5 Ways to check if your website is SEO Friendly (updated 2021)

Wondering how to rank better on Google?

Do you know that the most cost-effective answer to the question: “How would you drive traffic to your website” is not “By paying advertisement”?

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, most website owners like you might be simply focusing on making it appealing to customers instead of spending energy on the process of getting new clients.

That’s why starting to look to your SEO health from the very beginning will grant you stable and organic traffic, for free.

But what If you started already?

Well, no problem. That’s why I want to share with you 5 easy ways you can use to check whether your website is SEO-friendly or not.

So, why not try to cut your ads costs and start working right now?

A 3 minutes Promise

This 5 steps no-brain-guide will take more or less 3 minutes of your time. Go through it from top to bottom. It’s important that your answers are positive on every single step.

And be frank as cheating won’t help you. You can’t beat Google!

Step #1: Canonicalization

On your site, you could have different URLs redirecting to the same page. If you don’t specify which one is the “chosen one” in other terms, the canonical one, Google will randomly pick one for you between the available. As the pages’ URLs are different Google will see them as different pages, instead of redirect users to the same one. Hence, you’ll have pages crawled twice with traffic split between the two.

As a first step, click on the URL bar on your browser and check that every URL version of your website listed below is redirecting to the https version of it.

Step #2: Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?

Google couldn’t make it easier: just paste your URL on this Google Mobile-Friendly Test and run the test.

Does the result look like the picture below? Just hope it doesn’t!

Step #3: Mind your Meta Description?

Never Heard of Meta Description?

The meta description is an HTML tag that tells search engines what’s on a specific web page. You can find a meta description just under the page title and URL of your site. Google itself requires your meta description’s length to be between 140 and 160 characters to be visible (spaces included).

So, now that you know what a meta description is, pick up two pages of your website and analyze their meta description.

If you find weird words or just a copy of your first paragraph on that page it means your website is not optimized.

Remember: meta description needs to be relevant and stick to the content of your page. By using relevant keywords, Google knows what’s the content and can rank the page for you on search queries.

Step #4: Loading Time

Did you know that loading time has an impact on SEO ranking? This is because Google wants to provide its users with a delightful experience whilst browsing. So, don’t lose time and head over to GTmatrix paste your URL and run the test.

You will get a bunch of feedback for free. Have a look at where you score ok and where you have to improve. In general, the closer you get to their ranges, the better.

Step #5: Check your Organic Traffic trends

Last but not least, checking the trends of your organic traffic will give you a quick estimation of how your site is doing on the web. This step comes with the assumption that you are tracking your traffic (and if you don’t do that you’ve definitely failed already) constantly with any available tool.

Theoretically, the trend should be always upward as you want the traffic to grow as you grow with your business.

Also, if you spot sudden fluctuations you need to watch out for potential issues.

Ask yourself these questions:

Are my contents compelling, original and up-to-date?
Have you spot a 404 page recently?
Am I providing an amazing experience to my visitors?

Conclusions

In this post, I’ve shared 5 simple tests you can do to check if your website is SEO friendly. If you were successful in all of them, well that’s a good start. Your website has a friendly SEO structure, you know what meta descriptions are, and you’re monitoring your traffic.

But is this enough for you and your Brand? Are you really leveraging SEO as it should and can you prove that you are making profits out of it?

If you are not sure how your website is performing, we are offering free SEO test worth £249 for a limited time. Also, let me know with a comment what’s your best quick test you carry out regularly and how you measure your SEO improvements.