You value your health, so you visit the doctor and the dentist regularly to check in and make sure every part of your body is in good shape and working well. If something is wrong, you learn what you can do to fix it.
Your website is no different. It’s important to regularly check up on your site to make sure everything is functioning and determine if anything is not working so that you can repair it. After all, you pour so much time and energy into your business. The last thing you want is a few website errors keeping users from staying on your site and turning into leads.
An SEO audit is a check-up that reveals how your website is performing. Without an audit, it can be challenging, if not impossible, to find out if anything is wrong with your site. Just like you may not know what maintenance your car needs until you take it to a mechanic, you likely won’t realize what updates your website needs without an SEO audit.
There are hundreds of ranking signals that search engines evaluate to determine where your website should rank. An SEO audit reviews many of these ranking signals to see what is working well, what might need some improvement, and what issues need immediate attention. An SEO audit can reveal errors like broken links, slow loading times, duplicate content, and many, many more.
There are a wide variety of factors that can slow down or impede the performance of your website. An SEO audit evaluates things like page speed, title length, redirects page size, and other items that can cause issues in how your website performs. A poor performing site can cause visitors to leave without completing any action and can prevent you from driving organic traffic to your site, which means you could be missing out on potential leads and revenue.
In addition to taking a look at the technical side of your website, an SEO audit reviews the content on your website to determine what keywords you’re ranking for and whether you are correctly using those keywords. From your page title to the body copy to the meta description, every piece of content plays a part in determining where your site ranks in search engine results. An SEO audit gives you a clear idea of where and how you can improve your content to rank higher.
An SEO audit can also provide information about your competition, such as what keywords they use, how mobile-friendly their site is, and their content strategy. With a better understanding of what your competition is doing right, you can build out a more successful strategy for your business.
Once an SEO audit has revealed your website’s weaknesses, you can create a plan for turning them into strengths. You can prioritize issues based on their importance, for example, focusing first on errors that impact the usability of your site before working on improving and updating your content and putting your keywords to work.
