security and compliance. And if you still don’t think it’s necessary for your business—think again! Buying a third-party SSL certificate is one of the easiest ways to improve security on your website without having to make any changes to the code within it.
These are the tests you should run before you spend time and money on your website.
- Test your title tags and meta descriptions. These are the components of a web page that show up in search results. They tell Google, “This is what this page is about.”
- Test your internal link structure, or how you’ve linked to other pages on your website. For example, if there’s an important article on your homepage but visitors have to dig through several pages to get to it, they may not make it that far.
- Run an SEO audit with a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush (or hire someone to do it for you). These tools will help identify weak spots in your site’s architecture so you can fix them before they cause problems later on down the line.
Conclusion
We hope that you found these tests useful. If you’re looking for more detailed information about how to run them, check out our blog post on the topic here. We look forward to helping you with your next project!