It is nothing short of distressing when you are assessing your business website’s performance using Google Analytics and you notice that all of the organic traffic that is coming to the website is now down. Or, you may have spotted no movement in the number of leads that your digital marketing or your website is creating. Either way, it’s important to not panic here. SEO does fluctuate rapidly and there are some things that you can do to turn this around! The first step is, with the help of your marketing team, to conduct an SEO audit. This will give you a tailored view of how well your website is doing and will help to put you in a stronger place with your SEO strategy going forward.
Don’t worry if you’ve never conducted an SEO audit before. In this article, you’ll be guided through what one is and how it can help your business to boom!
What is an SEO Audit?
Starting with a clear definition, an SEO audit is the process of evaluating how well your website is optimized for search engines like Google or Bing. The audit aims to identify errors that can prevent your site from ranking well and will aim to help you get more visibility on the search engine results to help attract more business.
It can be a complex process, and with the help of marketing teams like Click Intelligence, it will provide some insights to help your business adapt and move forward.
If you are still on the fence about whether or not to invest in an SEO audit, here are some of the benefits you may be missing out on if you carry on as you are.
Improve Websites Performance
It should come as no surprise that search engine bots enjoy scanning healthy websites, and your website’s performance is one of the major keys to getting the higher rankings you want!
By engaging in an SEO audit, you will flag up any issues that your website has, which could be as simple as slower loading speeds or issues with sitemaps. It’s also worth noting that search engines prefer websites that have top-of-the-range security protocols, so if there are any security issues with your website that you were not aware of, an SEO audit will spot them!
Some of these problems can be fixed immediately, with the help of a trained marketing team but others can be a bit more time-consuming to turn around. So, it’s important not to lose hope if you’ve made all of the changes highlighted by your SEO audit and nothing has changed, as it can take search engines a little bit of time to catch up!
Identify Historic Practices (and get rid of them!)
Search engine optimization seems to be constantly evolving, and this can mean that if you have not engaged in an SEO audit, you may be behind! It used to be common practice to buy links that were directed to your page, and while this is still an important feature in an SEO strategy, these links can now be seen as bad for website search rankings. Indeed, pay-per-click and organic links are now preferred. An SEO audit will help you to potentially identify these historic issues, which will help improve your website’s overall SEO when they are removed.
Also Read: How Frequently Should You Conduct a WordPress Security Audit?
Spot the Best Keywords
To do well on search engines, you need to be ranking well for the trending keywords. However, if you have keywords that aren’t generating traffic, or they aren’t attracting the right kind of traffic, this can be pointless. If you find that your website is ranking well for one keyword and that keyword is generating low traffic, it could be that your marketing team is not researching terminology as they say they are or that, at the current time, the keyword has a low search volume.
Engaging in an SEO audit to better understand the search terms and variations can help you boost your SEO strategy by creating content that is optimized for the targeted keywords,
which will appeal to your website users and potential customers.
Also Read: Website Audit Essentials and Checklist a Business Owner Cannot Ignore
Assess Your SEO Situation
So, you’ve run the audit and you see that you aren’t in the best position with your SEO. The upshot is that you can implement the required changes and can now aim to run SEO audits every few months. This will help you stay ahead of any SEO-related changes and will also help you stay abreast of the constantly changing digital marketing landscape.
Get a Peek at Competitors
It seems sneaky, but when you conduct an SEO audit, you can extend it to your competitors; what is it that they are doing which is pushing them ahead of you? An audit can help you learn this quickly, and allow you to make the reasonable changes to catch up and even overtake them in rankings and customers!
Interesting Reads:
8 Smart Strategies for Boosting the SEO of a WordPress Site
