The Importance of Improving your Site Health
When Google presents suggested sites to their customers based on what was entered into the search bar (keywords), Google needs to make sure that what it presents is quality content. Google is a business and we are its customers. Just like any business, Google wants to present their customers with quality products that they can stand behind. In order for Google to want to present your website to their customers, your site needs to be healthy, reliable, and contain relevant information to the search.
No matter how awesome your site looks, and how much great content you include, if your site isn’t considered “healthy”, you’re less likely to rank higher on Google and other search engines and therefore your traffic will suffer. If you are trying to improve your rankings and outrank your competitors, improving your site health will make a big impact.
What Is Site Health?
Site Health is a metric that is tracked by SEO tools such as SEMrush and ahrefs. These tools crawl your site and measure site structure, speed, security, and technical SEO. This gives you an idea on how your site measures up to other websites from an SEO standpoint.
Items that will result in a lower site health score:
Broken links
Slow-loading pages
Missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions
Lowered percentage of crawlable pages
404 pages
Site health is not the only metric that Google takes into account when ranking a site, but having numerous errors will most certainly impact your ability to rank for your specific target keywords. Using SEO tools to help you find the issues and warnings, fix them, and keep an eye on your progress is a sure-fire way to improve your ranking and beat out your competition.
There are several items that need to be addressed and watched when monitoring site health. These items include:
Security: Make sure that your website is secure, that means your site should be set up as an HTTPS (versus an HTTP) and set up with a current SSL certificate.
Site Architecture and Crawlability: Your site should be set up in a way that is easy for Google and other search engines to crawl the content of your site.
On Page SEO: The content on your page must be clear, readable, include semantic keywords, and include an h1 header, title tag, and meta description. Also, make sure that you don’t have any duplicates of these on other pages.
Site Speed: Make sure that your core web vitals are healthy. Your content should load quickly and not shift around while loading. Knowing how quickly your First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) renders is important to know, which measures when the page’s main contents have finished loading.
What Is a Good Site Health Score?
At AutoGrowl, we aim for at or above 90% to ensure that technical issues are not preventing your sites from ranking higher in search engines. It is important to keep an eye on your site health and watch for any issues that may pop up as you add content pages to your site or make any changes.
Improving your site health can create a measurable increase in traffic and visibility. Improving a site’s health from somewhere in the 70% range to somewhere in the 90% range can markedly increase organic clicks and organic impressions. But remember, SEO is a long-term game, so give it time to show your results. It can show immediate improvements, but most long-term improvements can take 90 days or more.
Don’t let poor site health prevent you from ranking and improving your organic traffic. Enlist help from AutoGrowl to get your site back up to speed and bring in more traffic! We offer full marketing services, brand management, and SEO management. Give us a call or visit us online to get started today!