Websites are an essential part of any business. It's where people go to find out what your business does and leads to a way to contact you. Not just any website will do, however. Your website needs to have good health. In other words, it needs good search engine optimization (SEO).  An optimized website is easier for people to find and interact with. To help with this, you should use Semrush Site Health to do a website health check.

Semrush Health is a new tool to measure a site for issues. It can analyze the health and compare it to a competitor's site. You will be able to track progress over time and make sure you're running a smooth and stable site. 

Benefits of Semrush Health

According to Semrush, there are multiple benefits of using their tool for a website health check.

• The report you get communicates clearly what your issues are.
• You can use the report to show your team how good your website is.
• It is possible to use it to compare your website's on-page SEO to a competitor in the same niche area.
• Semrush Health can also track changes over time.

How Semrush Calculates Your Website Health Check

When you use Semrush to do a website health check, the bot goes through the website based on the parameters you give it. It then checks for over 150 common website issues.

There are three main categories:

1. Errors – These are the biggest errors that need to take priority in being addressed.
2. Warnings – These are issues that are important to be addressed but aren't as urgent as the errors.
3. Notices – Issues that aren't dangerous but are important to be aware of.

For example, an error would be broken internal links, and they contribute toward your Site Health score more than any of the warnings. An example of a notice would be external links with nofollow attributes. These don't impact your score because they aren't an indication of error. However, they are essential in being fully informed about the foundation of your site.

Critical Issues

There are a variety of critical issues you may across when doing a website health check. However, not all errors and warnings are weighed the same when it comes to Semrush Site Health. The more critical an error is, the higher impact it has on website health.

Examples of critical issues include:

• Incorrect page in the sitemap, canonical and hreflang. The issue here is that it can confuse the search engine by making it difficult for it to decide which page to show in the search.
• A broken page leads to broken links. You can use a 301 redirect to redirect broken links, but that's not helpful if the site doesn't update the links. This will lead to users waiting longer for the content when following the links (until they are redirected to the desired page).

Also, if you have many unique issues, this will hurt your website health a lot more than the same issue repeating again and again.

Optimizing Your Site

According to Search Engine Watch, many things go into site optimization. It is essential to make sure you are doing the correct things and avoiding the things that will negatively impact your site's health. When someone does a query search, there are certain things the search engine is looking for. There are also things that can penalize the likelihood of your site showing up in a search.

What Google Is Looking For

There are many things Google looks for when determining search results, but here is a handful of them.

1. Properly Tagged Images: When you put an image on your website, you need to provide the alt attribute, which describes the picture. 
2. Quality Content: Along with relevant content, Google also wants to provide quality content. If you are regularly putting out helpful content, it is more likely your page will rank higher.
3. User Experience: Your website's layout plays a role. If it is difficult to move around your website or find the desired information, it will hurt your site's health. You want to have an easily navigable and searchable site.
4. Internal Linking: This is when you link from one page on your site to another page on your site. You find a word or phrase on one page related to another page and create a link over that word or phrase. Site users can use this as an easy way to move around your site.
5. Comments: Encourage people to interact with your website by allowing comments. Make sure to get rid of any spam comments that may pop up.
6. Site Speed: If your site runs slowly, Google is not going to emphasize it in search results.

What You Should Avoid

While there are many things to do to improve your site health, there are also things to avoid.

1. Keyword stuffing: It is essential to do SEO keyword research to make sure you are using keywords that will drive users to your site. However, you don't want to overstuff your site with keywords to the point that it becomes hard to read.
2. Annoying ads: You want to avoid anything that will interfere with users having a positive experience on your site.
3. Duplicated Content: If something on your site is duplicated somewhere else, Google will only index one page. If your website isn't page-indexed, this will hurt the chances of your website coming up high in searches.

The more unique issues found per page, the lower your Semrush Site Health score will be. You can compare your website's on-page SEO with a similar website. Plus, you can get an easy-to-read report that highlights key issues to address. Ultimately, a website health check via Semrush will give you much-needed insight into things you can do to improve your site, along with specific things to avoid. Nervous about your score? We can help you and your website. Visit us today for a free website audit!