Do you know why SEO audit is important? It saves you money by showing you areas of your marketing campaign that need special attention. Additionally, it offers a unique opportunity to improve your site’s performance.
SEO is an important marketing strategy every serious business must consider deploying. It is cost-effective and can place your brand where prospects can find you, become familiar with your brand, and confidently recommend it to others.
Here, we will discuss the importance of SEO audits in any online marketing process. After reading, you’ll understand why you cannot do without SEO.
What Is SEO Audit?
SEO audit is a process designed to evaluate a website’s performance and make adjustments that can positively impact the website’s growth. SEO audit is a technical process. It also requires patience and attention to detail.
When conducting an audit, an SEO expert will consider different parts or elements of the website to understand how it’s performing in search engines. A comprehensive audit report is generated at the end of every SEO audit.
Businesses that hire SEO experts for their website audit will get a report of the findings and information on fixing the issue holding back the website. The report must be comprehensive, easy to understand, detailed, and have no fluff.
Google uses over 200+ ranking factors to determine where to place a website in SERPs. An example is the quality of your backlink.
A robust SEO audit conducted by an experienced search engine optimization expert would entail checking the quality of your links. Assuming there are low-quality backlinks that may do more harm than good to your website, the SEO expert would recommend disavowing them.
While auditing your website, a search engine optimization expert will evaluate all the key elements that can impact your site’s performance.
What Are The Types of SEO Audits?
Various types of SEO audits exist. Search engine optimization experts grouped SEO audits into three categories.
Check them out below:
1. Technical SEO audit
2. On-page SEO audit
3. Off-page SEO audit
4. Local SEO audit
When you hire an agency for your SEO site audit, you can inform them about the area you want to focus the audit. You can focus on the technical, on-page (on-site), off-page (off-site), and local SEO audit.
Conducting a complete SEO audit is more advisable. That way, you won’t skip any issue holding back your website. You’ll even discover more opportunities you haven’t taken advantage of to improve your ranking, traffic, and conversion rate.
Now, let’s discuss the various types of SEO website audits:
1: Technical SEO audit:
The technical search engine optimization audit focuses on a website’s technical aspect. We’re talking about the schema markup, mobile-friendliness, etc.
During a technical SEO site audit, an expert will thoroughly check your site to know if you adhere to SEO best practices. If you have been outsourcing your SEO campaigns, an audit will show if the people handling your have followed SEO best practices.
Every website owner understands that Google respects and honors hard-working website owners. The search engine giant also has rules it expects every website to abide by. And any website that breaks any of the rules will be penalized.
Without further ado, here are the aspects of the technical SEO considered during a website’s audit.
– Crawlability
– Indexation
– Quality of backlinks
– Schema markup
– Site’s mobile-friendliness
– The site’s mobile-friendliness
A Handy Tip: All these technical aspects of your website are vital and can have a massive impact on your site’s performance on search engines. How? Here’s what you need to know.
Backlinks and mobile-friendliness are two critical Google ranking factors. In other words, Google will consider them when deciding where to rank your website.
Making your website mobile-friendly is a very crucial step. Today, more people surf the internet via mobile phones (64%) than desktops (35%). People love the convenience mobile phones bring. A majority of people even order products via their mobile devices.
What’s mobile-friendliness? This refers to how well the site is designed and optimized to load on a mobile device. A mobile-friendly website would load on a mobile phone like on a desktop.
In other words, visitors who access your website via mobile devices don’t have to zoom in or strain their eyes to view your content. The page should display perfectly on all mobile devices and screen sizes. That is how a mobile-friendly website is.
Your website’s crawlability and indexation are vital, too. Crawlability focuses on how easy it is for Google bots (Google crawlers) to find, read, and understand your content. Of course, if Google crawler cannot understand your content, it can’t index it. It won’t even know which category to place him on the web.
Let’s move on to the next SEO audit.
2: On-site SEO audit:
An on-page audit is conducted on the website’s content or elements you can control. It evaluates the quality of the content you have on your website pages to know if they’re up to the required standard.
Here are the elements experts consider when conducting an on-site SEO audit.
– Title tags
– Meta description
– Headings
– Internal links
– Quality of the content
– Keyword placement
– Image optimization
3: Off-site SEO audit:
An off-site search engine optimization audit involves an audit of elements outside a website that influence its performance in SERPs. In other words, the SEO expert will look into activities outside the website that have or can significantly impact search ranking, organic traffic, and brand reputation.
Here are the elements considered in off-site SEO:
– Link building
– Guest blogging (a link-building strategy)
– Social media marketing (Audit the different social media channels)
4: Local SEO audit:
Local SEO auditing involves analyzing the popularity of your website in your location. If local customers search for you online, will they find you? That’s one of the things local search engine optimization audits consider.
So, here are the elements considered when conducting a local search engine optimization audit:
– Local citation
– GBP (Google Business Profile)
– Local keyword targeting
– Social media engagement (across all platforms)
Why SEO Audit Is Important For Your Website
Businesses use financial audits to uncover undeclared profits, losses, and thefts and have proper knowledge of the firm’s actual performance. The report from the financial audit can help decision-makers understand how the business is being run.
SEO audit seeks to achieve the same thing. It helps you uncover your website’s hidden growth potential. So, it’s a necessary process every business owner should take their websites through before kick-starting their SEO campaigns.
Before building a house, you have to inspect the land, prepare it, and lay the foundation of the building. The foundation has to be solid to hold the fittings in place.
People only build houses on a foundation they are confident is solid enough. Nobody builds a house on a faulty foundation. Similarly, launching an SEO campaign without a thorough website audit is counterproductive.
What does search engine optimization audit do? How important is it for your business? Here’s what you need to know.
1: Exposes your website’s SEO foundation:
An audit involves a thorough check of the different elements of a website. The elements in question influence your website’s performance in search engines.
When you conduct an audit on your website, you’ll be exposed to the SEO foundation that has been laid. In other words, you’ll discover if the SEO agencies you have been outsourcing your projects to adhere to SEO best practices.
2: Uncover and fix technical SEO issues:
Technical SEO site audit should be an ongoing process. Why? It will help you uncover the technical issues holding back your website.
Quickly, here are the areas experts will focus on when auditing a website’s technical SEO:
– Your site’s mobile-friendliness:
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, forget about ranking on Google search engines for your target search terms. Google prioritizes websites that are mobile-friendly.
You can find out if your website is mobile-friendly via a technical audit. Once discovered, an SEO expert will fix the issue and make your website mobile-friendly. Once this is done, you’ll notice an improvement in your search ranking and traffic. You’ll start getting more traffic via mobile searches.
– Your website’s speed:
Do you know how fast your website loads? You may be unaware when cookies have been stored on your device. So, for you and others who visit the site often, it will load faster on your device.
Your new visitors won’t enjoy the same loading step as you if your website is slow. Most visitors may not have the patience to wait for your website to load. Instead, they may prefer to visit your competitors.
A technical SEO website audit will help you uncover your website speed. The SEO specialist will use varied tools, parameters, and techniques to test your site’s speed and improve the accuracy of the results.
– Duplicate content:
Duplicate content is detrimental to Google and your users. It affects user experience and SEO performance.
Google has challenges ranking websites that have duplicate content. In most cases, the search engine giant might rank the poor-quality content out of the duplicates.
Technical auditing is an excellent strategy for uncovering duplicate content on a website and fixing the problem so it doesn’t affect your site’s performance in SERPs.
– Broken Links:
With an audit, you can identify broken links in your website and fix them before they create a terrible user experience for your website and negatively affect its ranking.
– Identify and fix security challenges:
Audit can help you identify and fix security threats like malware, SSL, etc. It will help you uncover ways to improve your website’s security and keep hackers at bay.
– Fix page crawl issues:
Making your website crawlable is a critical process. Google’s search engine won’t understand your content if it can’t crawl and read. And if it doesn’t understand your content, there’s no way it will rank your content.
Causes of page crawl issues include broken links, incorrect DNS settings, and others.
3: Comprehensive competition analysis:
Search engine optimization is highly competitive. That’s why some of the sites you find on the top pages of search results are no longer there. Some have dropped a bit.
Competition analysis will help you identify opportunities you can explore to outrank your competitors. It will unravel opportunities you haven’t exploited to grow your website.
4: Measurability:
Through an SEO audit, experts can help you set up the scene where you can measure diverse metrics and keep tabs on your site’s progress. You’ll have a sound idea about your website’s “before and after” conditions to gauge how much it has improved.
Conclusion
You can see why SEO audit is important. You can see the benefits your website will gain from a thorough SEO audit conducted by an expert.
An audit will help identify issues hindering a website’s growth online. This makes creating an effective SEO plan to take your website to the next level easier.
Furthermore, you can’t implement an SEO strategy without properly auditing the entire website. Similarly, you cannot build a house when the foundation is faulty.
Are You Looking For An Expert For Your SEO Audit? BitChip Digital can help you. We are a digital marketing company established to help businesses grow online and improve their profits.
