5 important questions to ask of any website

SEO has long been a vita consideration for many businesses but, it’s now more crucial than ever thanks to the massive increase in online ordering and search traffic. Whether you’re evaluating a new site you have designed, or are auditing a site as part of your SEO efforts, being able to ask a few key questions quickly is a useful way of building a picture of site quality. 

Here are five important questions to ask of any website if you’re targeting improved rankings and more traffic. 

1. Do pages load quickly enough?

Page load speed is a prime consideration for search engines when determining where a site should be ranked. It’s also absolutely critical to then maximising your hard won search traffic, with research showing even a fraction of a second delay can send a browser elsewhere. Google recommends aiming for no more than a two second load time. Underlining just how important this is, the search engine has baked page speed into a new algorithm, the Page Experience Update. 

2. Does the page perform well on mobile? 

Google completed its switch to its mobile first index last month, meaning now its rankings are based entirely on the mobile version of a website. Mobile performance is an expansive subject and covers considerations such as page load speed and the use of responsive design. If any element of the site is not optimised with a mobile first mindset, it’s very unlikely to rank well. 

3. Has schema markup been implemented properly?

Did you know there is a position before position one of the search results? This is known as position zero, often this will take the form of a question and drop down answer or, a block of text with a snippet of information relevant to your search term. Using techniques such as schema markup improves a site’s chances of being able to claim that top spot, by pointing out to Google what type of content it’s seeing when crawling the site. 

4. Is keyword cannibalization limiting performance? 

In an ideal world, every page on site would target a different keyword. In the real world, most sites will have multiple pages optimised for the same keyword, meaning they’re all competing against one another in the search engine results. This is known as keyword cannibalization and can limit visibility by pitting multiple pages from the same domain against one another. The presence of keyword cannibalization usually signals there is quite a bit of work to do onsite, as it could demand that new pages be created, content be audited and new content written and more keyword research carried out. 

5. Are all page titles present and unique? 

The SEO page title is an important SEO element and each page should have a meaningful, unique title relevant to the content of that page. If titles are duplicated, aren’t representative of the content itself or are too generic, they’ll need to be revised to help with ranking improvements.