Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Junior SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Are SEO audit tools accurate? As is the nature of SEO, the answer is very much a game of cat and mouse with Google. While there are certain ranking factors we know for sure improve performance, Google has and will not reveal their algorithm for ranking content therefore a lot of the suggestions made by SEO audit tools are up for debate. Google’s Martin Splitt has this week answered questions on the accuracy of SEO audit tools.
Martin Splitt’s Comments
Martin Splitt was asked this week at Google’s SEO Office Hours about the accuracy of SEO audit tools. “I run several free website audits; some of them suggested things that were never mentioned in the search central documentation. Do these things matter for SEO?”
Split’s response will be surprising to alot of SEOs who have been following these practices for years. He said:
‘’A lot of these audits don’t specifically focus on SEO and those that do still mention a bunch of outdated or downright irrelevant things unfortunately. I’ll give you some examples. The text to code ratio, for instance, is not a thing. Google search doesn’t care about it.”
The text to code ratio refers to the amount of code appearing on a certain webpage compared to the amount of text. The text should make up at least 10% of the code or the page is deemed to have too much code which could inevitably increase loading times. SEOs have long believed as the text to code ratio impacts page loading speed it has an impact on SEO performance but Splitt has thrown doubt over this theory along with some other SEO audit best practices.
Referring to the minification of CSS and JavaScript, Splitt said “CSS, JavaScript, not minified that you got apparently as well is suboptimal for your users as well because you’re submitting more data over the wire, but it doesn’t have direct implications on your SEO, it is good practice though.”
Google Documentation
While we can’t know for sure all the ranking factors that affect SEO and the importance that Google places on them, Google’s Search Central documentation does give us guidance on what to focus on when improving our SEO.
- Creating Helpful, Reliable, Quality Content Making sure your content is relevant and informative for your audience is crucial for strong SEO performance as Google wants to give users the best experience so they keep returning to search.
- Sitemaps A sitemap is essentially a map of your site that lets Google understand how your web pages are linked and allows Google to crawl and understand your site. You can submit a sitemap to Google via Google Search Console.
- Follow crawling and indexing best practices Make sure Google indexes all the correct pages and that your links are crawlable.
- Use Text Use text on your webpages to explain key information on the site. This helps Google better understand your pages.
- Follow Guidelines Follow Google’s guidelines to make sure your content isn’t breaking any rules that could harm your SEO. For example, plagiarising content or mashing up content from other sites can negatively impact SEO performance.
- User Experience Improving site speed and making sure content is compatible for both mobile and desktop are just some of the ways you can improve the user experience.
- Use Google Search Console Search Console allows you to track and monitor all data on organic traffic and performance on your site including what pages are performing well etc. Continuing monitoring the performance of your web pages and updating them accordingly.
Here at Intelligency we specialise in helping clients improve their SEO performance. If you want help improving your SEO feel free to contact us at info@intelligencygroup.com
