Global Seo, SEO Audit, SEO Audit Checklist, Website Audit, Website page load speed

WHY WEBSITE PAGE LOAD SPEED MATTERS AND HOW TO FIX IT !!

- Global Seo, SEO Audit, SEO Audit Checklist, Website Audit, Website page load speed

Website Page Load Speed

Need to know whether updates?

Want to check out the news headlines or the cricket score quickly?

All we need to do is ask Google.

We all like to get things done faster, for example, if we need to know a recipe for chocolate cake? Search engines will populate hundreds of results within a few seconds. Speed is probably one of the alluring forces for people to come to search engines for almost all their queries.

No wonder, all the search engines take website page loading speed as a top criterion while ranking the sites for a user’s query. So, if you own a website, along with the right SEO efforts, you also need to take care of the website page load speed aspects.

In this post, we will explain why website speed is critical and ways to achieve it.

Some numbers to back the importance of website page load speed

According to various sources

What Google Has To Say About Page Load Speed

On July 9th, 2018, Google rolled out an update that is famously known as ‘the speed update,’ which made page load speed as a significant ranking factor for mobile searches. With mobile traffic surpassing the desktop traffic, this update has brought page speed into the limelight.

This speed update brought negative impact to those websites that deliver a slower user experience when compared to the competitors in SERP’s. However, the intent still plays a significant role in ranking, the pages having the exact content might rank higher even though it may have slow page speed. But, to rank higher than your competitors along with the right intent, your page also needs to load faster.

So, Google updates, and the users are pointing towards website page load speed. So, how can you know if your website is loading within the prescribed time?

Things To Take Care To Improve Your Website Page load Speed.

1.Server response time: This is the time taken for an HTML page to load from the server so that the user can render that page. If the server takes more time to respond, then it takes more time for the HTML page to load, thus increasing the page load time. Using legacy software/hardware to host your website might increase the server response time.

How to fix it?

To improve your website’s server response time, you need to host it with a reliable hosting service. It is best to take up a dedicated server rather than shared hosting. Also, the latest technological advancements such as cloud hosting and a CDN (Content Delivery Network) that caches most of the static assets of the website geographically. Selecting a quality hosting can help in reducing your server response time. Cloud services also have an auto-scale policy that can expand and shrink the server capacity as per the traffic fluctuations.

53% of the visits are likely to abandon the site if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load.

2. Images and videos: High-quality Images and videos take up most of the server bandwidth and increase the response time, in turn, increasing the website page loading time.

How can you fix it?

It is always smart to optimize images and videos such that they occupy less space. Use third-party tools which can resize the image and set them to 72 dpi. Take the help of various image optimization tools to reduce its size further. It is always wise to stick to standard image formats such as JPG, PNG, and GIF. Also, massive text files must be compressed using Gzip compression (take care to configure the server so that it returns zipped content.

46% of people say waiting for pages to load is what they dislike the most.

3. Website code: Sometimes, the source code of the website might contain unnecessary characters and variables which can increase its size and subsequently increases the website page load time.

How to fix it?

Through a process called minification, the source code can be simplified by removing unnecessary spaces and renaming variables to shorter names. Minification helps the code transformation over a network efficiently.

A two-second delay in website page load time increases the bounce rate by 103 percent

4. Redirects and Plugins: Each redirection creates additional HTTPs requests to the server, thus increasing its speed. Also, excessive usage of plugins may increase the page load time.

How to fix it?

Until unless required, avoid redirects as much as you can, also if there are any broken links identify and fix them. Use only those plugins which are necessary.

Sites that load in five seconds see 70% longer average sessions.

5. Caching: Every time an HTTP request is raised, all the components (both static and dynamic) of a particular webpage have to be rendered from the server, which increases the load time. Although the dynamic content has to provide with every HTTP request, loading of the static content unnecessarily increases the website page load time

How to fix it?

By using Expires headers for static content and Cache-control headers for dynamic components, you can make various components of the web page cache, thus reducing the HTTP requests to the server and decreasing the page load time.

Website page load speed has now become a significant criterion for the users, and hence, the search engines are also emphasizing over it. So, always keep these aspects in mind while designing and maintaining your website. Checking of page load time must be an ongoing process, and, from time to time, adjustments have to be made to keep up the least load time.

79% of visitors who experienced web page performance issues are never to return to the site again.

Tools To Evaluate Web Page Performance

Try some of the popular SEO Audit Tools to analyze your website speed in just a few clicks. RoboAuditor’s SEO Report is famous not only for giving you the page speed but also giving you recommendations on how to fix it.

After evaluating your website’s performance, the next course of action is to take steps to make sure your website loads in the least time possible. Here are a few aspects you must take care, to ensure your web page will load faster.

It is wise to take these factors while designing the website and also while adding content and creating new webpages.

Global Seo, Lead Generation, SEO, SEO Audit, SEO Audit Checklist, SEO Firm, Website Audit

What Is a Site Audit & Why it is important?

By Rahul on

- Global Seo, Lead Generation, SEO, SEO Audit, SEO Audit Checklist, SEO Firm, Website Audit

Does your website have an aesthetic design with all the functionalities?

Do you plan to market it and generate leads for your business?

Before planning to invest in marketing your website, there is one more thing you need to make sure of, and that is to check if your website is up to the standards prescribed by the search engines.

All the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., work based on complex algorithms that function on specific criteria, and the websites that fall within these criteria rank first among the search engine results.

So how to know whether your website ticks the prescribed checklist of the search engines? One word Site audit! In this post, we bring to you what is a site audit, key features of a site audit, and much more.

What is a site audit?

The search engines decide website ranking factors based on the user experience. A site audit is a detailed website analysis of your website’s performance against these factors.

Search engines have automated search agents known as search engine bots. These bots crawl the websites, analyze the content, and store it in their databases. When a user enters a search query, these bots then search their database and retrieve the results that are most relevant to the user’s query and serve them on their search engine results page (SERP’s)

So by doing a site audit, you will come to know in which areas your website is falling behind in these factors, which are essential for the search engines to rank it first in its SERP’s.

Key Factors To Consider While Performing Site Audit

1. Page speed: Page speed is one of the key factors most search engines consider while ranking web pages in their SERPs. Hence it is necessary to find out whether your website has all it takes to load quickly than your competitors. Through site audit, you can find critical points that are affecting your page load time.

2. On-page SEO: On the page, SEO helps in easy identification of the page by the search engine bots while performing a site audit, the following must be checked.

Each page must have a unique topic
Each page must have a primary keyword included in its page title, related meta descriptions. Check the images, anchor texts.
Check the H1 and H2 headings, redirections, duplicate pages
Also, check the page crawl errors and indexation errors
Check for page not found and server errors
Have SEO friendly URL’s for all the pages
Activate bread crumb and have structured data inserted

3. Mobile-friendliness: Mobile compatibility will increase your page rankings and will give you an edge over the competitors. While performing site audit make sure you cover the following aspects

The site must have a responsive design
Youtube video links must be embedded
All the images must be compressed

4. Check the robots.txt file: If all you realized that all the pages on your website are not being indexed, then the first place to look at is the robots.txt file. Sometimes, a few pages are blocked, which prevents Google from indexing those pages so while performing a site audit search if there any page has been ‘disallowed.’

5. Check for broken links: Broken links lead to bad user experiences and, therefore, low site rankings, so always check for broken links on your website and fix them.

6. Check your website’s XML sitemap: The XML page of your website serves as a guide for the search engine bots to crawl and index the pages of your website. Hence it is essential to make sure the XML file is in the correct format and follows the XML sitemap protocol. All your website pages must be updated on the site map, and the sitemap must be submitted to all the search engines.

7. Social media: Another channel for lead generation channel is social media, so it is necessary to make sure your website is connected to your social media channels. Check if you have included the social media icons on every page, ensure you have social media share buttons where users can share your content on social media, place your social media icons on the header for easy access for the users.

8. Image SEO: Images SEO also plays a significant role in improving your page ranking, check for the following

Make sure the image file names match the image, you can also use keywords in the filenames
Check if the Alt tags are defined for all the images
If you are using many images, consider using a content delivery network

9. Check for user-friendliness: The ultimate goal is to attract traffic to your website, but what if you can get traffic onto your website, and are leaving abruptly? To ensure the users stay on your webpage, check for the user-friendliness of your website. Here is how you can do it

Check if the users can find what they are looking for within 3 clicks.
Track the user journey through the search engine console and see where the dropouts are occurring.
Check if you have clear navigation in place and have a 404 error page.
Ensure your site has the contact us, about us and privacy policy in place
Maintain consistent interface throughout the website

These are some of the aspects you need to look for while performing a site audit, however, a site audit is not a simple task, there are many aspects to take care of, and manually checking every detail might require lots of time as well as technical knowledge.

Do you know? You can check on all the SEO mentioned above Parameters through popular SEO Checker tools like RoboAuditor.

How RoboAuditor Makes Site Auditing Easy?

RoboAuditor does a detailed website analysis of any given website on 70+ parameters and gives you an SEO Report in less than 60 seconds.

Global Seo, SEO, SEO Audit, SEO Firm, Uncategorized, Website Audit

What is the right page speed and why is it so important?

By Rahul on

- Global Seo, SEO, SEO Audit, SEO Firm, Uncategorized, Website Audit

Website properties are as essential as businesses’ physical properties, and in some cases, there is no latter element. Think about Uber or Amazon, which are web-based services. Compare today’s information or knowledge economy that is based on information on your fingertips, to the ’90s when the web was ironically called WWW(World Wide Wait). This is where the topic of speed comes into the picture. Page speed is a critical factor that can add or shave off millions for certain businesses overnight.

Page speed should not be confused with page loading time. Although both are parameters regularly used, and sometimes interchangeably, there is a distinction. The amount of time taken by web pages or media content to download from hosting servers of websites, and displayed on the target web browser is page speed. This is in contrast to page load time, which entails the entire duration from clicking a link to when the webpage has loaded in its entirety.

Among the many web and mobile searches we undertake during a day, Google sets the benchmark in page speed: a scorching 0.5 to 0.9 seconds to load a search results page. However, with the capabilities of the teams at Google to keep the page size down to a sheer minimum, owing to showing only weblinks for search queries, it sits in a league that can rarely be matched.

Page speed for SEO is one of the essential reasons pages should be light and agile, as well. To talk of numbers, results by Pingdom showed that a desktop page weighing around 3 MB in size took 5 seconds to load. On mobile, it takes a whopping 22 seconds to load. This is contradictory to user’s expectations that mobile pages should be lighter, and hence load faster. Google suggests the web fraternity target average speed of 2 to 3 seconds to ensure seamless user connectivity.

But more than just user experience, there must be further reasons for rallying all the forces you can to optimize the page speed of your website. We quote it as ‘optimize’ because there can be instances where website content is trimmed to the bare minimum, and that goes against providing a complete branding experience. Let’s dive into the reasons to help you towards optimizing your page speed.

Does page speed really matter for SEO Ranking?

As Google is the most widely used global search engine, conversations in web optimization or SEO inevitably turns to the search giant. Google, in a survey on 900,000 mobile landing ad pages across 126 countries, found most of the website(70%) took around 7 seconds to load, albeit the fact that it has focused on site speed as a critical parameter since 2010.

Google keeps updating its evolving criteria for ranking websites, and the onus is on web-optimizers or marketers to ensure they align and maximize their page speed. Not only would it help it accelerates your search engine rankings, but provide higher brand recall too. Other search engine giants have criteria that are similar to Google’s. However, the general sentiment of the user’s changing requirements, increasing dependence on digital-enabled means like shopping online, must be the Holy Grail for web marketers.

Using techniques like A/B testing or page speed testing can help evaluate where the website is, and where it needs to get to.

How important is page speed to attract visitors?

The user of today, typically millennials, encompass current user, and purchase habits. And this is nothing like what we have seen in the past. They shun brand loyalty, want the user experience to be on their terms, or are happy to vent out their concerns on social media. Page speed in SEO in this era must evolve, and the focus on streamlining your website delivery strategy is vital to cater to these requirements.

Forrester recently surveyed online shopping expectations and found 88% of users chose online retailers who consistently succeeded in web performance, while around 50% would close websites that weren’t. Page speed must be a key KPI in your performance arsenal that could also experiment and incorporate new trends like voice or home speaker based searches, which could be the next battleground of SEO.

Attract visitors
How can you enhance the page speed?

There are high chances that your website might be hosted on different servers, or run on a platform like WordPress. Or you might have built it from the ground up, incorporating the most of what you had intended to place to showcase your entire product or service portfolio.

That exercise would have built a lot of flab into your website, as studies show that when your potential audience queries your website, the browser has to download an average of 110 resources to render your page. Or think of all the extra code that might have come along with the web theme selected, or images not optimized for faster downloads, while retaining the quality. The key is to go behind the scenes and identify all the excess segments that can be skipped, so your page size becomes smaller, and page speed in SEO quicker. Now that’s putting your website on a balanced diet.

How important is page speed for Mobile Platforms?

Statistics around the world prove that mobile is the dominant platform already, taking away significant portions of interactions from the desktop platform. Since the handheld supercomputer, also called the smartphone had become an indispensable part of our lives, it is more convenient and readily available to solve and assist during moments of curiosity or need.

Google has made its intentions clear with experiments to launch a mobile-first index, where the website’s algorithms will evaluate and rank a site based on a website’s mobile version, rather than the desktop version. Improving page speed cannot happen if the mindset is still set on seeing mobile as a supplement to desktop efforts.

This is an update that shows how keenly web proprietors must drastically reduce the 22-second average page loading time. Statistics from Similar Web in 2017 showed how 90% of the traffic surveyed go online via mobile, and how 74% would terminate the web tab of sites that do not load in 5 seconds. Getting your page speed in SEO right will help you cater better to the current user demographic.

Is your page ready for what’s coming next?

The world is changing quickly, and it is up to you to stay current and gear up for a changing environment. Technical aspects of cutting down on bloated Javascript or using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) are means to reduce clutter and cut the numerous elements the browser has to encounter to load your website. Moreover, look at how hardware and new software innovations are steering the market towards better productivity for the end-user.

Home speaker solutions or home-integrated things (related to the Internet of Things) are making voice searches more mainstream. Keeping a tab on new trends during page speed testing will help you stay relevant and leverage emerging technologies.

EndNote:

Ever-expanding technological advancements, increasing customization for web versatility and expertise among web and SEO professionals are bringing a level-playing platform for even new web owners to experiment and not be laggards compared to more significant players, in their online growth strategies.

Evaluating and signing up with proper web development and marketing vendors is a great way for their expertise to be translated into success for your business, and page speed must be a key performance indicator for business progress. While their expertise grows your online business, you can focus on key business functions that are eventually marketed through the website.

How can you check your page speed?

Pagespeed is the most important factor which helps you in attracting and converting more traffic. So it is important that your page loads fast. You can easily check the page speed of your website with our RoboAuditor. RoboAuditor is a White Label SEO Audit Tool that generates SEO reports in just 60 secs on 70 parameters.

RoboAuditor is an Embeddable SEO Audit tool that generates 4X more leads with the traffic you already have.

Global Seo, Lead Generation, SEO Audit, SEO Audit Checklist, Uncategorized, Website Audit

Why Every Agency should have a White Label SEO Audit Tool in their Kitty!!

By Rahul on

- Global Seo, Lead Generation, SEO Audit, SEO Audit Checklist, Uncategorized, Website Audit

Before getting into the need to have a White Label SEO Audit Tool in your kitty, let us understand what this term ‘White Label SEO Audit Tool’ actually means!!

An SEO Audit Tool is like what a thermometer is to a doctor. It helps the marketers know the health of a website in just a few seconds.

White Label is all about making website health report (popularly known as Website Audit report or SEO Audit Report) as yours, i.e. without any third party branding 🙂

Every Agency which works in the field of inbound marketing, website design, or improving business through digital channels, do SEO Audits / Website Audits of the client’s website multiple times to make sure the best practices of On-Page and Technical SEO are followed.

Now, as we have a brief idea of what White Label SEO Audit Tool is all about, Let’s understand how it can help marketers and digital agencies in improving their business.

What Makes White Label SEO Audit Tool So Important !!

1. Start Generating Leads Now:

As a business owner, you, of course, want to have a lot of leads and keep your Top of the Funnel full :). Gated content is an excellent way of generating leads, but it needs at least a couple of months and a team of 4 experts (content writer, graphics designer, website expert, SEO expert to make a wonderful ebook or a white paper. (you can find a detailed blog on this topic here) this where White Label SEO audit tool comes handy.

With RoboAuditor, you can embed the SEO Audit Tool yourself by just adding a couple of lines code on your web page and start generating the leads from day 0 onwards. Now you no longer have to wait for months as you do for your gated content.

2. Reduce Cost per Lead:

Lets us first understand what Cost per Lead exactly is!

Well, Cost Per Lead (CPL) is the total cost that is induced while developing, publishing, and sharing the offers amongst various channels to that of the number of leads generated.

It’s always essential to differentiate the costs over different offers so that you can know which offer or content gives more profit, in short, it is generating clients at a much lesser price.

Consider this example, now suppose your marketing team spends around $1000 to generate say 10 leads, the cost per lead would become $100. But now you increase the sales by doubling the number of leads to say $20 and spend the same $1000, but soon your cost per lead would come down to $50. This sounds amazing, isn’t it?

A Site Audit reduces your cost per lead by more than 75% if it’s executed properly.

With the money you save on the lead generation, you can have drinks with your team (every week 🙂 )

3. More Personalized Content:

White papers and e-books provide the users with detailed information, but they do not focus on particular information which your prospects would be looking for.

A recent study by Hubspot shows that the long form of content, i.e. ebooks, white papers, etc. is least popular among all age groups across the world.

For Example, you wrote a wonderful ebook on SEO Audit Checklist, but your prospects still have to digest this information and apply it to the website manually and then analyze the output.

Wouldn’t your prospect be super HAPPY if you directly do the SEO Audit and give the exact pointers which should be worked upon? Of course, yes. The prospects would love this. That’s exactly what your SEO Audit Tool should do.

4. Immediate Actionable Insights:

Actionable Insights can be defined as an analytical result that provides sufficient data to the organizations and managers to make an up-to-date decision. In short, it is about giving the right recommendations based on a certain logic.

Who doesn’t love recommendations? If an SEO Audit Report not only tells me the issues but also tells me what to do to fix it, would I love it? Of course, I will, and I am sure the same is the case with most of the business owners worldwide.

An SEO Audit Tool that gives you not only the list of issues but also the recommendation on how to fix it would make the real difference. RoboAuditor provides detailed recommendations based on the website audit information.

5. Make your Sales team look awesome before clients:

As a business owner, wouldn’t you would want to look the best for your clients? This can only be possible if and only if your sales team has done proper research about the clients.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if your sales team walks into a client meeting with a comprehensive website audit report (with your business branding, of course) and start the discussion from there? This, for sure, will leave a good impression on the client, and your agency will have an extra edge to win the deal.

Conclusion:

SEO Audit Tool is one of the best lead generation tools your business should invest it. RoboAuditor is the only White Label SEO Audit Tool which not only provides downloadable comprehensive SEO Audit reports but also lets you Embed the SEO Audit tool on to your website in just a few clicks.

Start Using RoboAuditor today and automate your agency’s sales and marketing.

RoboAuditor is an Embeddable Technical SEO Audit tool that generates 4X more leads with the traffic you already have.

Website Audit

Can Digital Agencies Generate Leads without E-books and Whitepapers?

By Rahul on

- Website Audit

For a very long time, marketers have been relying on e-books and whitepapers to generate leads for their agency. In fact, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the total Revenue generated from e-book will reach $8.7 million by 2018.

It’s a simple process of generating leads, where people interested in reading the e-book or the whitepaper enter their e-mail id and contact number in the form, which is later used to contact them. However, it does not stop at just generating leads.

The demand for the long form of content, i.e. eBooks, the white paper is going down tremendously.

Hubspot Research

E-books and white papers help in establishing you or your agency as marketing thought leaders and influencers. A case in point is LinkedIn. As a marketer, you might be aware of the different types of e-books, such as the content marketing toolkit and the sophisticated marketers’ guide to content marketing that LinkedIn produces at regular intervals.

These guides have successfully helped LinkedIn to establish itself as a frontrunner in Content Marketing, and have acted as a base to push the subscribers down the sales funnel.

There is, however, a flip side to creating e-books and whitepapers.

1. Spend on efforts: Let us admit it; we cannot merely duplicate the content used on the internet to publish an e-book or a whitepaper. The content has to be original and a result of our observations, market research conclusions, and expert opinions. It takes a lot of effort in terms of time, resources used to get original content, and the cost spent on sourcing them.

2. Escalated cost and a slow process: There is a lot of effort and money spent on creating a single e-book or a whitepaper. Creating a single e-book or a whitepaper can take at least 2-3 months and cost more than $1000 – $3000 each. A massive amount of investment goes into creating them, which may not be a good strategy if you are a small or medium-sized agency.

3. Late results: While e-books and white papers may build your credibility as a thought leader, in the long run, it will not show you immediate results. For example, while people may provide you with their contact details, you cannot say with certainty that the leads will convert into potential customers within weeks. You need to prove yourself always as a thought leader to win the trust of the leads before you convert them. So, if you are looking for immediate ROI, e-books and whitepaper may not be a good marketing strategy. A slow and steady strategy will help you win the race, but not immediately.

4. Slow impact in this fast-paced time: We live in a time where one cannot retain information or pay attention to anything beyond ten seconds. It is observed that the demand for e-books and whitepapers has reduced to a great extent due to its inability to hold the attention of the audience. So, no matter how informative and well-structured your content, it may not be useful to your potential customers as they are on the lookout for actionable insights and not theoretical nuggets alone.

Sure, if you have a team dedicated to doing this exercise and if you are willing to spend thousands to do it, an e-book is certainly a good method to generate leads. However, if you are looking at generating leads cost-effectively and easily with immediate results, then you need to look at more fast-paced alternatives.

One of them is the white-label SEO tool

Do you know the one thing that catapulted Hubspot and Neil Patel to success is their Website Grader and the SEO Analyzer tool, respectively? Well, we do not promise that White Label SEO tools will bring your agency on par with HubSpot or Neil Patel, but what we can say with certainty is that you will be able to generate more leads at a price that is way less than creating an e-book or a whitepaper. Let us delve more into this option.

To begin with, let us understand what white label SEO tool is

White label SEO Tool has two aspects to it.

1. Embedding the Audit Tool on your website and blogs wherein the prospects can enter the domain and get the website audit results live. Yes, it’s true, and it’s possible 🙂

2. Download the Audit report in your own branding and send it to the prospects and make them feel special. There are a lot of tools which does the second part, but there are very few tools that do point 1 and point 2 together, and one of them is RoboAuditor.

How does it help your agency grow?

1. Generate leads quickly: Companies like to see actionable insights that can be executed immediately to optimize their website and generate more traffic. By giving them an in-depth report on their pain points, areas of improvement, and areas where they are good, in just a click of the mouse, you are able to build your credibility immediately as well as generate and convert leads at a fast pace.

2. Reduction in cost per lead: Conventional methods of generating leads such as newsletters, direct response mailers, and reward programs cost a lot as there are multiple resources and touchpoints involved in building trust and engaging the lead. With white-label SEO, you can reduce the cost per lead to a large extent by providing what the customer wants almost immediately.

3. Drastic reduction in operational costs and quick ROI: Unlike other content marketing strategies that require you to spend money and resources for continuous visibility and engagement, the white label SEO tool does it in just a fraction of the cost and helps in increasing the ROI multi-fold through its immediate solutions.

Do not undermine the importance of Content marketing strategies.

While we do encourage you to use white-label SEO to generate leads and grow your business quickly, we also recommend that you include content marketing as a part of your marketing strategy. HubSpot and Neil Patel use a healthy mix of content marketing such as e-books, videos, and blogs to share knowledge nuggets with their audience and the white label SEO audit tool provides them solutions to improve their website’s SEO.

This mix of strategies will help in creating a holistic approach and building your credibility as a marketing expert, which is very important to generate and convert leads.

RoboAuditor is an Embeddable SEO Audit Tool, which generates 4X more leads with the traffic you already have.

SEO, SEO Audit Checklist, Website Audit

How much keyword density is too much?

By Rahul on

- SEO, SEO Audit Checklist, Website Audit

“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” Mark Twain

There is no optimal keyword density out there.

There is, however, a lot of room for original, quality, and valuable content.

Having said this at the very outset, is there more to be said?

keep reading

Website Audit

7 Tools That Will Help You Find Duplicate Content On my Website

By Rahul on

- Website Audit

The presence of duplicate content on your website can translate into a compromised search engine ranking. The most important search engines like Google and Bing employ a sophisticated and astute strategy to reward web pages.

With the highest quality of unique content by adding them to their indices. While eliminating the web pages with exact or “appreciably similar” content from the SERPs.

The following article supply an overview of the duplicate content. How it can affect your position on the search engine listings.

We have also arranged a comprehensive list of tools you can use to ensure that your website adheres. To the search engine guidelines and provides authentic content to the users.

What is duplicate content, and why does it matter?

The article “Duplicate Content“ on Google Search Console Help Centre states that:

“Duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains. That either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar.”

Duplicating parts of content like a block-quoting text from another source (as done above) or e-commerce websites quoting suppliers provided generic product descriptions are inevitable.

However, significant concerns arise when a substantial number of web pages on your site hosts content similar to other pages on the Internet.

Although Google does not impose a penalty on duplicate content, it affects your website’s search engine standing due to some factors:

a) Search engines do not display multiple versions of the same material; instead, they choose the text which they deem most appropriate in regards to the query. This dilutes the visibility of your page

b) Inbound links that could have pointing to your content are instead divided into the duplicates diluting the link equity. This dilution affects your website’s ranking as incoming links are a major deciding factor for a site’s visibility

How do duplication issues arise?

In most cases, duplicate content is not created deliberately by website owners. Despite that, a study conducted by Raven Tools estimated that 29% of the sites face issues of duplicate content.

Following are a few ways that lead to the unintentional generation of duplicate content:

URL variations

At times, the same page of your website is located in multiple places. For example, On an e-commerce website, the page is featuring. An item of women’s clothing on sale found — both in the “Women Clothing” section as well as the “Sale” section.

Session IDs are another reason for duplicate content. Various e-commerce websites involve the use of session IDs to track user behavior. However, when each user is assigned a different session ID. It creates a duplicate of the core URL of the page where the session ID was applied.

WWW vs. non-WWW pages

When your site has two different versions, one with and the other without the www prefix and each version have the same content, they both compete with each other for search engine rankings.

Copied content

There are a few websites that may conduct plagiarism by copying blog posts or republishing editorial content. A practice which resulted in content duplication and frowned.

However, various e-commerce websites also create duplicate content. When they are selling the same products on other sites, use the standard product description provided by the manufacturer.

How to fix duplication issues?

Following are a few technical solutions to tackle duplication issue:

Canonical URL

Using a Canonical URL on each duplicated page helps the search engine identify the original page that should be indexed and prevents the duplicate URLs from being registered. Hence, all the links, content metrics, and other ranking factors attributed to the original page.

On each duplicated page helps the search engine identify the original page that should be indexed and prevents the duplicate URLs from being registered. Hence, all the links, content metrics, and other ranking factors are attributed to the original page.

301 redirect

In most cases, implementing a 301 Redirect is the most suitable option to give precedence to the original page. A permanent 301 redirect directs. The users and the search engines to the original page regardless of the URL they type in the browser.

Applying a 301 redirect to the most valuable page. Amongst all, the duplicated pages stop the different pages from competing with each other for rankings. As well as strengthens the relevancy factor of the original page.

Meta Noindex, follow.

By including a Noindex follow Meta tag to the HTML head of a page, you can prevent the page from being indexed by the search engine. The search engines can crawl the page when they encounter the tag or header. They will drop the page to stop it from being included in the SERPs.

Rewriting content

A simple way to distinguish your content. Especially product descriptions, from other e-commerce websites, is to supplement the generic story with your wording.

That targets the specific audience and their problems. Include your unique selling proposition to the content, outlining the product, to compel the users to buy from you.

For a more comprehensive understanding of how duplicated content created and how you prevent them from building or how you can fix the issues, read this blog by Neil Patel, marketing expert, consultant, and speaker.

Tools to detect duplicate content

Before you can implement solutions to counter the effects of duplicate content, you need to audit the content of your website to determine what needs to fixed.

Discovering duplicate material can be an intensive and time-consuming process; the following tools can ease the process and help you find the duplicate content on your website:

Moz Site Crawl Tool

Moz is a well-recognized name in the field of SEO, inbound marketing, content marketing, and link building. In addition to these services, Moz also offers a Site Crawl tool, which is very useful in identifying duplicate page content within the website.

The tool recognizes duplicate content as a high priority issue since an increased ratio of the duplicate to unique content can significantly diminish a website’s credibility in the Search Engine Indexing.

The tool also allows you to export the pages with duplicate material, which makes it easier to determine the unchangeable that needs to implement.

The Moz tool is a paid tool for 30 days free trial period.

Siteliner

The Siteliner is a fantastic tool for garnering in-depth analysis of the pages which duplicated and the proximity of their relation. The device identifies not only the copied pages but also the specific areas of texts that replicated.

This feature is advantageous in some instances where large bodies of texts duplicated while the entire page may not have replicated. It also offers a quick way to gain insight on the pages which contain the most internal duplicate content.

Copyscape

Copyscape is one of the oldest plagiarism tools, which is mainly significant for auditing website content to identify external editorial duplicate content.

It crawls the website’s sitemap and compares the existing URL individually to Google’s index to check for duplicates on your pages.

It exports the data as a CSV file and ranks the pages by the duplicated content, where the most replicated page given the highest priority.

You can also purchase a subscription to the tool for a nominal fee to check for plagiarism in the content you create in Word document.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a frog that is highly famous amongst advanced SEO professionals because, also, to duplicate content, it identifies potential technical issues, improper redirect, and error messages, amongst other things.

It creates a comprehensive crawl report of your site and displays all the titles, URLs, status code, and word count, which makes it simpler to review and compare the titles and URLs to identify replicates.

The low-word-count pages can be considered for quality and rewritten in case of poor quality, while the status column can help identify pages with 404 errors that need to remove.

Google search console

Google search console can be used to discover various duplicate content issues in some ways:

1. It identifies specific URLs with duplicated title tags and meta description

2. In the Index Status section, an unusually high index volume for your site can point out towards duplicate content problems

3. URL parameters section can help you determine whether Google is having difficulty in crawling and indexing your site which alludes to technically-created duplicated URLs

Google search console offers a high level of investigative tools that are incomparable in quality to those provided by other search engines like Bing. However, compared to Screaming frog, it offers limited features and a lack of additional insight. The service is free to set up on your website.

Duplichecker

Duplichecker is one of the best free plagiarism checker tools which allows you to conduct useful text and URL searches to rule out plagiarism in your text.

The tool permits unlimited searches once you have registered and allows one free trial search. The entire process of scanning conducted in a short amount of time; however, the time varies according to the length of the text and size of the file.

This quality of the tool is inferior to the advanced paid tools like the one provided by Moz.

Plagspotter

Plagspotter is another plagiarism tool that offers free services. The URL search conducted by this device is thorough and quick, and yields sources of duplicated content for further review.

In addition to the free URL search, it also offers a plethora of valuable features in the affordable paid version, including full site scan, plagiarism monitoring, and batch searches. You can also sign up for their free 7-day trial.

Conclusion

Duplicate content, whether internal or external, can have a significant influence on your search engine rankings and the overall visibility of your website. Therefore, it is imperative to produce authentic, robust, engaging, and unique content to the best of your abilities.

Despite Google’s expertise in spotting unintentional duplication, the best practice is to keep your content plagiarism free through periodic website content audit by the creative tools and subsequent fixing of the detected issues.

RoboAuditor is an Embeddable SEO Audit Tool, which generates 4X more leads with the traffic you already have.

Website Audit

Don’t Launch A Website if You Don’t Do These 5 Activities

By Rahul on

- Website Audit

The idea behind having a website is to ensure a steady flow of website traffic, interact with your customers on the website, get to know their pain points and needs, build a relationship and finally sell them your product or services.

Before you launch a website, you have to prepare a website launch checklist template, and you must register for an account in the following tools to keep a tab on the health of your website traffic and take corrective measures when required.

keep reading

Website Audit

11 Must Have Elements of a SEO Audit Checklist

By Rahul on

- Website Audit

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the action taken on the content of a web page to ensure that it is found in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) when searched for words or phrases relevant to the content of the web page.

SEO audit is a standard procedure undertaken for any website to get a better insight into the contents of the site, individual web pages, and overall traffic.

An SEO audit checklist is always helpful and improves performance allowing for a better ranking in the SERPs.

11 Must-Have Elements of an SEO Audit Checklist

1. Keywords in SEO

The most important part of a technical SEO audit checklist is to make sure you are targeting your content for the right set of keywords.

They are the building blocks of a Search Engine Optimized web page. They are the words that readers use to query in search engines.

To ensure your readers get to your website, you need to make sure you use the right keywords in the content of your web pages.

When used appropriately, it provides a roadmap for developing content, designing, and building websites.
An SEO Audit Checklist should ideally have the following:

2. Page Title Audit

One should not neglect the manner in which ones’ site is presented via the Title Tags and meta descriptions, which play an important role in how search engines like Google view your site.

It is important that you use the right keywords pertinent to the content on the page.

3. Meta Description

They are short sentences used to describe title tags or short titles assigned to individual pages on a website. Meta Description is written into the site’s code to feed information to search bots.

They increase the site’s visibility and get it compartmentalized, as the search engine deems appropriate. It is important that keywords appropriate to the content on the web page are incorporated into the meta description.

One needs to make sure titles and descriptions are present on every page of the website.

Keep them concise. Titles should be no more than 100 characters, including spaces and descriptions no more than 170.

They should focus on introducing the concept. Duplicates are a strict NO, and there is no room for plagiarizing.

4. Landing page Redirects

Redirects occur when a user attempts to load a page with a given URL but is instead sent to a site that uses a slightly different address. The reasons for this may be:

The original page might have been moved, and you want to send the user to the present location.

To track clicks and log pages that refer users to a site.

To reserve multiple domains.

To secure the information, you are sending and receiving and when switching users from using HTTP to https.

To redirect the user to a device-specific version of the website.

Hyperlinking inconsistently also renders redirection. Minimize redirection to optimize page performance.

A 301 redirect passes between 90-99% of ranking power to the redirected page, especially if it’s an aged domain redirection. It is a permanent redirect.

In HTTP version 1, 302 redirects are referred to as Moved Temporarily and in version 1.1 to mean Found.

5. Mobile-Friendly Check

Mobile devices are rapidly changing the world. A not so mobile-friendly website version may require one to pinch/ zoom in order to read the content, which can be frustrating, whereas a mobile-friendly version is readable and usable immediately.

Making a mobile-friendly site depends on developer resources, business models, and expertise.

Key points for going mobile:

Signal to Google when a page is formatted for mobile use as this helps search engines to serve mobile searches accurately.

Do not use robots.txt to block search engines from accessing critical files.

Avoid common mistakes that frustrate mobile visitors, such as featuring unplayable videos.

6. Viewport

It is the users’ visible area of a web page. It is smaller on a mobile device than on a computer screen. Sites can set their viewport to a specific size.

You should make sure your pages work in a variety of screen sizes and orientations.

Three key elements for viewport are

Configure viewport

Size content to the viewport

Size tap targets appropriately.

7. Enable Compressions

With file Compressions, you can reduce the size of the web page files up to a maximum of 70%. This means faster loading time and amounts to better status with the search engines.

You can achieve this by setting up a compressed version of a file on the server-side, which is smaller and therefore takes less time to send the same to the user’s browser.

The file is decompressed on the user’s site resulting in faster file transfer.

gzip compression is a very popular compression tool and its open-source too.

8. Minify JS and CSS

Minification in JS and CSS is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from the source code without changing its functionality.

It is useful for interpreted languages deployed and transmitted on the internet, such as javascript, because it reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred.

JS and CSS resources should be minified, which reduces their file size but at the same time, preserving their functionality. JS source can make code readable and debuggable even after it has been combined and minified.

9. Sitemaps

In simple terms, the Sitemap is like an archive of every page on a website, typically organized in a hierarchical manner.

This should be easily recognized in a website for search engine crawlers to stumble upon it.

A sitemap is important because it tells the search engines the content present on the website often has been updated.

This is crucial because search engines rank web pages and not just websites. Having an XML sitemap improves a website’s SEO.

10. Robots.txt

This file is used to give instructions to the search engine bots. Robot.txt file is a publicly available file. Anyone can see what sections of your server you don’t want robots to see.

Google uses them to index web content. This should be used only to control crawling traffic.

11. Optimize Images

The Alt tag is the most important image optimization factor. The text in the alt tag is displayed if the image cannot be shown or is taking too long to load.

Most of the search engines are text-based and hence cannot read images or videos. Creating descriptive keywords with file names is very important for optimizing images.

Some pointers for image optimization

Use the right image

Choose the right file format.

Use informative filenames

Pay attention to alt text.

Separate thumbnails from the main pictures.

Create image sitemaps

Do not rely on third-party image hosting.

Integrate social media

Conclusion

Lastly, when in doubt, you can always run your website through RoboAuditor’s White Label SEO Audit Tool. The RoboAuditor tool not only checks for the elements mentioned above but much more.

Before you host your website, it is essential that you tick off all the points on your SEO audit checklist. Pin up a list of the SEO audit checklist on your desk and make sure you do not miss out on any of the items on the list.

RoboAuditor is an Embeddable SEO Audit Tool, which generates 4X more leads with the traffic you already have.