How to monitor the health of your website

Your website health is very important as it determines the overall user experience and it also affects how Google sees your site and where it will rank it on search engine results pages (SERP’s). 

What to look for when monitoring the health of your site and SEO

When monitoring your site there are a few metrics that you can look at to keep on top of good performance and be able to fix any problems before they affect the performance. Keeping on top of issues mean’s that they don’t affect the SEO performance of your site. Here are a few things to look at and monitor to keep your site health up:

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is one of the biggest goals in online marketing and noticing any changes in this metric and being able to act on these changes can affect your SEO health. If the number of organic traffic decreases you should, have a look deeper and investigate what happened. Firstly check the organic traffic to each section of the site and see if there are any particular pages that are performing badly, have a look at your mobile SEO performance and see if this is where you are losing organic traffic and look at if there has been a decrease in marketing activity from other channels as this can decrease brand awareness and organic search.

If you see your organic traffic increasing you should have a look and investigate what made this happen and apply it to the rest of the site.

Site speed

The speed that your site takes to load can really affect the SEO health and the user experience. Having a fast site gives a better experience when browsing and decreases bounce rates. You should aim for your site to load in less than 1 second, there are some specific things you can do to optimise the loading time of your site. You should decrease images sizes across the whole site and aim for the total size of all images on each page to add up to 1mb, this will decrease loading time as the browser will not be spending time loading huge image files. Remove any unnecessary code from the site as this can clog up the back end and make load times a lot slower and have a look at any plugin’s that you might not need and remove them! 

Alt tags

Alt tags are the things that Google uses to determine what an image is about so it can display it in search results correctly. You need to make sure that each image on the site has these alt tags to optimise the SEO of your site.

Meta details

Optimising the meta details of each page on your site will also help the overall health and SEO. The meta details are given to each page to describe to google what the page is about. The meta title should feature at least one keyword and will be displayed as the title in search result pages. The description also needs to feature a keyword and will be displayed in search engine results below the title to tell people what the page is about.

There are a lot of things that can affect the health of your website and it is easy to get overwhelmed by all of it. These 4 are a good starting point and will definitely help you to keep your site healthy and user-friendly. Here at Damteq, we specialise in increasing site health through detailed and advanced analysis and tracking. Contact us if you would like to inquire about how we can boost your website and marketing.