In the current digital era, a robust online presence is essential for organizations, particularly police recruitment agencies.
The website serves as a primary interface between the agency and potential recruits. Thus, it’s imperative to ensure that the website is not just visually appealing but is also technically sound.
This article offers a comprehensive technical SEO checklist to enhance your police recruitment website’s visibility and performance.
Crawl Errors
Crawl errors occur when search engine bots are unable to access specific pages on your website. These errors can significantly affect your site’s SEO performance.
To fix this issue, use tools like Google Search Console to identify and rectify these errors promptly. Regular checking will ensure that your website remains accessible and indexable by search engines.
In addition to identifying the errors, understanding their types can help you address them effectively.
For instance, server errors (5xx) indicate issues with your server, while Not Found errors (404) suggest that a page no longer exists at the specified URL.
By addressing these errors, you can improve your site’s crawlability and overall SEO health.
Crawl Depth
Crawl depth refers to the number of clicks required to reach a particular page starting from the homepage.
If important pages are buried deep within the site structure, they may not be crawled or indexed regularly.
To resolve this, keep your site structure simple and ensure that important pages are not more than three clicks away from the homepage.
A shallow website architecture facilitates better site crawling and ensures that all pages are easily accessible to both search engines and users.
Using a flat site structure where every page is reachable within a few clicks can significantly improve your website’s SEO performance.
Missing Titles, Descriptions, and ALT Tags
Page titles, meta descriptions, and ALT tags play vital roles in SEO. They provide context about the content to both users and search engines.
Missing or poorly optimized tags can negatively affect your site’s visibility. Ensure each page on your site has a unique and descriptive title and meta description that accurately represent the page’s content.
ALT tags are used to describe the contents of an image, improving accessibility for visually impaired users and providing additional context to search engines.
Make sure all images on your site have relevant ALT tags. A well-optimized ALT tag should be concise and descriptive, accurately conveying the content of the image.
Https Errors
Https ensures a secure connection between the user’s browser and your website. Sites without https are often flagged as insecure by browsers, which can deter users and negatively impact SEO.
Ensure your site uses https and regularly check for https errors using tools like SSL Server Test by Qualys SSL Labs.
Any https errors should be promptly addressed. Common issues include mixed content errors, where secure https pages contain links to insecure http elements, and certificate errors, which can arise from an expired, missing, or incorrectly configured SSL certificate.
Regularly monitoring and fixing these errors can help maintain a secure and SEO-friendly site.
Broken Links
Broken links can lead to a poor user experience and hinder search engine crawling. Regularly identify and fix broken internal and external links on your site using tools like Google Search Console or Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
Not only do broken links disrupt the user experience, but they can also waste crawl budget, especially on large sites.
When a search engine crawler encounters a broken link, it’s a dead-end, and that crawl time is wasted. Fixing broken links helps ensure efficient use of crawl budget and improves overall site usability and SEO.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can confuse search engines and may lead to lower rankings. Use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of a page and avoid duplicating content across multiple pages. Tools like Siteliner can help identify duplicate content on your site.
Addressing duplicate content issues is crucial for SEO. When there are multiple identical versions of a page, search engines may struggle to determine which version is most relevant to a given search query. This can dilute the ranking strength of your content.
Regularly auditing your site for duplicate content and implementing appropriate remedies, such as setting up 301 redirects or using the rel=canonical tag, can help prevent these issues.
Indexing Issues
If your pages are not being indexed, they won’t appear in search results. Check your robots.txt file to ensure you’re not accidentally blocking search engines from crawling your site. Also, use the ‘Fetch as Google’ tool in Google Search Console to see if Google can access your pages.
Indexing issues can also arise from noindex directives and faulty redirects. Make sure important pages are not inadvertently marked as noindex, and check that all redirects are correctly configured.
Remember, for a page to rank well, it first needs to be indexed. Resolving indexing issues is a critical step towards improving your site’s SEO performance.
Schema Errors
Schema markup helps search engines understand your content better. Errors in your schema markup can lead to incorrect SERP displays and lower click-through rates. Validate your schema markup using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
Implementing schema markup correctly can enhance your presence in SERPs with rich snippets, leading to increased visibility and click-through rates.
However, errors in your schema can prevent these benefits. Regularly testing and correcting your schema markup ensures that search engines can accurately interpret and display your content.
Core Web Vitals and a Slow Site
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of a page.
A slow-loading site can frustrate users and lead to higher bounce rates, negatively impacting your SEO.
Regularly measure and optimize your site’s speed and Core Web Vitals metrics using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse.
In addition to improving user experience, optimizing for Core Web Vitals can enhance your site’s rankings. With the upcoming Page Experience update, Google has announced that these metrics will become official ranking factors.
Addressing issues related to Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) can help improve your Core Web Vitals and boost your site’s SEO performance.
Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages on your site target the same keyword, causing them to compete against each other.
This can dilute your SEO efforts and confuse search engines. Identify and resolve instances of keyword cannibalization on your site using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
To resolve keyword cannibalization, consider merging the competing pages if they cover the same topic, or re-optimizing them to target different, unique keywords.
This can help each page to rank for its targeted keyword without cannibalizing traffic from other pages.
Thin Content
Thin content refers to content that provides little to no value to the user. It can lead to lower rankings and penalties from Google.
Regularly audit your site for thin content and improve these pages by adding valuable, unique information.
Content quality is a significant ranking factor for Google. High-quality content that thoroughly covers a topic can significantly improve your site’s SEO performance.
If you find pages with thin content during your audit, consider enhancing them with more in-depth information, relevant images, or helpful resources.
Content Freshness
Search engines favor fresh, up-to-date content. Regularly updating your content, especially time-sensitive information like job postings, can help maintain high rankings.
Also, regularly adding new content can signal to search engines that your site is active and up-to-date.
Content freshness isn’t just about creating new content; it’s also about updating existing content. Review your top-performing pages periodically and update them with the latest information, statistics, or resources. This can help maintain their performance and provide the most accurate and relevant information to users.
Topical Authority
Topical authority refers to your site’s credibility and expertise on a specific topic. Building topical authority can boost your site’s SEO performance.
Create high-quality, in-depth content on relevant topics and interlink related articles to establish your site as an authoritative source.
Building topical authority can take time, but the effort is worthwhile. As you create more high-quality content around a specific topic and interlink these pieces, search engines will start recognizing your site as an authority on that topic. This can lead to improved rankings and increased visibility in search results.
Google E-A-T Policy
Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines reflect the factors that Google uses to assess content quality.
Ensuring your site meets these guidelines can significantly improve your SEO performance. Display clear information about your organization, cite credible sources, and create high-quality content to improve your E-A-T score.
E-A-T is particularly important for YMYL (Your Money Your Life) sites, which include recruitment websites. Demonstrating high levels of E-A-T can help improve your site’s trustworthiness and authority, leading to better rankings. Regularly review and update your site to ensure it aligns with Google’s E-A-T guidelines.
Conclusion
Technical SEO is a crucial aspect of improving the visibility and performance of your police recruitment website.
By addressing crawl errors, optimizing tags, securing your site with https, fixing broken links, avoiding duplicate content, resolving indexing issues, correcting schema errors, improving site speed, avoiding keyword cannibalization, providing quality and fresh content, building topical authority, and adhering to Google’s E-A-T policy, you can significantly enhance your site’s SEO performance.
Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, and regular monitoring and optimization are key to success.
