How do you grow online? Ask a hundred different marketers, and you’re likely to receive a hundred different answers. Yet lump the answers into groups, and you’ll likely start to see patterns:
- Search engine optimization
- Social media
- Paid advertising
The basis for everything you do online starts with a website. And if it’s not performing for you, you’re losing valuable sales. How do you know? An SEO audit can show you how well your search engine optimization techniques are working and if they are helping you achieve your online goals.
Why You Need an SEO Audit
Search engine optimization involves creating a website that ranks well in the search engines. Because Google is the biggest, with 92 percent of the market share, marketers pay attention to what Google wants. The other search engines may have slight variances but, in general, will yield to Google’s approach.
Google uses 200 ranking factors when deciding where your site will rank on a specific search term. They include domain factors, user interaction, brand signals, and on- and off-site webspam factors, to name a few.
An SEO audit gives you a picture of how your website is currently performing and provides an indicator of whether you’re using best practices to achieve results with your online marketing. It can tell you the structural problems with your website performance and where your greatest weaknesses are, allowing you to make positive changes that directly influence how well you rank in Google.
SEO audits are similar to diagnostic tests on your vehicle. A professional uses sophisticated tools and programs to see exactly how your vehicle operates. It can pinpoint problems and alert them to fixes that will give the vehicle better performance.
When you hire a digital marketing company to perform an SEO audit, they know the right tools to use to dig into your site and find the issues and have the knowledge and skills to fix the problems correctly the first time.
What an SEO Audit Looks At
A good SEO audit dives deep into all the components that help you rank well in Google. It starts with determining your crawlability, looks at the overall structure of your content, checks tags and codes, and determines how well your site is structured for mobile. Good SEO audits start by gaining a general picture of a site’s overall health, then homes in on the problem areas to find where tweaks will make the biggest impact. Think of an SEO audit as a three-step strategy.
- First, it looks at your on-site components to see how well they impact your overall SEO.
- Second, it analyzes your off-site SEO to see how well you’re connected to other quality sites.
- Third, it determines how effective your content strategy is to see if you’re utilizing keywords effectively and if you’ve built authority in your brand.
Get those three things right, and you’ll quickly move up in ranking in Google.
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What’s Involved in an SEO Audit?
When performing an SEO audit, this is a checklist of items to look at to ensure everything is accounted for and checked. It’s a step-by-step process. But you do need to know what to look for. Crawl your website—it starts by thoroughly looking at your entire site and seeing what components are working for you … and which ones aren’t. This shows where your strengths are in ranking well in Google and where work needs to be performed.
Determine Ranking Status
You can’t be found on Google if you don’t rank well for your keywords. The audit may start with thoroughly analyzing your brand and determining your top keywords. It will then see where you’re placed and compare you to your competition to find where we can gain the most ground. An audit will also look for any indexing problems. If your primary URL isn’t ranking, it’s important to discover why and fix the issues.
On-Page Checks
On-page checks will help ensure every page on your website has elements that help it rank well. This involves looking at both the content of the page and the source code. While individual on-page items aren’t as valuable as they once were, having them in place still provides you with a high-quality strategy that ensures you’re on track with your overall online marketing strategy.
Duplicate Content
Remember the days when you could rank better the more times you listed your keywords? Now, duplicate content can get you banned. Your site should be analyzed to ensure you haven’t used the same content multiple times between pages. Don’t regurgitate copy. Write it in new ways to dive deeper into your subject matter.
Site Speed
You only have a few seconds to make a first impression. Visitors leave quickly if a site doesn’t load quickly enough or they don’t find what they’re looking for. Check all elements that contribute to site speed. This can be as simple as changing video or image size or moving to a faster hosting service.
Backlinks
This is about finding links pointing to your site and testing them for authority and trustworthiness. You need to find legitimate partnerships where people are talking about you with authority rather than just buying a link, as was popular a few years ago.
Fixing Broken Links
As you walk through the different links on your site, both internal and external must connect with a source. Any link that leads to an error is considered broken. The more you have, the more your site is viewed as out of date.
Look for Opportunities
When you hire someone who performs SEO audits frequently, they know what works and what doesn’t. They understand how to prioritize tasks to help move the needle on future results. They see weaknesses as opportunities.
Is an SEO Audit in Your Future?
If you haven’t performed an SEO audit on your website, you probably aren’t ranking as well as you could. Things change rapidly in the digital world. Google changes its algorithms frequently, which can make all the difference in where your content ranks. If you want to rank well in Google, and have a marketing strategy in place that utilizes organic traffic for higher growth, schedule your SEO audit today.
