Ever heard of an SEO or website audit?
If you run a blog or a business website, it's likely you've heard the term before. Many businesses invest in audits all the time but why? What is an SEO audit to begin with?
Don't fret, we'll break it down for you. Read our guide below to understand what an SEO audit is and how it can benefit you:
Let's start by tackling the main question: what is an SEO audit?
It's no secret that SEO covers a wide range of tasks. Ranking high on Google SERP, increasing traffic, and boosting sales and conversions are the end-goals but how do you know all your efforts attain them?
This is where SEO audits come into the picture.
An SEO audit is a lengthy process of checking how well your SEO strategies perform. With an audit, you can determine if you're on the right track. It helps you determine if there's something wrong, if you're mismanaging the budget for SEO, or if your lagging behind the competition.
Audits check three things in general: on-page SEO performance, off-page SEO performance, and technical SEO performance. Your audit determines whether your strategies in all three aspects work or if you need to make adjustments.
How do you conduct an SEO audit?
You can start by using a tool like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Copyscape, PageSpeed Insights, and SERP Simulator. It's also recommended to hire a professional SEO agency to run an audit for you. Outsourcing SEO services like this can go a long in improving your performance and achieving your goals.
Now you know what an SEO audit is and how it works but why should you do it? What benefits can you reap from running the numbers and getting a look at your SEO grade?
There are five major benefits you shouldn't overlook. We're going to go over each one in-depth below. These can make or break your business, after all.
It all starts with understanding where you are right now:
As mentioned, the first benefit is understanding where you are. You should know whether you're one step closer to hitting your goals or if you haven't budged an inch since you launched your SEO campaign. If it's the latter, it means you wasted money for months achieving nothing and you should understand the reasons behind it.
Knowing your position allows you to determine, right off the bat, whether you're on the right track or if you hit a big wall. If you're doing something right, it's time to check the audit's data and see what you did to hit your current status. If the audit shows you're failing, look at the information and pinpoint what issues are holding you back.
An audit can quickly point out your weaknesses. One SEO audit can show you're not getting traffic with the current guest posts you put out. The audit can show which keywords and posts aren't generating traffic or buzz.
It's important to start with pinpointing these problems so that you can stop repeating them. Once you've found the issues, remove them from your SEO strategy and attempt to repair what you can.
If, for example, your audit reveals you have too many web pages that take too long to load. This can affect bounce rates and UX so you'll need to work on speeding up those pages. You can achieve this by reducing image file sizes and cutting out content like Flash animation.
On the opposite end, an audit can also reveal your strengths.
Did a particular post gain millions of visitors while all your other posts barely break 10,000 views? Determine what clicked using the data from the audit. That one post might've been so successful thanks to a combination of the right keywords, an evergreen topic, proper sharing on social media, and others.
It's now time to replicate your success.
One of the biggest benefits of an SEO audit is that it should be your main ledger in developing a better SEO strategy. Now you know your position, your weaknesses, and your strengths. The audit can now help you redirect your strategy to reduce the weaknesses and increase your strengths.
Did all those Top 10 lists and How-To guides garner more visitors? Did your old landing page generate more leads or funnel more immediate sales? The audit should show the results and it's now your job to keep replicating those successes by making adjustments to your strategy.
If your audit showed no one reads the guest posts you put out, it's time to approach other websites for guest posting and backlinking opportunities. If your audit showed you have too many broken links or 404 error pages, it's time to allocate a bit of your budget to repair these issues before Google penalizes your pages.
Cut out the fat and add in more of what worked.
Audits also compare your performance to your competitors. You can use an audit to check how or why a competitor found more success than you despite the fact you both used the same keyword phrases. They might've used it in a better way or wrote their content in a better format.
Perhaps it's the other way around and you left your competitors in the dust. The audit can show how you achieved this. It'll now be up to you to keep going at that pace.
What is an SEO audit? In a nutshell, it's a process that helps you look at your SEO efforts in raw numbers. An audit lets you identify what's wrong, what works, and helps you to formulate a better, stronger SEO strategy moving forward.
Of course, running an audit is only the beginning. Once you're done, you need to improve your SEO efforts and that's why we're here.
We can help you achieve those goals. You can continue reading more of our guides here to guarantee your success, such as this post highlighting how to get your web pages to top!
