What is an SEO audit for? How important is it? Not many business website owners understand why they need to audit a site. Website creation is not the end goal. The goal is to bring in more wealth to the business and, one of the first steps is to get the website ranked well in search engines. In order to do that, the crucial task is to have the site quality well maintained. The majority of website owners know how important SEO is, but they may not be aware of how an audit can significantly improve site performances.
Regular SEO audit is essential for almost all e-commerce business owners mainly due to a large number of products, their images, and related links. Also important to any other business site due to the fact that search engine algorithms change frequently and SEO strategies can become outdated over time.
Every day, thousands of competitive resources are created. Your site will get left behind if you don't take the SEO techniques seriously. I hope this post will help you learn a little more about the SEO audit, make sure that it is essential for your business, and avoid any serious problems.
What Is An SEO Audit? What Are the Main Tasks?
In order to understand what is an SEO audit, let’s break this concept down into two easily understandable ones.
- The concept of the audit is well known to business owners and it means an independent assessment of an object or process for compliance with requirements.
- SEO is one of the internet marketing channels for attracting visitors from search engines.
If we combine these two meanings, it turns out that an SEO site audit is an analysis of the resource for compliance with the requirements of search engines. To put it more simply, with the help of a site audit, you can find errors that complicate the promotion in search engines.
Site owners need to realize that a quality audit goes beyond just listing errors and problems. The task of a high-quality and correct website audit is:
- Find and analyze all site errors.
- Come up with a list of recommendations on what and how to fix.
- Provide technical specifications for a programmer.
As a result, the client should receive extensive recommendations, the implementation of which will lead to increased traffic, improved conversion, and indexing for key queries. If you are in doubt about the necessity to audit your website, then below you will find some reasons why you should use this service.
What Is An SEO Audit For? Why Do You Need It?
Whether you worked on search engine optimization yourself or with the help of professionals, there is always a risk that you may have missed something. As the saying goes, two eyes are better than one. In this case, the audit will become the second eye, spotting a few things that were done wrong or that were missed.
Taking a fresh look at your SEO helps to improve everything you've implemented before and filled in any gaps. Even if you hire two SEO specialists and ask them to check how everything works, there is always a chance that they will find completely different flaws. This is why an SEO audit will be indispensable.
Still, no SEO audit turns out perfectly. Even when everything seems to make logical sense as far as the SEO audit is concerned, in practice, the webpage may not rank in search engine as good as you expected. Things can turn out differently and this is normal. Continuous trials and errors will improve the website ranking positions and an SEO audit will make sure things are going in the right direction.
What An SEO Audit Will Look For
Now you understand that audit is required not only for business websites but for any websites that need organic traffic. If you are at a crossroads, the following points will give you some ideas of what an SEO audit will look for and how it will help you add better ranking value to your website.
UX (User Experience)
Search engines will only rank your website when they find it useful to users. If they find your site awkward to navigate, then they won't recommend your site to others, hence will rank at a lower position.
Mobile responsiveness, for example, has become an absolute priority in the past few years. In simple words, if you have a site that works good on desktop but the mobile version is inferior in quality, then it will be unlikely for your site to break into the top.
Another factor that determines a good UX is page loading times. Site speed is crucial when the users decide to discover your product or services for the first time. According to Sean Work for NeilPatel.com, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. If you have slow-loading pages, then this will also slow down your strategy and lengthen the path to the top search results.
With that said, you can check whether your site is mobile-friendly or not by yourself by using Google Mobile-Friendly Test. You can also check your page loading speed using Google Page Speed Insights.
Competitor Analysis
The good thing about SEO audit element is to obtain information on competitors. Learning from your successful competitors is a good strategy, especially in the context of an SEO. Your competitors' strengths and weaknesses are related to the keywords that they use, some of the key pages, meta tags, their own competitors, etc.
As your new SEO strategy, you can use the information, for example use the same keywords that your competitors use and try to create better quality content. That is, if the competitor's performance is better, then you can use these insights to improve yours.
Constant Algorithm Changes
Search engine algorithm changes as frequently as a few times a year, and if you don't keep following the guidelines, you might see some sudden drop in ranking sometimes. The negative impact can apply to some of the related pages, or can apply to the entire operation of the site, which can ultimately lead to a decrease in sales.
But not all website owners have SEO specialists and don't always follow SEO trends or changes in algorithms. It is a painful job to keep an eye out for the changes, revise the entire SEO strategy and make adjustments every time. So what is an SEO audit for? It's for this reason! An audit can become a lifeline in order to timely react to changes in search engine algorithms and create an SEO strategy taking into account new changes.
The Importance of Organic Traffic
You may be able to drive traffic to your site and make sales as much as you want if you use paid advertising campaigns. But as soon as you stop the campaign, the traffic and sales will stop. But if your site is well-optimized for search engines, you can also expect organic sales. It won't be the case if your site has a lot of errors.
SEO Audit and Effective Advertising
Like I mentioned earlier, an SEO audit will check your site usability, including mobile responsiveness, page loading speed, and also to detect broken links. It will be useful to have your site audited before the implementation of a targeted advertisement. Without correcting the shortcomings, your site can drive your visitors away and that will be a marketing budget waste.
The audit will help establish the level of trust via improved usability, hence the loyalty and the improved conversion rates.
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What Is An SEO Audit For? The Final Words
As an afterword, we can note the fact that an SEO audit is a good opportunity to improve the indexing of the resource and eliminate all errors that slow down the promotion. This is the best option to get an independent assessment of your SEO efforts and get a roadmap to your further development.
Finally, we would like to note you need to audit your website regularly, making sure that everything worked as planned. An audit will always reveal what prevents your site from getting to the top!
Author Bio: Jamie Fry
Jamie Fry is a purposeful and promising author. At this moment he is working at writing services review companies, as Pick the writer and Writing Judge and enhances his blogging skills. Confidently goes to his goal. He has a talent for writing original content. The main conviction in his life: «To be the best in the field in which you are developing». Always in search of fresh ideas.
