If your business has a website which is used to sell your products or services, it is likely to be your key sales channel for customers. Making sure that your website gets in front of more eyeballs will, therefore, directly impact your revenue. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all about improving the organic visibility of your business, so customers can easily find it through searching the internet. SEO audits are an essential part of this.
What are SEO audits?
Since SEO is all about implementing the right changes to make your website rank better on the search engines, such as Google, SEO audits are the first step towards it. It is essentially a thorough examination of the website, evaluating how well it is optimised against a variety of different factors. See it as a regular medical check-up, which helps maintain good site health. Most importantly, SEO audits are there to find any issues that could be fixed to further improve its performance.
What is being examined?
Comprehensive SEO audits will take a wide range of different elements into account. These are typically divided into the following four categories:
1. Technical audits
The technical aspects of your website play an important role in your search performance. SEO audits will check such things as site speed, SSL certificates, XML sitemap functionality, and more. While none of these things are visible anywhere on the website, they will impact the way search engines crawl and index it. The technical audits can be quite complex, as you need to understand what different issues mean and how to fix them.
2. On-page SEO
On-page elements of the SEO are concerned with things that you can actually change within your site. For instance, your images must be optimised by compressing their size and adding appropriate ALT tags – this makes them more accessible and, therefore, improves search performance. The internal linking structure is another important aspect of on-page SEO, ensuring that you distribute your page authority properly throughout your website.
3. Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is something that you may not have quite as much control over. It’s about the external factors, such as backlinks, which showcase your site’s authority and reliability to search engines. You can improve this through quality link building, like guest posts on third-party pages, and through ensuring that your social media and other external platforms link to your site properly.
4. Content audit
The content on your website, such as landing pages or any blog posts, should also be crafted with SEO-friendly practices in mind. This may include using headings to establish a clear content structure, adding metadata to the page, or including relevant keywords within the articles (i.e. phrases and words that people commonly search for). However, businesses must be mindful not to overdo these things and make their content look spammy, which could also be penalised by the search engines. Content audits can help find the right balance.
What are the benefits of SEO audits?
So, with so many different things to consider, why should businesses bother with SEO audits? Here are some of the main benefits:
1. Organic traffic flow
When a website is doing well with SEO, it appears higher on the search engines. This means that your business will receive a lot more organic traffic, meaning site visitors that find you without any paid promotions or adverts. Organic traffic does not only mean lower marketing costs, but also an advantage against your competitors, since people tend to trust businesses that appear higher on the search engines.
2. User experience
Many aspects of SEO audits are about ensuring that your users have a pleasant experience on your site. Whether it’s the speed that your pages load or the way your content is structured for easy skimming, all of these things can improve user experience. Happy customers mean more sales and, as a result, higher profitability.
3. Brand visibility
It is a well known fact that the majority of people browsing the internet will only look at the first page of Google. So, no matter how great your website or your product is, poor SEO performance means it may never see the light of day when it comes to organic searches. SEO audits will help you optimise your site to give it the best opportunities to appear on the first page as much as possible.
How does it work?
SEO audits are conducted with the help of specialised tools that crawl the site similarly to how search engines do and check for any potential issues. These issues are reported in detailed documents, which experienced SEO professionals can then look through and decide on the next steps. It is a good idea for a business to do an SEO audit regularly, making sure that the implemented fixes are working, and new issues have not appeared over time.
Final word
The online world is incredibly competitive, and the only way to stand out from the crowd is by going above and beyond. Comprehensive SEO audits can help you do just that.
