Why is my page not ranking on Google?

SEO for a long time has been a domain of experts. It’s true. You need skills, experience and should understand Google’s requirements intrinsically to be good at SEO. 

But not everybody is good at SEO and most don’t know where to start. That’s alright. If you can perform basic SEO checks to see what works and what doesn’t work in itself is a starting point.

You don’t need 5 years of experience. You need a checklist. A checklist that helps in ranking your website on the top of Google searches.

Why should you do an SEO audit to improve page rank on Google?

• Understand where you stand with SEO

• Where are you winning with SEO?

• Where are you failing with SEO?

• What do you need to do to improve?

In summary, an SEO audit can boost your business.

In today’s article, we’ll give you a checklist to perform an SEO audit for your business.

How often should you perform a SEO audit?

Once a quarter will really help your business.

For today’s SEO audit, we’ll cover Novatise – Digital Agency Singapore

Step 1 : The Crawl

Crawling your site with the help of a 3rd party tool, can help you understand how Google crawls your site. You can identify any errors or  issues. Here is the answer to which SEO crawlers you should try.

Step 2 : Google Search Console

Here at Novatise, our best practice is to access your Google Search Console, access the queries and to find out the best keywords to enhance. We work on them by introducing awesome blogs with internal linking.

Yes, it indeed sounds like hard work. Well, if you are not the person who has the time, check out our services below

Keywords Research

On page SEO

Blog Writing Services

Step 3 : How do you rank for your own brand name?

This is an important step and must not be missed. When businesses have simple and common names, more often than not – they don’t just rank for their own keyword. To make sure you don’t fall in this bucket, google your company name and see the results.

If you are the top result, not to worry. If you are in top three, you are good. If you are not in the top three, then there’s an issue.

Step 4 : On Page SEO checks

A simple way to check on-page SEO is through the browser.

• Does the page have a clickable title tag?
• Does the page have a custom meta description? Is it optimized to convert?
• Is there a H1 tag?
• Is the H2 and H3 optimized?

Here is an article that we wrote earlier that might better explain it all…

Step 5 : Internal and External Links

Websites that have a hierarchy do better that sites that don’t.

So how do you fix this? By making sure your Internal and External links are proper.

There is a good tool called Integrity that helps Mac users find bad links on their sites. All you have to do is enter your URL and it points to all the 404 Pages that need to be removed.

Step 6 : Site Speed

Site speed is a big deal.

The slower the site, the higher the bounces. Google Page Insights gives you information on what the speed of your site is and the corrections you can make to improve.  

Step 7 : Crawl Report

It’s good to check crawl reports on tools like Ahrefs that give you data on

• Multiple H1 Tags you have
• Missing meta descriptions tag if any
• Title too long

Crawl reports also give you data on Content Quality, Social Tags etc.

Step 8 : Use Analytics

Get into your analytics to understand the true numbers. One of the best numbers to look at is the Bounce Rate. What pages have the most number of people bouncing?

Why do you think they are bouncing? If the page is bad and does not have adequate or useful information. Delete it. You do more harm than good by keeping badly performing pages.

Here is an article by Neil Patel that talks about 13 ways to reduce bounce rate.

Step 9 : Check to see if rankings are going up

It’s easy to check this with a tool like Ahrefs.

Ahrefs’ site explorer shows you your rankings over a period of time. This is the simplest way to check if you are progressing or not.

If the numbers are going down, then it’s probably to do with poor content or a penalty by Google.

It’s important to check an overall performance of your SEO efforts every time you do an SEO audit.

Step 10 : Find pages ranking in positions 5–10 for high-volume keywords

Don’t fix what’s not broken right? Wrong.

When you rank in the top positions from 5 to 10, then there’s always scope for improvement. A ranking increase can do wonders to your traffic.

So what do you do post identifying these pages?

• You can drive more backlinks to the content
• You can link internally within the content
• You can update and upgrade the content and re-promote it.
• You can improve on-page optimization.

Step 11 : Backlink

Understanding your backlink profile is kind of like taking a look into your gut. You can tell how your site is performing by looking internally.

Using a tool like Ahrefs, one can see if the backlink profile is improving. If you are getting more backlinks then it’s a good sign. But you should filter your backlinks by your Domain authority (DA) and see all the bad links that are there.

If you are getting links from poor sites and a lot of them, it’s time to recheck your backlinks campaigns.

Step 12 : Ahref’s Competing Domains

Ahrefs have a nifty tool called competing domains.

You can compare the backlink profiles of up to 5 different domains. Check this by seeing how many keywords overlap and how many are unique to your competitor. And then look to add content pieces to improve your rankings in certain keywords and drive more traffic.

Step 13 : Content Audit

The final step is to remove poor content.

Bad content can do harm to your site. Some content pieces are inferior and they don’t do much good. Identify the ones that can be improved and add more content, or better information. If not, delete the content and redirect to something relevant.

Check out Novatise’s SEO driven copywriting if you need our help to push some of your keywords that have been stuck for quite sometime.