Google’s frequent algorithm updates produce nonstop fluctuations in organic traffic and rankings. Content audits are essential to identify lost rankings, revive declining traffic, and find new topics.
Here’s how I audit content for better search engine optimization.
Evaluate Lost Traffic
Traffic declines from organic search can occur for multiple reasons.
Over time, new articles push current ones deep into the archives. Updating articles with substantially new info and a new date will likely help regain traffic.
Google’s core updates often focus on searchers’ intent. Many queries imply multiple intents. For example, a search for “backyard barbeque” could suggest a need for information (how to cook barbeque) or purchase options (where to buy a grill). This type of loss is not easy to fix, likely requiring a new landing page or article.
Rankings of competitors’ pages surpassed yours. Shifting from position 1 to 2 can result in huge traffic losses. That, too, is not easy to fix. Closely analyze your competitors’ pages and backlinks to identify what may have led to their ranking increase.
Changes by Google in search result pages, such as adding sections and lowering the visibility of organic results. There’s no fix.
Regardless of the cause, the first step is to know which pages account for the loss. Search Console is an easy and free tool for diagnosing organic traffic drops.
Go to the “Performance” section.
Click “Search results” > “Date” > “Compare.”
Select “Compare last 3 months to previous period” or “Compare last 3 months year over year,” depending on your audit frequency.
Click on the “Pages” and sort by “Clicks difference.”
Click any URL in the first column.
Click “Queries” and sort again by “Clicks difference” to see the search terms causing the biggest traffic drops.
Now search for those queries (keywords) in Google to evaluate what may have caused the decrease.
Search Console is an easy and free tool for diagnosing organic traffic drops. Click image to enlarge.
Even climbing one position on the first page will likely increase traffic substantially. Optimizing the page copy by adding more keywords and creating more internal backlinks will likely help.
To identify these pages, use Search Console’s Performance section again.
Click “Search results” > “Average position” on top of the graph.
Click the filter option (inverted triangle) and select “Position.”
Click “Filter by Position” for “Greater than” 2.
Sort the queries by the number of clicks to see the top (and bottom) performers. Again, a page that climbs even one position will experience a huge traffic increase.
In Search Console, filter “Average Position” for “Greater than” 2. Click image to enlarge.
Identify and improve pages with external backlinks
Pages with many backlinks but few searchable keywords often fail to rank. For those pages, research keywords to help Google understand them.
Semrush’s backlink research tool can identify top-linked pages:
Log in to Semrush and click “Backlink Analytics” under “Link Building.”
Paste your URL and select “Root domain.”
Click the “Indexed pages” tab.
The report is sorted by the number of linked domains for each page on your site. Heavily linked pages are easier to improve, rankings-wise.
Use Search Console for ranking opportunities, or run keyword research tools to find new queries.
Semrush’s backlink research tool can identify top-linked pages. Click image to enlarge.
Now, what about the content of the actual calls? Well, you can use that, too.
Let dive into how you can use call analysis to further inform your strategy.
How To Analyze Your Call Data
The insights you collect from customer phone interactions can have a game-changing impact on your business.
But you want to make sure the effort required to dig into those calls is worth it for your team.
This is where AI and machine learning technology can be utilized effectively to streamline your process and save time.
For example, Conversation Intelligence is an AI-powered tool by CallRail that constantly records, transcribes, and analyzes each inbound and outbound call.
With transcriptions that have near-human level accuracy, Conversation Intelligence goes a step further by spotting keywords, tagging calls automatically, and qualifying leads with powerful automation rules.
Plus, with multi-conversation insights, you can easily transform countless conversations into actionable insights at scale.
Not only does this analysis unlock deeper insights to help you catch customer trends and spot long-term shifts, but it also tells you what you should focus on in your content.
2. Website Form Submissions
Another effective way to gather essential audience insights is through website form tracking.
When this data is paired with deeper analytics, you can gain a clear understanding of what drives the most qualified leads for your business.
With Form Tracking, you can find out exactly which ad or keyword made someone click “submit” on your form.
Launched last year by CallRail, this tool allows you to build custom forms or integrate existing ones, pairing the data with inbound call conversions for a holistic view of your marketing efforts.
Combining Call Tracking And Form Tracking
Leads often connect with businesses through multiple channels, so focusing on just one source isn’t really enough.
By using Call Tracking and Form Tracking together, you get a comprehensive overview of your leads’ entire customer journey.
Both of these tools essentially work by installing a single line of JavaScript code on your site, which captures and relays information about each of your leads back to CallRail.
You can easily evaluate the various campaigns that you’re running, like paid ads, social media posts, email nurture campaigns, etc. – all of which could be opportunities to incorporate tracking numbers and links to your forms.
Using both a tracking number and a form tracking link gives your leads the option to choose how they prefer to contact your business.
And as they reach out, you’ll be able to measure which campaigns and which conversion type – calls or forms – is getting the best results.
3. Customer Feedback & Surveys
If you really want a deep dive into the minds of your customers, surveys are an incredibly effective way to get feedback directly from the source.
Surveys allow you to ask your users targeted questions and receive precise answers about their preferences, pain points, and expectations.
You can then leverage this comprehensive data to guide your marketing strategy and fill any content gaps you may have.
Discover the type of content your customers prefer, the topics they are most interested in, and how they like to consume information.
Once they point out areas where they feel your content is lacking or what they would like to see more of, you can then fill the gaps in your strategy to give them what they want.
Integrating Customer Feedback Into Your Content
Understanding your audience can help you tailor your content to better meet their needs and preferences.
Here are some tips for how you can effectively integrate customer feedback into your content creation process:
Create a Feedback Loop: Ask your audience to rate the usefulness, quality, and relevance of your content to gain a clear picture of where you can improve. Then establish a system where their feedback continuously informs your content. Regularly conduct surveys and update your strategy based on the latest insights.
Prioritize High-Impact Content: Identify the topics and formats that resonate most with your audience and prioritize them in your content calendar. For example, if customers indicate a preference for video tutorials over written guides, focus more on creating video content. This ensures that you’re always aligned with what your audience finds most valuable.
Test and Iterate: After publishing content based on customer feedback, monitor its performance to see if it meets the intended goals. Use analytics to track engagement, shares, and other metrics. Be prepared to refine your content based on ongoing feedback and performance data.
Communicate Changes: Let your audience know that their feedback has been heard and implemented. This not only builds trust but also encourages more customers to participate in future surveys.
Unlock Higher Search Rankings With CallRail’s Data Solutions
Google is constantly changing its algorithms to produce higher quality search results for users, which presents numerous challenges for marketers and website owners.
Between the upcoming phase-out of third-party cookies and the recent core update, the search engine is cracking down heavily on content it deems as unhelpful.
That’s why it’s time to take a user-first approach to your content strategy.
By leveraging first- and zero-party data through methods like call tracking, form submissions, and customer surveys, you can create high-quality, relevant content that meets your audience’s needs and boosts your Google rankings.
CallRail’s suite of tools makes it easier to gather and analyze this data, helping you refine your marketing strategy and drive sustainable growth.
Ready to see the impact for yourself?
Try CallRail free for 14 days and start transforming your data into actionable strategies for higher ranking content.
In this guide, you will learn about alternative text (known as alt text): what it is, why it is important for on-page SEO, how to use it correctly, and more.
It’s often overlooked, but every image on your website should have alt text. More information is better, and translating visual information into text is important for search engine bots attempting to understand your website and users with screen readers.
Alt text is one more source of information that relates ideas and content together on your website.
This practical and to-the-point guide contains tips and advice you can immediately use to improve your website’s image SEO and accessibility.
What Is Alt Text?
Alternative text (or alt text) – also known as the alt attribute or the alt tag (which is not technically correct because it is not a tag) – is simply a piece of text that describes the image in the HTML code.
What Are The Uses Of Alt Text?
The original function of alt text was simply to describe an image that could not be loaded.
Many years ago, when the internet was much slower, alt text would help you know the content of an image that was too heavy to be loaded in your browser.
Today, images rarely fail to load – but if they do, then it is the alt text you will see in place of an image.
Screenshot from Search Engine Journal, May 2024
Alt text also helps search engine bots understand the image’s content and context.
More importantly, alt text is critical for accessibility and for people using screen readers:
Alt text helps people with disabilities (for example, using screen readers) learn about the image’s content.
Of course, like every element of SEO, it is often misused or, in some cases, even abused.
Let’s now take a closer look at why alt text is important.
Why Alt Text Is Important
The web and websites are a very visual experience. It is hard to find a website without images or graphic elements.
That’s why alt text is very important.
Alt text helps translate the image’s content into words, thus making the image accessible to a wider audience, including people with disabilities and search engine bots that are not clever enough yet to fully understand every image, its context, and its meaning.
Why Alt Text Is Important For SEO
Alt text is an important element of on-page SEO optimization.
Proper alt text optimization makes your website stand a better chance of ranking in Google image searches.
Depending on your website’s niche and specificity, Google image search traffic may play a huge role in your website’s overall success.
For example, in the case of ecommerce websites, users very often start their search for products with a Google image search instead of typing the product name into the standard Google search.
Screenshot from search for [Garmin forerunner], May 2024
Google and other search engines may display fewer product images (or not display them at all) if you fail to take care of their alt text optimization.
Without proper image optimization, you may lose a lot of potential traffic and customers.
Why Alt Text Is Important For Accessibility
Visibility in Google image search is very important, but there is an even more important consideration: Accessibility.
Fortunately, in recent years, more focus has been placed on accessibility (i.e., making the web accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities and/or using screen readers).
Suppose the alt text of your images actually describes their content instead of, for example, stuffing keywords. In that case, you are helping people who cannot see this image better understand it and the content of the entire web page.
Let’s say one of your web pages is an SEO audit guide that contains screenshots from various crawling tools.
Would it not be better to describe the content of each screenshot instead of placing the same alt text of “SEO audit” into every image?
Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Alt Text Examples
Finding many good and bad examples of alt text is not difficult. Let me show you a few, sticking to the above example with an SEO audit guide.
Good Alt Text Examples
So, our example SEO guide contains screenshots from tools such as Google Search Console and Screaming Frog.
Some good examples of alt text may include:
Tip: It is also a good idea to take care of the name of your file. Using descriptive file names is not a ranking factor, but I recommend this as a good SEO practice.
Bad And/Or Spammy Alt Text Examples
I’ve also seen many examples of bad alt text use, including keyword stuffing or spamming.
Here is how you can turn the above good examples into bad examples:
As you can see, the above examples do not provide any information on what these images actually show.
You can also find examples and even more image SEO tips on Google Search Central.
Common Alt Text Mistakes
Stuffing keywords in the alt text is not the only mistake you can make.
Here are a few examples of common alt text mistakes:
Failure to use the alt text or using empty alt text.
Using the same alt text for different images.
Using very general alt text that does not actually describe the image. For example, using the alt text of “dog” on the photo of a dog instead of describing the dog in more detail, its color, what it is doing, what breed it is, etc.
Automatically using the name of the file as the alt text – which may lead to very unfriendly alt text, such as “googlesearchconsole,” “google-search-console,” or “photo2323,” depending on the name of the file.
Alt Text Writing Tips
And finally, here are the tips on how to write correct alt text so that it actually fulfills its purpose:
Do not stuff keywords into the alt text. Doing so will not help your web page rank for these keywords.
Describe the image in detail, but still keep it relatively short. Avoid adding multiple sentences to the alt text.
Use your target keywords, but in a natural way, as part of the image’s description. If your target keyword does not fit into the image’s description, don’t use it.
Don’t use text on images. All text should be added in the form of HTML code.
Don’t write, “this is an image of.” Google and users know that this is an image. Just describe its content.
Make sure you can visualize the image’s content by just reading its alt text. That is the best exercise to make sure your alt text is OK.
How To Troubleshoot Image Alt Text
Now you know all the best practices and common mistakes of alt text. But how do you check what’s in the alt text of the images of a website?
You can analyze the alt text in the following ways:
Inspecting an element (right-click and select Inspect when hovering over an image) is a good way to check if a given image has alt text.
However, if you want to check that in bulk, I recommend one of the below two methods.
Screenshot from Web Developer Extension, Chrome by author, May 2024
Next, open the page whose images you want to audit.
Click on Web Developer and navigate to Images > Display Alt Attributes. This way, you can see the content of the alt text of all images on a given web page.
Screenshot from Web Developer Extension, Chrome by author, May 2024
How To Find And Fix Missing Alt Text
To check the alt text of the images of the entire website, use a crawler like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.
Crawl the site, navigate to the image report, and review the alt text of all website images, as shown in the video guide below.
You can also export only images that have missing alt text and start fixing those issues.
Alt Text May Not Seem Like A Priority, But It’s Important
Every source of information about your content has value. Whether it’s for vision-impaired users or bots, alt text helps contextualize the images on your website.
While it’s only a ranking factor for image search, everything you do to help search engines understand your website can potentially help deliver more accurate results. Demonstrating a commitment to accessibility is also a critical component of modern digital marketing.
FAQ
What is the purpose of alt text in HTML?
Alternative text, or alt text, serves two main purposes in HTML. Its primary function is to provide a textual description of an image if it cannot be displayed. This text can help users understand the image content when technical issues prevent it from loading or if they use a screen reader due to visual impairments. Additionally, alt text aids search engine bots in understanding the image’s subject matter, which is critical for SEO, as indexing images correctly can enhance a website’s visibility in search results.
Can alt text improve website accessibility?
Yes, alt text is vital for website accessibility. It translates visual information into descriptive text that can be read by screen readers used by users with visual impairments. By accurately describing images, alt text ensures that all users, regardless of disability, can understand the content of a web page, making the web more inclusive and accessible to everyone.
![Screenshot from search for [Garmin forerunner]](https://ecommerceedu.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/alt-text-serp-790.png)
