If you want your website to rank on the first page of Google for your desired search terms, then an SEO audit is essential in helping you reach that goal.
Performing an SEO audit on your website is critical, and it shouldn’t be something you do just once. You should plan on regular SEO audits to monitor your site’s health and diagnose any issues that need immediate attention.
Running an SEO audit is also a key component of keeping your SEO strategy updated and ensuring that your website is optimized based on current algorithms and best practices.
Think of an SEO audit like a check-up, similar to when you take your car into a mechanic. You want to make sure your car stays in good working condition and won’t break down on the side of the highway.
In the same way, you want to make sure that your website is fully functional and won’t frustrate your visitors. You also want to do everything possible to boost your site’s chances of appearing in search engine results pages (also known as SERPs).
An SEO audit covers a whole host of potential issues with your website and provides you with a list of items that need your attention. You can then use these results as a checklist to fix any errors on your site and improve your optimization.
Below are just a few reasons why you should perform an SEO audit on your site ASAP.
Your initial SEO audit can help you see your site’s strengths and weaknesses. Once you know what you’re doing right and what you need to improve, you can start to build out a comprehensive strategy for your SEO.
For example, you can start with fixing the errors your audit uncovered before moving on to the harder work of creating keyword-rich content and building out backlinks.
A comprehensive SEO audit pinpoints technical issues on your site that may prevent you from ranking. Think of a technical SEO audit as a health checkup for your website. Improving your technical SEO allows search engine bots to more easily crawl your website. An audit can identify a wide variety of issues, giving you an opportunity to fix these problems and ensure your site runs smoothly.
Here are just a few of the technical issues an SEO audit can discover:
· Broken images
· No XML sitemap
· Missing or incorrect robots.txt
· Slow page speed
· Duplicate content
· Missing alt tags
· Broken links
· Not mobile friendly
Did you know that Google changes its algorithm every year? Every search engine regularly updates their algorithm to improve their user experience and provide their users with the best possible search results. In order to stay on top of algorithm updates, you need to make changes and adjustments to your site. Otherwise, you may lose all the traffic you worked so hard to get.
That’s where an SEO audit can be a lifesaver. It’s next to impossible to keep up with Google’s algorithm changes on your own, not to mention all the other search engines out there. An SEO audit can provide you with the most up-to-date suggestions for optimizing your website and serve as a checklist for making changes.
An initial SEO audit gives you a baseline for how well your site is functioning and whether your current SEO strategy is working. Once you have that foundation, you can do additional SEO audits after you’ve made changes to see if your score has improved—and to assess what parts of your site still need work.
If you don’t have a clear starting point before you make changes, you won’t be able to measure how successful your changes have been. A regular SEO audit allows you to check in on the health of your site, as well as see how effective your SEO strategy is and whether there’s anything you need to improve.
An SEO audit can also review your content and find where you can improve, such as adding your keywords in your page title or headings or working on your title tags and meta descriptions. Editing and optimizing your content for search engines plays a huge role in helping your website get ranked for your desired keywords.
Your audit can also provide you with suggestions for ways to improve old content on your site to help you improve your rankings. Once you understand how to make your old content better, you can use that as a guide for creating new content that your users will find compelling and helpful.
An SEO audit doesn’t just give you ways to better optimize your website for search engines—it can also help you improve the functionality and experience for your users. And the happier your users are, the more likely they are to spend more time on your site and end up doing business with you.
Ready to get your website on the right track? Start with our Free SEO Audit!
