This article is about how we can do an SEO audit for a website and optimize it based on the results. The tool I will use for this audit is called Semrush, and it is the best online tool for SEO specialists.

To stay on top of your page SEO, regularly audit your pages with a reliable SEO audit tool. It will give you valuable insights into how your pages perform and how to make necessary improvements to get the most out of your SEO efforts

We want to optimize a WordPress blog with approximately 16 posts, so it brings more visits. The blog is called Top Romanian Movies (https://topromovies.com/) and it’s obvious the site was intended to rank well for the ‘Top Romanian Movies’ search.

Let’s do a quick Google search for the phrase

The website appears in the search results on the first page, the last position with some irrelevant text description. Not that good, not that bad. With that position and that description snippet, it doesn’t have a great CTR.

Let’s have a look in Google Search Console

We can see a very low number of clicks coming from Google. We have an average position of 41.5. On the other hand, the blog ranks in the top 10 for some movie titles or actor searches. It also ranks 7 for “best romanian movies,” but nobody clicks on it.

Let’s also check Google Analytics

The numbers for the last 30 days are not looking very well. A decent average session duration and a big bounce rate.

Low page view numbers. I had to filter out the WordPress preview pages.

Let’s check now my favorite online SEO tool: Semrush

 

The tool found 26 incorrect pages. Page SEO is optimizing individual web pages to rank higher on search engines and drive organic traffic to your site. It’s a critical component of any successful digital marketing strategy. Effective page SEO ensures that your content is seen by the right people and speaks to them in an engaging and meaningful way.

Although the site uses HTTPS and redirects all the HTTP URLs to HTTPS, inside the sitemaps and the HTML code, there are references to HTTP..

To fix this, I made some updates in the wp_options table. First, I logged in inside phpMyAdmin and updated the siteurl and home options to use HTTPS :

Before :

After:

We also have to replace the blog post’s content that contains HTTP:// references. We did this with a query like:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://topro', 'https://topro');

After these changes, you should clear the WordPress cache, and in case you have the Yoast plugin, you might need to reindex your posts. If you have ssh access and wp-cli installed, you can run: wp yoast index –reindex

The report above shows some broken links (external) that we need to take care of.

The meta description displayed in search results doesn’t match the tag from the page. So we will provide a more relevant meta description, hoping Google will use ours. The current description is as follows:

“Romanian movies recommendations. A list of reviewed Romanian movies. Some of them can be watched online with subtitles on streaming platforms like Netflix.”

We will change it to:

“Romanian movie recommendations. A list of reviewed Romanian movies. You can watch some online with subtitles on streaming platforms like Netflix.”

Ranking in Google is an ongoing challenge for modern businesses. Successful companies know that their rank on the search engine is vital to their success. Working with a professional SEO expert is the best way to ensure your website ranks high in Google and other search engines. With targeted content, appropriate keywords, and proven strategies, your website can increase its rankings and drive more customers to your business.

User experience, load time, and social media are also important metrics for success in the modern digital landscape. For example, a great user experience can turn a casual user into a loyal customer, while fast load times can keep people engaged and prevent them from becoming frustrated. On the other hand, effective use of social media can give your business the exposure it needs to draw new customers in. Semrush can also help you check those metrics, but we will probably cover that in a future article.

If you want to investigate why your site or the pages are not performing well in search engines, we highly recommend you start using Semrush. In a future article, I will show you how our changes impacted our website’s ranking and traffic. Then, we will see how it performs in search engines.