What is an SEO Audit?
As a business owner, you have created your website, invested hours on the design, and maybe even spent money to try and increase the traffic it receives. After all that time and effort, you still might not be experiencing the results you expected, and your website isn’t receiving as much attention as anticipated.
One key way to solve the issues you’re having is by doing an SEO website audit. SEO audits can improve your website’s search engine ranking to bring in more traffic, potential customers, and revenue.
Now before you perform an SEO audit, let’s start with the basics: what is an SEO audit?
What is an SEO audit?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a practice used to drive traffic towards your website by allowing it to be easily found on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than traffic that is either paid or direct.
An SEO audit is a process that reviews your website’s ability to be found by a search engine such as Google. Your website may be well-designed, easy to use, and informative, but if a search engine cannot find and understand your website, it will not gain any attention.
What an SEO audit will not do
When a website for your business isn’t performing at its fullest potential, an SEO audit will provide information on what is and isn’t working well. You can then use that data as a foundation for how to improve your campaign and what may need changing. Although it is beneficial in determining what issues your website is facing and provides plenty of knowledge, there are a few things that an SEO audit will not do:
An SEO audit is specific to website errors, readability and indexability. However, it is not a complete analysis of your digital footprint; for example, it will not analyze your social media accounts, Google My Business listing or find spelling errors on your site. A good company can provide both an SEO audit and a “Digital audit,” covering your digital footprint throughout the internet.
Although it will find the issues with your website, it will not provide step-by-step instructions on how to address each concern, the agency running the audit should be able to fix the problems for you.
An SEO audit is limited to providing you with information rather than making the changes. However, using a service or professional to conduct an SEO audit will give you helpful insight into the content, technical issues, user experience, and adjustments.
What will an SEO audit reveal?
An SEO audit is essential in identifying the foundational issues that may be impacting your organic growth. With increased awareness of your website’s problems, it is possible to modify and improve your website to resolve these issues.
An SEO audit will generally analyze the following:
1. Website structure
The structure of your website is the organization of your pages and the ability to navigate the site. There are various ways that the structure can impact your SEO visibility. For this reason, the most critical part of SEO is to optimize your site for revenue, traffic, and conversion. An SEO audit can tell you about your website structure, including the performance rates, mobile viewing design, key content, internal linking, and URL structure.
Performance and speed are critical factors in the overall website structure. If users experience a slow website or unresponsive pages, they will likely leave the site, resulting in a drop in traffic and conversions. An SEO audit will also dictate how well the design for the mobile site is performing. Consumers enjoy the convenience of being able to search for information on a mobile device. If your website is not designed correctly for mobile use, this can damage the user experience and SEO. Professionals conducting the audit will share what content, visual elements, and designs impact your SEO performance and what needs to be changed.
Content and keywords are fundamental to SEO and should be an essential part of your website. This information will depict your target audience’s understanding, search behaviour, and relevant topics if done correctly. An audit will reveal if your content is performing as it should.
Internal linking is the ability to navigate within site without any issues. It not only helps users and search engines to discover new pages, but it creates a flow between your site’s information. The URL structure can also impact your SEO, and so it should be easy to read by search engines and the user. Overall, an SEO audit will provide in-depth information on the website structure so you can make changes as necessary.
2. User experience
A significant factor that impacts SEO is the user experience. The user’s ability to navigate your site and find the information they seek with no issues is critical to having good SEO. The bounce rate is the percentage of users who will visit a site and leave instead of searching within the webpage. This rate is important since you’d want visitors of your webpage to look for as much information as possible, and search engines penalize websites with a high bounce rate. In general, the user should navigate through your webpage, whether using a desktop or mobile, with ease. The basics of a good user experience include:
Information is easy to find
Navigation is intuitive and straightforward
Click through’s are set with the user expectations
A bad user experience can damage your SEO. So it is vital to ensure that consumers can use your website with no problems and that information should be readily available.
3. Gaps in content and opportunities for improvements
A content gap analysis will help to identify what’s lacking and thus the opportunity for improvement. An SEO audit of your content will reveal missing pieces that could align with the stages of the buyer’s journey. The audit will typically include looking into blog articles, social media content, landing pages, and web pages. Finding what holes there are in your content, and deciding how to fix them, will positively impact your overall SEO.
4. Technical SEO
The technical side of an SEO audit focuses on the technical requirements of search engines. The purpose is to improve organic rankings and thus create a website that is more search engine optimized. Some technical aspects included are the website’s speed, crawlability, duplicate content, keywords, and security.
Speed is one of the top-ranking factors as webpages that load faster will create an optimal experience. Crawlability refers to robots used by search engines that “crawl” through the content on your site. An SEO audit will let you know if your site has an excellent internal linking structure or if it needs improvements.
An additional feature of a technical SEO audit is the ability to search for duplicate content. Search engines can get confused with these kinds of issues, and you may not even realize your website is experiencing them as they may not be readily visible to a human viewer. An audit will make you aware of any current duplicates and help to prevent them from happening in the future.
The traffic to your website may reflect the quality of the keywords that lead consumers to your site. It is essential to focus on what your business can offer and how consumers will be searching for it. It is better to rank first for a keyword with a hundred searches than to position yourself in the middle of a keyword with thousands of searches. For that reason, SEO audits can provide an analysis of keywords currently used and their effectiveness.
Finally, when a website is technically optimized, it is a secure website that can guarantee users’ privacy. Audits will also provide a ranking of how secure the website is and potential unsafe issues.
5. Marketplace insights on competitors
Performing an analysis of your competitors is a great way to see what is and isn’t working for competing businesses. However, it’s also important not to get caught up in what another company is doing and lose focus on what your business can uniquely provide.
An SEO audit will allow you to determine what keywords are too competitive, opportunities for new keywords and links, and the type of content that performs well. With this information, you can adjust your keywords based on what your competitors are doing or not doing. You can also identify gaps in the market and capitalize on any absence of keywords. It will also provide you with insight into the marketplace and how you compare among competitors.
6. On-page and off-site SEO
On-page SEO will look at your website’s content, keywords, and other on-page elements. In contrast, off-site SEO looks into the external relations to your site to determine the value and level of trust of a website. Although they are very different, both elements are essential to any SEO campaign.
An on-page SEO may include an audit of HTML improvements, keywords, page content, and internal links. This audit is similar to the analysis of the website structure and technical SEO. Analyzing these areas will ensure your website is functioning correctly and that it includes keywords perfect for search engines.
At the heart of off-page SEO are backlinks, the other places on the internet that link back to your website. This is likely from various areas such as other websites, social media pages, or listing directories. This audit will help your company know what content is specific to your local region and how established your presence is throughout the internet in general.
Takeaway
With all of this information, you should have a much better understanding of what an SEO audit consists of. The massive range of analyses often determines a fix for broken parts of your website that you could never discover without an SEO audit.
FAQs
How often to perform an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is performed mainly for marketing and revenue purposes, allowing you to improve your performance and make changes as needed. If you are looking to keep your website up to date, you should conduct an SEO audit frequently. As a rough guide, complete the audit at the beginning of a new project or every quarter.
How long does it take to do an SEO audit?
There are a few factors to consider when a company is performing an SEO audit: What is the depth of the audit, and how simple or complex is the website? The answers to these questions will dictate how long the audit will take.
Should I hire a professional to do an SEO audit?
While you can perform an SEO audit yourself, there are many perks to hiring a professional service. If you don’t have any experience with SEO, then a service will be your best bet. While the company performs the SEO audit and even implements the necessary changes, you’ll have more time to focus on your business.
How much does it cost to hire a service to do an SEO audit?
The cost of an SEO audit for your website is dependent on several factors. The size of your business will usually dictate how large and complex your website is. A more extensive site will require more time and thus will cost more.
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