Reputation Management Denver Experts Helps Make SEO Audits Easier

Your Reputation Management Denver Specialists Explain Why SEO Audits Are Crucial to Success 

Denver Integrated Marketing Systems your reputation management Denver professionals would like to share with you these topics we thought would be of interest to you this month regarding how to make SEO audits easier.

Your reputation management Denver experts know that e-commerce businesses live and die by Google rankings–and regular SEO audits are a must. Running a comprehensive SEO audit isn’t for the faint of heart; some problems are quick and easy to fix, while others take weeks or months to iron out.

1. Flush out Thin or Duplicate Content

Your reputation management tools analysts know that the more content there is to crawl, the happier Google is to point traffic your way. When similar content is placed on separate pages, the traffic is split, weakening traffic to individual pages.

Duplicate content is one of the most common problems in e-commerce and SEO, therefore, it will play a big part in this post.

How do sites wind up with duplicate content?

It’s easy to have duplicate content from one page to another within your site. It happens even if you’ve carefully avoided duplicate content when creating product description and other site elements.

Your reputation management consultants specialists know that in terms of content, DeepCrawl identifies duplicate content well and ranks pages by priority – a critically useful feature for e-commerce sites that have extensive product lines and use faceted navigation.

2. Use Canonical Tags

Canonical tags tell Google which parts of a website are “canonical” – a permanent part of the site.

If each page is the same, but Google counts them as unique due to their different URLS, traffic will be split four ways. A page that gets 1000 visitors shows up in Google’s algorithm as receiving 250, while the “other three pages” get the additional traffic.

So much for why. What about how?

Using canonical tags is an “opt-in” system, so you’re tagging the pages you want Google to index. It’s fairly simple. The following is a common scenario for large retail sites:

3. Balance Link Equity and Crawlability

Crawl efficiency and link equity aren’t either/or, but they can wind up treading on each other’s toes if you’re not careful. Here’s how they fit together:

If you have a bunch of pages that you don’t want indexed, because they’re slowing down crawling, you can use robots.txt instructions like noindex and disallow to stop them from being crawled.

4. Paginate Categories

Even smaller e-commerce sites face pagination issues thanks to product pages. Pagination is a two-edged sword. If you’re going to have a site that anyone can find their way around, pagination is a must. At the same time, pagination can confuse Google.

You can also use rel=“next” and rel=“prev” HTML markup to differentiate paginated pages; make sure if you do this you don’t canonicalize the first page. Instead, feature numbers in your URLs and make each page its own canonical tag to prevent duplication issues.

Your reputation management Denver professionals know that when doing an audit on your e-commerce site, look for unlinked pages with pagination that is broken or leads nowhere. Also, look for standalone pages that need to be paginated but aren’t.

You can find more information as well as get assistance on reputation management Denver and on how to make SEO audits easier at Denver Integrated Marketing Solutions.

Your Reputation Management Denver Analysts Shows You How to Use Google to Your Advantage

5. Keep Your Sitemaps Fresh

If Google has to crawl thousands of pages to find a few dozen new product pages, it’s going to affect crawl efficiency – and your new products will take longer to show up in search.

In addition to getting new pages into search results quickly, sitemaps offer you other advantages. Your Search Console features information on indexing problems, giving you insight into site performance.

When you’re building your sitemap, there are a few things to keep in mind. Your reputation management professionals feel that if you do international business, and your site is multilingual, you’ll need to use hreflang – to let Google know where a user is located and which language they need.

One of the quickest and yet most comprehensive ways to generate a sitemap is to use the free Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which allows you to include canonicalized and paginated pages as well as PDFs.

6. Simplify Your Taxonomy for Easy Navigation

Taxonomies affect crawl depth, load speed, and searchability. The best way to score better for all of these is to have a “shallow, broad” taxonomical structure, rather than a “narrow, deep” one.

What’s the difference? On a chart, deep narrow taxonomies have more layers – more questions to answer, or choices to make, before you reach your destination.

This matters to users as a rise in the number of clicks to reach content damages user experience. It also harms SEO directly (Google is increasingly taking UX into account now) by making your site harder to crawl, especially if it’s a big site to begin with.

A wider, more open taxonomy is easier to crawl, easier to search and easier to browse, so it’s recommended for e-commerce sites.

How should you accelerate load speeds?

There are a lot of simple tweaks you can make to your website in order to speed up loading times and get on the good side of Google. Start with static caching. If your site uses dynamic languages like PHP, they can add to lag times.

And don’t forget images. While everyone realizes the advantage of smaller file sizes, specifying images” height and width are often overlooked. When you visit a URL, the browser downloads all the data on the page and begins rendering it together.

Over to You

Fixing errors like duplicate content and broken links can deliver substantial benefits. Address more technical matters like canonicalization and schema, and your e-commerce site should see improved search rankings, more real estate in the SERPs, and the jumps in traffic and revenue that go with it!

What challenges are you facing when auditing and optimizing your e-commerce site? Let’s discuss in the comments!

So don’t forget these helpful pointers on how to make SEO audits easier for yourself. 1) Flush out thin or duplicate content;  2) use canonical tags;  and 3) keep your sitemaps fresh.

Denver Integrated Marketing Solutions has more information on reputation management Denver and on how to make SEO audits easier.

via 9 Things to Validate While Auditing E-Commerce Site for SEO by @searchrook

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