WEBSITE AUDITOR TOOL

Auditing your Website

Out of many website auditor tools, here at Keenclick, we use SEO PowerSuite WebSite Auditor which is absolutely the best SEO Audit Tool on the market for an affordable price. Being an Independent SEO Freelancer my discussion with you will be based on facts that are clearly visible in the SEO audit report that I can create.

You might ask yourself the question of an SEO Health Check is needed but an optimised website is key for good solid search engine optimisation.

What is a WebSite Auditor?
A website auditor is a website audit tool that helps you with the technical and content search engine optimisation.

A well-performing site is not only what search engines want but the visitors to your website as well and that well-performing site start with an SEO Health Check through a website audit by yourself or me.

You might know that WebSite Auditor is part of the SEO PowerSuite applications that you can download and use for FREE.

FOUNDATION OF A WEBSITE

Not all websites are in the best shape and although they might look beautiful and you love to browse them, underneath it might be a complete disaster that is just not falling apart….. yet.

Ranking the site high in the search engines might become really tricky with an underperforming website. Nobody wants to see slow websites, server errors and other issues a website might have.

During my search for prospective candidates in the SEO link-building process, I have seen so many problems with websites, not only from an infrastructure point of view but also malware and virus-infected websites.

Have your website checked regularly, just like your car and an MOT, do the same for your website.

Your website is for many people the first business representation they see before contacting or visiting you therefore your website must be top-notch without glitches, errors and other issues.

THE FEATURES OF WEBSITE AUDITOR

When you do your research on the best website audit tool no doubt that you will find SEO PowerSuite Website Auditor and rightly so because the features that you get with this tool will absolutely help you optimise your website.

It will give you so much information about your own but also your competitor’s website that you can outrank them on even small ranking factors you have never thought of.

To get an understanding of the list of Website Auditor features, I wrote this page so to make it a comprehensive page for you to digest.

However, it would not surprise me that you are just not interested to learn another tool and I do not blame you, there is enough work in running a business.

Let me do the website auditing and you run your business the way you know best.

Coming back to the website auditor tool from SEO Powersuite. Below you see a long list of features and many of them even for free.

A tool that shows all errors and issues that your website has and solutions to solve them making your website working flawlessly.
Creation of XML Sitemaps that search engines like so they know exactly which pages your website has and therefore help with the indexation of these webpages in the search engines.
Creation and updating of the robots.txt file to allow or deny spider robots to certain pages on your website.
Page optimisation is important and WebSite Auditor reads the content of your pages and will let you know what you need to change as part of the optimisation process.
Where most likely the home page is the most visited page for your website, you can find out if that is indeed the case or find out the least visited page and create a campaign around it to change that.
If you are new to SEO or are a PRO the features are top notch and will give you all the detail you need to optimise your or your client’s website.
Comprehensive reports for yourself, your boss, your client or who-ever is eligible to read the professional printed reports.
Every page that you see can be configured and optimised the way you want, there are no limits.
Security is key and WebSite Auditor has many security features added for you to safely search the search engines.
Multi-platform and multi-language.

Before we dive into the detail of the features it is good to know that there are 3 WebSite Auditor Editions.

SITE AUDIT

A long list of features that gives you a good and understanding report upon which you can take action. As a business owner managing your own website then the FREE Edition of WebSite Auditor would be a great asset to see what kind of issues the website has, however, the biggest problem for website owners is a) the lack of technical knowledge b) time to learn to do it yourself and for you hire Keenclick to do the work.

The site audit will show you something like the next image giving you a factor status on that particular item. The status can be an Error. Warning or Info writing what is wrong and what you need to do to solve it.

The solution can be a link to Google with more explanation on the error itself but any technical person dealing with your website will understand the problem and should be able to solve it. If they can’t then simply that person is the wrong engineer for your website.

In the image below you can see very easily if there are errors, warnings or just info messages about your site.

INDEXING & CRAWLABILITY

To rank in any search engine, a website must be crawlable otherwise it just cannot be indexed.

This sound all too logical isn’t it? However, if your website has 100 pages of fantastic content but search engines have only indexed 75 then you obviously would like to know which pages are not indexed and the reason why because then you can take action.

404 ERRORS

Everyone has seen the 404 errors which basically means that the webpage cannot be found. Maybe it has been deleted, maybe there is another reason, the point is that a 404 error gives a bad behaviour and visitors might leave your website.

An option to solve the 404 error is to create dedicated 404-pages writing that the content has been deleted.

You might think of creating a new article and use a 302 redirect which is fair, the main point is that you do not want to show the 404 error without telling the search engine that the page is gone.

REDIRECTS

Sites that have many redirects are not really user friendly however some redirects are just necessary.

HTPP/HTTPS: This redirect makes sure that all browser traffic makes use of the secured channel for secure website communication.

www/non-www: There is no difference between www.domain.com or just domain.com but there should be only 1 website.

If the search engines see 2 websites with the same content your site will be penalised because of duplicate content.

SECURITY CERTIFICATE

In case you thought that a security certificate is expensive then get a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt (https://letsencrypt.org/).

Let your hosting provider deal with Let’s Encrypt, it is their job to implement that on your server and if your hosting provider is not willing to do so, then consider switching to another website hosting provider.

CONSEQUENCE MIGRATING FROM HTTP TO HTTPS

It however has consequences for the ranking if you switch from HTTP to HTTPS because for the search engine a page http://example.com/exampe.html and https://example.com/example.html are two different pages while for you they are the same.

A redirect comes then into place that is a) redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS so all traffic is secure and redirect every non-HTTPS page to HTTPS using a 301 redirect. This can be a daunting task if you do this manually but there are options for doing that in a clever way.

The founder of SEO Powersuite Aleh Barysevich wrote an article for Search Engine Journal. The title of that article is “HTTP to HTTPS Migration: The Ultimate Stress-Free Guide” and basically writes the story on the steps to undertake to migrate a large database with loads of content and pages from HTTP to HTTPS.

The best is to avoid redirects because it simply takes time and visitors just do NOT want to wait for redirects but want to have the page, they intend to see immediately. Do not forget that the load time of a page should be less than 2 seconds otherwise you might lose potential customers.

ENCODING & TECHNICAL FACTORS

In March 2018 Google announced that they start to roll-out the mobile-first indexing Today, nearly everyone has a smartphone that they use to go on the internet and so they visit your website using their mobile phone. This simply means that if you have 2 sites that the mobile site will be indexed first.

For the majority of us that is not a problem because your site will be the most likely responsive main point is that your mobile site must be fast and especially mobile-friendly.

MIXED CONTENT

We just wrote about securing your site with a certificate which is great for ranking but remember that if you link to another website then please use HTTPS if possible.

There are still websites out there not using any security at all and then you have a simple choice

a) use the HTTP

b) remove the link altogether

c) request the partner to migrate to HTTPS

CANONICAL

We have not touched the canonical pages but basically, it means that you point to one single page as the main page which comes into place when you have multiple pages in different languages or a mobile page that is a subset of another page, the canonical page.

FRAMES

Frames have been very popular in the past but for search engines, these are documents within documents and just give issues and just try to avoid that.

W3C

Browsers act differently from web pages. The World Wide Web Consortium is standardising the web avoiding inconsistencies.

Although it does not directly mean that you lose ranking but visitors simply want the best.

TOO BIG PAGES

Do pages have large images that mean that the page is loading very slow and has a negative SEO impact?

URLS

URLs having characters like “?” or “_” is not user friendly and hard just harder to remember therefore the usage of keywords in the URLs are a better way to increase your ranking but at the same time, URLs should not be longer than 115 characters.

The best is to keep the URLs short and clear so it is easy to understand what the page is all about.

LINKS

Webpages should not have broken links.

Remember the 404 pages which should be avoided however you might have a service that is unavailable like a forum service giving an internal broken link.

At the same time having pages with many links can be very irritating and does not help to give the best experience to the visitor of the page.

Linking to other websites is a good thing which is important for link building and having links to your website is a ranking factor however the link must be relevant but keep it the same for outbound links and when you do not “trust” the other website or do not want the spider to follow the link make use of the Nofollow attribute.

IMAGES

Having broken images or better a place on your website that is missing an image is not what you should show to your visitors.

An important part of SEO is having an ALT text describing the image. Do not use too many keywords because of keyword stuffing, just describe the image giving the visitor to your page an understanding of what the image is telling.

On Page: The on-page search engine optimisation is what needs to be addressed if there are any issues.
Empty title tags: Every page must have a title writing what the page is all about. Do not leave that empty.
Duplicate titles: As written a page should have a title but duplicate titles will be confusing everyone and should be avoided. If pages have similar content it is better to rewrite these pages into one single page to keep the quality of the content high.
Too long titles: In the search engines there are only a few characters available to show otherwise the search engines will just truncate the title and important parts of the title might be missing.
Meta Description: The meta description tells the searcher what the page is all about. It is just a summary of the content but make it count, do not duplicate the meta description, do not make it too long because it will be truncated, just make it count.
Localisation: In a world with so many languages websites are not only written in English and if you have a multi-language website make use of the hreflang element telling the search engine which language is used for that particular page.

VISUALISATION

The visualisation section gives a quick and clear understanding if there are issues like in the image below. Clearly to see is the red circles showing that there are problems that need to be addressed.

The image not only show the issues but also the links between pages. It is possible to zoom in and out to get a better picture of the links per page.

Highlighted in the image below is the “forum” which clearly shows red and the reason is that the forum link still shows on the homepage but the forum itself has been disabled and that returns the 503 Service Unavailable error.

PAGES

Within the pages, you can simply select any page and check if the robot.txt is affecting the page or that the page is added to the sitemap.xml

There is just too much to name all the possibilities and options, next to that some of them will be more reflecting the way you want to work or what you want to see which might be different than me or one of my colleagues.

We wrote on the link building page on our site about do follow and no follow pages, here you see what happens when the free plugin JComments from Joomlatune is installed.

A dofollow link is added and because the JComments are on every page it means that we might lose juice to Joomlatune only because of the plugin.

Note: JComments was only installed to show, it has been removed from the keenclick.com website because Keenclick has been migrated to WordPress.

ALL RESOURCES

The all resources section shows you the resources used on the site for both internal and external.

CONTENT ANALYSIS

The real interesting part comes with content analysis. We will briefly go through this but will have a chapter dedicated to that because it is important with a lot of challenges making this page extremely long if it is added here.

PAGE AUDIT

Each individual page can be audited on content and other issues.

The “local” page on Keenclick was audited against the keyword “local SEO Southampton” and although it looks good, there is clearly one big missing item and that is the keyword in the H1.

CONTENT EDITOR

Although many small businesses make use of a Content Management System like WordPress or Joomla, a content editor has been added in case it is needed and save it to a .html page that can be uploaded to your server.

TF-IDF

We have mentioned keyword stuffing in other articles and with the TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) function we can see if there is any keyword stuffing or if it is better to add a keyword.

Below you can see that for the local SEO page we can add “digital marketing” & “keyword research” but should remove “local search” and “search engines” or replace these with synonyms.

In the end, the content must be of high quality and SEO optimised and WebSite Auditor helps with that.

REPORTS

The report under content analysis gives the options of the Page Audit Summary, Page Audit Details but also a TF-IDF report.

TF-IDF REPORT

Although the summary showed a 90.6% optimisation rate when going into more detail and especially reading the TF-IDF report then clearly for the local-SEO page there is “only” a 66.4% TF-IDF score and that gives room for improvement.

website auditor content analysis report tf idf

MORE THAN JUST A GREAT SEO AUDIT TOOL

This overview is just a glimpse of what SEO Powersuite Website Auditor can do. In separate posts, I will go into more detail around certain elements of auditing a website and how I use SEO PowerSuite with that. In the end, it is the human that is the biggest tool but it is also must be clear that you can run the audit yourself and with some explanation, you can come a long way.

The Very Best Website Auditor Tool