15 Reasons to Start the New Year with a Panda Audit
Would you leave the door to your house unlocked when you know you live in a dangerous neighborhood widely known for robberies? Never, right?
So why do so many marketers ignore the potential of a Panda penalty? The Google Panda penalty police is on the loose, actively seeking out “offenders”, freely handing out Penalty cards that result in a significant loss in traffic and sales for your website.
Why do we rarely hear “Panda audits” as part of an online marketers optimization routine?
Smart marketers run a Panda audit at least every couple of months to make sure their site is safe from future Panda penalties. Panda protection is an integrat to SEO as keyword research, and should be a fundamental part of every online marketers protocol.
Let’s review 15 reasons why you need to start the New Year with a Panda Audit:
- You can’t afford to lose your rankings, and traffic, to the dreaded Panda
- Google baked the Panda algorithm into their regular algorithm updates, so Panda is now ever-present. What does this mean? Your site could be hit by a Panda penalty ANY TIME.
- Panda audits identify problems on your site that may be suppressing your site and causing traffic “leaks”, such as broken links or 404 pages. Fixing these can increase conversions and rankings.
- Improving problems identified by a Panda audit will make your site visitors happy. Ultimately, Panda is about USER EXPERIENCE, so optimizing your site for usability will increase conversions. This means improving navigation, identifying pages with high bounce rate, and finding the areas of your site where the user experience is poor.
- Identify sites that are duplicating your content & get them to remove or change your content.
- Find pages that are loading slowly and improve load time so both users and robots can get your content quickly and easily.
- Optimize your site for mobile, the future of search. A thorough technical audit will help uncover pages that are not mobile-friendly.
- Identify pages that are performing well so you can update them and add more relevant, current content or offers for conversions.
- Discover pages that have been “orphaned” or require an increase in inbound links from other pages of your site as well as external sites.
- Find what sites have a strong or weak CTR according to Webmaster tools and tweak your titles to attract more clicks.
- Optimize your site for schema.org and other tags.
- Audit your tracking, and make sure all of your goals and conversion codes are working properly.
- Find opportunity gaps to create pages for keywords that you aren’t currently targeting, or optimize existing pages for different keywords.
- Audit your template for on-page optimization, making sure you have the proper title tags, header tags, etc.
- Not only will your site be safe from penalties, but you will improve the rankings by optimizing for on-page SEO, conversions, usability, connectivity and load time.
Want to learn how to run a comprehensive Panda audit? Download our Ebook: A Step by Step Guide to Performing a Panda Audit to learn more. Or reach out to us and request a Free Basic Panda Audit to get some pointers on how you can improve your site right now.
Start 2015 off on the right foot by protecting your site while improving your chance’s for increased rankings, traffic and sales!
Latest posts by Marcela De Vivo (see all)
- The Evolution of Data: Creating Intent-Led Digital Strategies - 29 January, 2019
- Productive Things To Do When You Are a Freelancer Job-Hunting - 18 July, 2018
- What KPIs Should I be Using to Measure my SEO Campaign - 21 July, 2017