How to Perform a Free Comprehensive Website SEO Audit in Nigeria (2020)

In the past, I have paid over $25 to perform an SEO Audit for just one website. In all fairness, this audit was good at that time as it covered the basics, but it was not comprehensive enough. As such, fixing the SEO issues reported on the website did not lead to any improvement in On-Page SEO and general website ranking on Search Engines. At least, this was my past experience.

In desperation to find a way to perform a more comprehensive SEO Audit for websites without all the mumbo jumbo reports that were full of marketing ads and links, I was faced with the option of having to pay over $199 for an SEO Audit software or to pay $99 to another wannabe SEO guru. I weighed my options and just settled for a free basic Website SEO Audit, which wasn’t of any much importance.

Today, the story has changed for the better as I am now able to perform a comprehensive SEO Audit with GoAnalyzer, Nigeria’s foremost free comprehensive Website SEO Audit Tool. This Website SEO Audit Tool is powered by NaijaGoDigital and it is an improvement to TopYouGo’s Free SEO Sitechecker. You can call it blowing one’s trumpet, but this tool is so good that a lot of SEO Companies, business owners and entrepreneurs in Nigeria now use it to perform SEO Audit for their personal and client’s website for free.

Why you should perform an SEO Audit for your Website (2020)

Imagine a newly built house without a street name, house number, or full address, isn’t connected to the power grid, and cannot be found by the favourite Google Map. Can you imagine? The obvious consequence is that the house will be in abject darkness and can never be found by anyone.

The same thing happens to a new website. After building a website, it does not get seen or noticed automatically. So, you need to ensure that visitors and targeted audience can easily find the website, and the website meets all searchability standards and best practices. Website SEO Audit helps to check and evaluate websites against all SEO standards and guidelines, International standards and webmaster best practices. Once all these SEO standards are met and the webmaster best practices are followed, it then becomes easy for the right people and intended audience to find and visit your business website. This also enables your website to show up properly on search engines like Google, Bing and many more.

Key Metrics and Best Practices to consider for SEO Audit of your Website

Here are some metrics, standards and best practices that are checked on your website when you perform a comprehensive Website SEO Audit with GoAnalyzer:

1. Meta Tags

This consists of your website Meta title, Meta description and Meta keywords. You need to carefully spell out your website title while ensuring it is not beyond 70 characters and it also includes your targeted keywords. Your website description should be at least 70 characters and at most 160 characters, and it should systematically include your targeted keywords, audience type and locations (if any). Adding a clear call to action to your Meta description tells your readers what action to perform after reading it. Add three to five keywords to your Meta keywords.

2. Headings

Headings are divided into H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 headings. Use your keywords within titles in headings as it’s easier for search engines to initially understand what your website page is about, with H1 being the most important and H6 being the least.

3. Alt Attribute

Add Alt descriptions to all images on your website that you want search engines to index. When Alt texts, which is also known as Alt Attribute are added to your images, it makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index such images. An Alt text basically tells search engines what your image is about, making it easy for such an image to be found in search engines image search result for relevant keywords.

4. Keyword Consistency

Apart from adding Meta tags, headings and alt attribute to every page on your website, you also need to ensure that your targeted keywords are mentioned within the body of your texts where necessary, starting from the first paragraph. This makes it easier for search engines to read and understand what your web page is about. This should not be an opportunity to overuse keywords within your texts; it will not only be a desperate and incompetent act but also attract penalties from search engines.

5. Secured HTTP and IP Canonicalization

Using https in your URL shows that your website is not only secured but uses a dedicated IP address which further indicates that your website can resolve to its IP address and vice versa. If you enter your IP Address in the browser, does it load your website? It should!

6. Sitemap

A sitemap lists all the web pages on your website that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. You can use plugins like Yoast SEO for WordPress websites to generate XML Sitemap, and then submit the sitemap URL to webmaster tools like Google Search Console.

7. Robot.txt

This is a file that simply tells search engine robots which part of your website can and should not be crawled and indexed. Adding blocks to your robot.txt file prevents the search engine robots from crawling and indexing the blocked pages. It is also a good practice to specify your sitemap locations in your robot.txt file.

8. 404 Page

Ensure you set up a 404 page on your website, so when users encounter a “Page Not Found” error on your website, they are given the options to report the error or are able to navigate to the homepage or other working pages. This way, you can avoid losing your website visitors when they hit a 404 page.

9. Website Speed and Load Time

Slow websites kill user experience. Therefore, this is an important factor for search engines to check when ranking websites. Ensure that your web pages load quickly, and your website generally run fast. You can measure page speed with tools like Google PageSpeed Insight and GMetrix. These tools also provide tips on how to achieve a fast loading website.

Read Also: How To Improve Speed on Your WordPress Website

10. Mobile Responsiveness or Friendliness

Ensure users accessing your website on mobile devices are presented with an optimised mobile version of your website. This is another important factor checked by search engines when ranking websites. If your website isn’t mobile responsive, your best bet is to convert your existing website to a mobile-friendly one, or completely overhaul and redesign your website to make it mobile-friendly.

11. Web Analytics

Web Analytics let you measure your website visitor in a granular way. Ensure you install relevant web analytics like Google Analytics and Search Console on your website. You should have at least one web analytics tool installed on your website.

12. Broken Links

Broken links are unprofessional and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of your visitors. No one likes to make an effort to visit a web page, and then finds out that the web page is non-existent. Broken links affects site usability and SEO. Use broken link checker tools to check your website for any broken links. Ensure you remove and fix any reported broken link.

Furthermore, here are a few best practices you should also adhere to for your website URL links:

• Avoid underscore in your URLs; use hyphens instead.
• When choosing URLs or domains, use domain names that describe your business and are not misleading.
• Add favicons on your website
• Submit your website to Google Search Console and other similar webmaster tool so your website pages are easily indexed by search engines.
• Continuously build quality backlinks to your website as this will increase your domain authority, website page authority as well as improve your ranking on search engines.
• Avoid having email addresses as plain text on your website as this can be easily crawled by email harvesters and hunters. You do not want to be receiving spam emails every hour in your business contact email mailbox.
• Create all relevant social media pages for your business and integrate them to your

The Website SEO Audit Report

Once you perform and download your free SEO Audit report from GoAnalyzer, then you can start addressing each issue, and then perform an update on your audit after each SEO issue has been fixed. If you can fix most of these SEO issues raised, it will improve your On-Page SEO and increase your ranking on Search Engine Result Page (SERP) when visitors are searching for keywords relating to your website (or services and products). This is a massive way to improve organic traffic to your website without having to pay a dime.

If you need help interpreting your SEO Audit report or looking to improve your website SEO, please contact NaijaGoDigital on 07017180353 and ask to speak to an SEO Expert.

See another resourceful post on How To Perform SEO Audit in Nigeria